Blink and breathe

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/080716.cfm

Ezekiel 12::1-12
Matthew 18:21-19:1

Forgiveness begins with sin. Without sin, forgiveness is moot. Living with ready forgiveness without any sin going on would be like keeping an elephant gun near the back door, just in case an elephant comes, when an elephant hasn’t been seen in the backyard since the age of the Mastodons. 

But not to worry. Sin is rampant, so forgiveness need always be handy. In fact, we have to keep a storeroom full of offerings for our forgiving deeds. We need shelves of it always available.

Sin and forgiveness do not come scheduled at opportune times, nor in singular events. They are like decades long serial television shows, playing on all the channels at once, and repeated ad nauseam, in unrelenting obnoxious reruns. 

Thus, God’s admonition to forgive seventy times seven times. 

Taken at simple math, the daily infractions that we encounter could reach many dozens per day, beginning when we were just teenagers. Each of those seventy times seven forgivenesses, which comes to 490 for each sin, means that we could reach 30,000 forgiving acts in our future for just one adult day’s interaction. 

Science estimates that we also blink about 30,000 times a day. The older we get the amount of forgiving acts is going to reach saturation. Our blinking will come awfully close to the times we are forgiving folks. Cussing will surely be involved, and then the sinning and forgiving continuum will cross our eyes. If that happens, we might as well just keep our eyes closed. 

We also breathe anywhere from 17 to 30 thousand times a day. Those are similarly daunting numbers. The sinful cadence of our lives, then, catches our breath. Literally. If we’re not careful we’ll stop breathing.

Sins are a tricky thing to compile, because we humans have a propensity for finding a sinful adventure in just about everything we do. Different sins seem to require different provisions of forgiveness. Some are easier to forgive than others.

Proverbs tells us about the incalculable breadth of sinful stuff we can accomplish, but in one stretch of verses the author highlights the worst of the worst. In true biblical form, God specifically hates seven things.

"These six things the Lord hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him:
A proud look,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that are swift in running to evil,
A false witness who speaks lies,
and one who sows discord among brethren.”

              Proverbs 6:16-19

God’s forgiveness through Jesus’ life hints at how we should forgive. We would be wise to consider his example. The sins that God hates require an immense application of forgiveness. Judas pulled off almost all of these sins against Jesus just by himself. Granted, though forgiveness was within his reach, it apparently never reached his closed heart. He must have blinked his last breath and stopped his heart.

Proverbs accurately outlined the seven hated infractions above that encompassed the last few days of Jesus’ life. Judas wasn’t the only sinful participant. We know the great lengths that God went through to establish a permanent forgiveness for these sins. It resulted in his dying on the cross, taking a dreaded vacation to hell, and then rising from the dead to a shocked, unbelieving retinue of the very folks who needed his forgiving self. 

Pope Gregory I, who served the church in the beginning of the 7th century, catalogued seven “deadly” sins, or infractions that can block the redemptive forgiveness of Jesus altogether. Similar to Judas’ self-destruction, the deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth necessitate forgiveness in conjunction with our participatory remorse. That is, forgiveness expects a plea for mercy. 

It’s one thing to have a gun ready to kill an angry elephant. It’s another to have forgiveness ready in the face of an unrelenting sinner. You can easily shoot at the one, the elephant, but you can’t pierce the heart of a relenting person with the other.

While forgiveness follows sin, remorse precedes the mercy of forgiveness. It all sounds quite complicated. We’re tied up like pretzels in the cycle of these things. We return like dirty clothes to the washing machine, all cleaned up and then immediately dirtied again. 

The tiresome reality of forgiveness is a two-phase activity. The exhaustion of constant forgiving is quite similar to the exhaustion of constant pleas for mercy. 

Forgiving means getting the water hot for muddy things or cold for bloody stuff, scrubbing until washed, spinning until damp, hung until dried, and folded or ironed to put back on. Pleas for mercy mean dragging our dregs into the laundry room, apologizing and bent over in embarrassment, naked as we wait for the forgiveness, and full of promise that we’ll never get our clothes dirty again.

And just like our dirty hair, we have to wash, rinse and repeat this exhausting theatre for the rest of our lives!

Gregory’s compilation of the flesh-based sins are just the exemplary vices of humanity. He offers some help for these awful and dreadful sins, though. In order to delay our normally quick return to the laundry room, Gregory has counter measures. These are activities of the heart that help us to stall our activities of the flesh. 

Gregory proposed the seven virtues of faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. They counteract the deadly sins. The virtues don’t appear at first to be acts of forgiveness as much as they are acts of love. The proper argument in favor of justice, temperance, hope, and so on, to be acts of forgiveness is to understand that to forgive means to love.

Again, this tends toward the complicated. While the matrix of possible sins can be laid out on a 3-D graph the size of a large building, the counter measures would take up the same space in the next block. Tit for tat, so to speak, and worse than the playbook for all the player positions of a national football team.

That means to concentrate upon the logging of infractions and subsequent mercy pleas, monitored by the offering of forgiveness from our brother or sister, followed by the meted out mercy is simply unmanageable.

It can’t be done.

So, we just do one thing in forgiveness. We love. 

We most likely express our love as faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, but we practice love in waves of blinking and breathing. These are the autonomic parts of our lives. Though they automatically take place, we can manually exercise them. Though we can manually inhale/exhale and stare/blink, we automatically exercise them.

When we agree to love, we wash our clothes along with those of our brother and sister, and our hearts are mended and molded properly by love. The exhaustion turns into the fulfillment of love and mercy, through the same events of our blinking and breathing.

Blinking and breathing 30,000 times a day constitute the proper amount and actions of our love for each other. They fulfill the counter measure to 30,000 acts of sin, forgive everyone we encounter, and meet our necessary pleas for mercy.

Consider that the closing of our eyelids presents our remorse. The opening of our eyes extends our plea for mercy. In the breaths we take, we inhale our forgiveness, and our exhales mete out God’s mercy for all to share.

Set aside the compilations, calculations, considerations, and conundrum of chaotic causality. It’s an unnecessary exercise of probable futility.

All we have to do is blink and breathe.

Just blink and breathe.