Blink and breathe in God's forgiveness
Wash away that one sin, decades-long ago, which flashes in an unending stream of reruns
We each have one sin that tortures us, insisting upon constant repentance. Most of us have more than one, doomed under a Gatlin gun of sorrows. We cower and hide, paranoid, unable to request, yet again, a worn-out “forgive me.” Forgiveness from those we love has a limit. We can see it in their eyes. 70 times 7 passed by long ago. God’s admonition to forgive seems absurd for them to do, but absolutely necessary for us to hope for. What must our family members think of us? I cannot forget. How can they? How pathetic we all are. How does God do it?
Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent
Daniel 3:25, 34-43
Matthew 18:21-35
Forgiveness begins with sin. Without sin, forgiveness is moot. But not to worry. Sin is rampant, so forgiveness need always be handy. We should keep a storeroom full of forgiveness for others. They’ll need shelves of it for us.
Sin and forgiveness do not get wiped away, except in the eyes of God. Transgressions vibrate longer than the ring of one bell. Sins are not moments that pass. We call upon forgiveness for each sin over and over again because one sin can be decades-long, flashing in an unending stream of reruns. Sin after sin plays on all our channels at once, ad nauseam, in unrelenting, obnoxious cycles.
Confession works. It washes. But our memories grieve us.
We each have one sin that tortures us, insisting upon constant repentance. Most of us have more than one, doomed under a Gatlin gun of sorrows. We cower and hide, paranoid, unable to request, yet again, a worn-out “forgive me.” Forgiveness from those we love has a limit. We can see it in their eyes. 70 times 7 passed by long ago. God’s admonition to forgive seems absurd for them to do, but absolutely necessary for us to hope for. What must our family members think of us? I cannot forget. How can they? How pathetic we all are. How does God do it?
Thankfully and unfortunately, we are not alone. For every snowball of sin we throw, we get seven back in retaliatory clusters. After we brush ourselves off, we yell “I forgive you” to a host of people whom we don’t even know, while the one we hit lies comatose. We whisper to God and cry for mercy.
The daily infractions we encounter and cause can number in the dozens, dating back to when we were just teenagers. Sure, we’ve forgotten most of our sins. That’s frightening enough, considering the volumes of sins we can’t forget. Several times a day, many of us shudder and weep.
We all know the knucklehead who repeatedly offends. It is often us. Seventy times seven forgivenesses come to 490 for each repeated sinful act, per person. They struggle to embrace us at some point. We know more than one knucklehead like ourselves. We seldom remember to forgive them, an act required thousands of times a year. And that’s just for the crap that happens to us. How about the indecencies and calumnies we caused, that we pray have been forgiven?
Dear Lord, what a mess.
Science estimates that we blink 30,000 times a day. The older we get, the more forgiving acts (from us and to us) must reach saturation. Our blinking will come awfully close to the times we are forgiving folks and being forgiven. Cussing will surely be involved. The sinning-and-forgiving continuum, where sparks are flying, could fuel entire planets.
We also breathe nearly 30,000 times a day. Those are similarly daunting numbers. The sinful cadence of our lives catches our breath more often than physical exertion. Literally. If we’re not careful, we’ll stop breathing.
Sins are a tricky thing to compile because we humans have a propensity to find 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. I’ve thought other things were worse, since I’ve practiced most of these for 70 years. We are doomed.
“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)
How do you put up with us, God? It must be the combined power of a trinity. “I want to smote him,” says one. “I’ve got this,” says another. “Good,” says the third person. “I tried everything in my power, and I’m moving on.”
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 immense forgiveness. Judas pulled off almost all of these sins against Jesus by himself. Though forgiveness was within his reach, it apparently never reached his closed heart. When he took his last breath, eviscerated and hanged at his own hand, he refused God’s power to restore him. Our refusal to face the music, choosing self-harm instead, sadly mirrors Judas’s stubborn rejection. “Alas, Judas. I know him well.”
We know the great lengths to which God went to establish permanent forgiveness for our egregious sins. His vocal command would be enough, we think, but he chose dying on the cross, took a dreaded gurney ride into hell, and then rose from the dead to a shocked, unbelieving retinue of the very folks who needed his forgiving self.
Pope Gregory I, who served the church at the beginning of the 7th century, catalogued seven “deadly” sins, or infractions that can block the redemptive forgiveness of Jesus altogether. As with Judas’ self-destruction, the list matches the Proverb list. The deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth fall away under God’s forgiveness. Who among us wouldn’t provide the necessary participatory remorse? Forgiveness expects a plea for mercy. We plead 70 times 7.
It all sounds quite complicated. We’re tied up like pretzels in the cycle of these things. We return to the washing machine like dirty clothes, get cleaned up, only to be immediately dirtied again. And just like our dirty hair, we have to wash, rinse, and repeat this exhausting theatre for the rest of our lives!
Gregory offers some help for all awful and dreadful sins. To delay our normally quick return to the laundry room, Gregory implemented countermeasures. These are activities of the heart that help us to stall our activities of the flesh — faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude — the seven virtues. They counteract the deadly sins. The virtues appear at first to be acts of forgiveness but are better defined as acts of love. The proper grasp of forgiveness is to understand that to forgive means to love.
We bow to God’s mercy. We accept God’s grace, get washed again in the confessional, and in our socially available acts of repentance. And then, 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. Although they occur automatically, we can exercise them manually. We can manually inhale/exhale and stare/blink, an exercise that trains us to refrain when we can, and repent when we can’t.
Blinking and breathing 30,000 times a day constitute the proper amount and actions of our love for each other. They fulfill the countermeasure to 30,000 acts of sin, forgive everyone we encounter, and meet our necessary pleas for mercy.
Consider that closing our eyelids expresses 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 conundrums of chaotic causality. It’s an unnecessary exercise of probable futility.
All we have to do is blink and breathe. Just blink and breathe.
[A rewrite of my OMG reflection from 8-11-16]