Trinity + 21 (part 2): Repentance

12 October 2008
Exodus 32.1-14; Philippians 4.1-9; Psalm 106.1-6, 19-23 Confessing to the Lord
For I will declare mine iniquity: I will be sorry for my sin.^{Psalm 38.18}

Love means never having to say you're sorry. So said Ali McGraw to Ryan O'Neal as she lay dying at the end of 'Love Story' , coining a catchphrase which summed up attitudes at the end of the flower-power decade of the 1960s. It's not true, of course: anyone acting seriously on this relationship advice is going to end up without any relationships, as Ella Wheler Wilcox knew:

There's one sad truth in life I've found
While journeying east and west -
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
But deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.

Last October we looked at Forgiveness, and this month we are considering the related topic of Repentance, inspired by today's collect and the first lesson, in which God himself repents for his anger against the Jewish people. October 9^th was this year's Day of Atonement which the Church of England might do well to copy (after all Christmas is linked with Hanukkah, and Easter with Passover) - though perhaps 'Day of Apology' would sound more Anglican?
Confession and Absolution are already, of course, firmly embedded in the liturgy but: whereas once Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, Christians, says Dom Anthony Sutch:

must recognise their own need for help and ask for forgiveness. St Benedict in his Rule expects the individual to acknowledge his wrongdoing in the presence of the community. St. Benedict thought this the best way for men to repair broken bonds. In the same way, the Sacrament of Reconciliation is initiated by the person seeking forgiveness, who is then forgiven in the name both of God and of the community…this is of enormous importance, since any fault affects everyone else. Sin is not a private zone.

Frank Sinatra has a lot to answer for in what became his theme tune, adopted by several truculent East End gangsters for their funerals:

And now, the end is here, And so I face the final curtain...
Regrets, I've had a few - But then again, too few to mention...
I've lived a life that's full; I've travelled each and every highway;
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way.

Edith Piaf famously regretted nothing - neither the good anyone has done me, nor the evil, it's all the same to me - it's been paid for, swept away and forgotten. I start again from zero. However, although she intends to be every bit as truculent as the gangsters, she in fact crystallises the Christian message: our sins are redeemed (or paid for) by the sacrifice of our Lord's crucifixion, enabling them to be swept away and forgotten so that we can start again at the beginning, washed in the blood of the Lamb.

And what have you been up to this week? Committed any murders in Ibthorpe? Is Church Street awash with adultery? Are you all stealing from each other in the Newbury Road? No, I thought not. When we look back at our sins, they are not the major, headline-grabbers of murder, adultery and theft: what our sins all have in common, surely, is a degree of small-mindedness. In one of his best-loved poems, D H Lawrence describes beautifully just this feeling of remorse at his own pettiness:

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me...
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth...

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
'The Snake' Taormina, 1923

Elizabeth Goudge, in 'A Book of Comfort', devotes a chapter to the comfort afforded by remorse and forgiveness. Let us end by quoting three of her extracts. First, John Donne's 'Hymn to God the Father' - notice the punning use of 'done'/'Donne':

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive those sins, through which...
And do them still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy sun
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done; I have no more.

Next, this deceptively simple poem by one of our most complex poets:

Bad I am, but yet thy child.

Father, be thou reconciled.
Spare thou me since I see,
with thy might, that thou art mild.
I have life before me still and thy purpose to fulfil:
Yes a debt to pay thee yet; help me, sire, and so I will.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Thee, God, I come from, to thee go'

And, lastly, Dame Julian of Norwich:

Our Lord of His mercy sheweth us our sin and our feebleness by the very sweet gracious light of Himself ; for our sin is so vile and horrible that He of His courtesy will not show it to us but by the light of His grace and mercy...but our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for our falling hindereth not Him to love us...for it needeth us to fall, and it needeth us to see it. For if we never fell, we should not know how feeble and how wretched we are of ourself, and also we should not fully know that marvellous love of our Maker. His goodness suffereth us never to be alone, but lastingly He is with us and tenderly He excuseth us, and ever shieldeth us from blame in His sight...But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. 'Revelations of Divine Love'