Shrove Tuesday: On Repentance
As is often the case, I'm taking a leaf from Darkwhimsy's book here. Look, man, you've got a few years on me, and as alluded to in my first post to this journal, I am a moron. I learn slow. But onward.
Today is Shrove Tuesday, aka Mardi Gras. That festivity emerged from the tradition that on the day before Lent begins (on Ash Wednesday, of Mel Gibson fame,) one is to remove all of the fatty, sinfullish foods from one's home: lard, eggs, that sort of thing, as well as, I believe, liquor. And naturally, there is no better way to get rid of such than to make a lot of pancakes and sausage and drink heavily.
The name of Shrove Tuesday, however, echoes a more somber theme: "shrove" is the past tense of the verb "to shrive," the action of a confessor. Though the pancakes are a pleasant little Easter Bunny, the point of the day is confessing one's sins in preparation for Lent.
I have never undergone sacramental confession, as I fear desperately revealing my sins to any priest I actually know and will continue to know. You see, as covered earlier, I am a moron, and this has led to really some startling acts of evil, in thought, word, and deed, things done and left undone, known and unknown, the whole bit. I will likely eventually break down and sneak off into the night to the utter dismay of some random priest I'll never see again. This, in turn, will likely be the first sin I confess to my actual rector, and I will hope against hope that he does not ask me to reveal any of the past bits in penance (I believe that by the terms of the sacrament, he is actually theologically forbidden to ask me to dredge up forgiven sins. Ha.) This arrangement would presumably work until my next mortal sin. Who knows how long that would be.
Regardless of the specific sacrament, it is a time for reflection on past sins and for repentance from them. And it strikes me this year, for the first time in my life, really, that repentance as an institution has been very troubling for me. It has often seemed to me that to admit a past action to truly be wrong, as such, is to in some way diminish the power and glory of God, to deny His power to retroactively make that action be "all part of the plan." And naturally, it's rather nice to know that however bad you might have been, it was all part of the plan to make you the better person you are now, and one doesn't really have to feel responsible.
I know better now. I know that some things simply weren't supposed to happen. That nothing that will ever be done, nothing that can ever be done, will make them have been right, or justified. That sometimes there's a tear in time that isn't going to be healed, that will draw tears of compassion even from eternity itself.
I know that God's omniscience doesn't mean that everything's okay, only that He knows what we could do, that He has plans for any eventuality, no matter how horrific we choose to make it. I know that His light will pierce any darkness we may create, but I know that He will not prevent us from wrapping ourselves in the deepest horror imaginable. He did not choose the darkness. The question of whether we generate the forms of evil ourselves, or whether He may have spun the form of it in some secret heart of the Logos never meant for mass production, still puzzles me. But regardless, we allowed it to take what little life it may claim, at great expense to our own.
This is endlessly sad, almost paralyzing. And there is that way out, which like most false ways out, seems easy at first but quickly becomes impassible just once you've gone far enough down the road that you despair of the journey back. It doesn't help. To pretend that we live in the best of all possible worlds is to deny Heaven, and to demand further suffering and death.
But I know, too, that He hopes to give us back what we have given over. That in every frozen moment between human choice there is the small still note of a theme that echoes above the dawn, a theme that shifts and moves over our turbulent waters as we break its chords in our desperate struggle to rise above the waves, fragile as rose petals, and unstoppable as the sun bearing down upon the sea. It is Life, and the Life is the Light of the world, and the Light is a Word for Life. And that light shines forth from the Cross, which we need never have used as an implement of torture, but which even having been so used is the intersection of two lines, which need never have met, but should have, and did.
I had a vision once, some will recall, of Christ and the Holy Spirit, a woman, dressed in a gown of dove's feathers woven from the souls of the faithful, dancing upwards in dimensions of time I had yet to wrap my head about at all and now only begin to comprehend, laughing and spinning and embracing as their way became narrower, and they became greater, and their embrace became the world.
Lord, let us see that the Rose and the Cross are one, and weep and laugh with you until dawn, and let us not keep silence.
It'll be okay.