Self-Examination and Repentance

The scriptures referred to are Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16.

You often see people change in movies. It's called a character arc. Something happens to a character that makes him or her realize they must change their attitude and maybe their tactics. They must become more confident or more empathetic or smarter in response to a situation that does not yield to their previous methods to solve it. What you rarely see is repentance, where a character rethinks the entire course of their life and decides to reverse it. We see it in Scrooge when the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him his grave. But we also see a glimpse of it in a scene toward the end of Schindler's List. One of the things I like about the movie is that they don't clean up Oskar Schindler's moral ambiguities in the film. He was an adulterer who liked the good life; he was a corrupt businessman and a member of the Nazi Party. And yet he decided to save nearly 1000 Jews by getting them assigned to work at his factory through bribing the Nazis. This decision is never really explained. But as the Third Reich falls and the Red Army approaches, Schindler and his family must flee. The grateful Jewish workers present him with a ring made from dental gold and inscribed with a quote from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” At this juncture, Schindler realizes that the gold in the ring, his clothes, his nice car all could have been used to bribe the Nazis and save more Jewish lives. He sees that he could have done more, realizes that it too late and breaks down.

The ring was real as was the fact that Schindler spent his entire fortune on bribes to save Jews. So I don't care whether the emotional moment in the movie where he has an epiphany is real or not. The point is that we rarely see characters look at themselves honestly and show regret for what they have done. Perhaps the filmmakers don't want their heroes to look weak or doubtful. Practically every film these days has the explicit or implicit message that you must above all else believe in yourself. Which works if you are an artist or a screenwriter or a filmmaker trying to get your vision out there. But if you are a Bernie Madoff or a Charles Manson or an Adolf Hitler, maybe you should have serious doubts about your dreams and goals. The only people who are without regrets are narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. Everyone else realizes at times that we have behaved badly and we usually feel awful about it.

Unfortunately we often think of sins as enjoyable or as natural things arbitrarily stigmatized by God or religious people or society. We think these killjoys want us to stop having fun and stop drinking and doing drugs and having sex with whomever we want whenever we want. Which is the way adolescents see sin. As they get older they might notice how drinking and drugs can destroy health and lives and how indiscriminate sex can cause unwanted babies, disease and heartbreak. Even adults have a tendency to romanticize flaws and think it makes people more interesting. There is a mystique about actors and writers who drink or rock musicians who take drugs and the implication is that those things fueled their creativity. The fact is alcohol has destroyed the lives and careers of many writers and actors and that drugs have taken from us very talented musicians, often, oddly enough, at the age of 27. And people like Elton John, Robert Downey Jr. and Stephen King have managed to recover from addiction and go on to greater success. By giving up what they thought they needed, they found what they really needed.

Schindler's wife had a clear-eyed assessment of the man. His failings did not make him a lovable rogue to her. She did say, “In spite of his flaws, Oskar had a big heart and was always ready to help whoever was in need. He was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time, not mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived me...” She told German TV that her husband did nothing remarkable either before or after the war. “He was fortunate therefore that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he met people who had summoned forth his deeper talents.” It was only then that he was the remarkable person he could have been all along.

In Lent, as we approach what Jesus did for us on Good Friday, we are encouraged to, first, take a good long hard look at ourselves. We are to acknowledge that we are capable of evil, that is, of deliberately doing what we know we shouldn't. And yes, occasionally we act out of ignorance, though sometimes it is a willful ignorance, an intentional aversion of our eyes from the probable adverse side effects of what we do or give others the go-ahead to do.

The point of this self-examination is not to make ourselves miserable but, as with breast or testicular self-examination, to notice what is amiss so that we can get it taken care of.  If you think of sin as spiritual illness, something that if unchecked will poison the person you are, it helps motivate the process. You are not trying to find and excise what makes you you but rather elements in you that, like cancer, have gone wrong, and which will metastasize and eventually diminish the person you could be.

In a letter to his life-long friend Arthur Greeves, C.S. Lewis came up with a brilliant analogy for why we need to repent, especially if you remember that in Hebrew “to repent” means “to turn back.” Lewis recalls how when he walked his dog the animal invariably would get the leash, or as the British call it the lead, wrapped around a pole. The dog would not understand how to extricate himself and made things worse by trying to go forward. Lewis would have to get down on his knees to untangle the dog and often pull him back around to the right side of the pole. Lewis said this is often how our lives get in trouble. We take the wrong path and get ourselves in a bind. We then make it worse by trying to keep doing what got us into the mess in the first place. And just as the dog owner sees the dog's problem better than the dog does, though God does not sin, from his perspective he actually understands evil better than we do. And God, if we let him, will get us out of our predicament. This usually consists of getting us to reverse our direction, though that seems counterintuitive at the time. Often the dog resists going back because the animal thinks it will not then get to where it wants to go. But just as the dog owner also wants to go forward, so God wants us to progress. He just understands better than us the right way to get there.

In Lent, one of the things we need to do is stop straining at the lead and let God move us in the right direction. We aren't dogs and so, if we just stop and examine ourselves and our situation and think, we can at least see the next couple of steps to take. We have to consider that maybe we need to walk back our recent moves. To change the analogy, our destination may seem nearer if we travel as the crow flies; but we are not crows either. The way forward, especially over rough and mountainous terrain, may involve some switchbacks. The direct route may not be the best way to get there.

And we have to trust that God also wants what we ultimately desire. He wants us to find our heart's delight. The problem is that it may not be in a form we recognize. As Lewis points out, what we think we want may be a cheap imitation of we really desire, the way some people chase after money or popularity or sex when what they really want is love. Which is why, when some of them do get what they think they want, it doesn't satisfy them for long and so they want more. Many a person has been spurred on to achieve what the world sees as success when what they actually wanted was their father's approval or their mother's love.

In the final analysis the source of all good things is God. Which means we cannot find true goodness apart from him. And he cannot give us what is really good if we don't want him to be part of it. It would be like wanting the light and warmth we get from the sun without the sun's involvement. That would be impossible. In self-examination you have to be realistic. Yet atheists now have humanist chaplains and gatherings vaguely like worship services to somehow get the advantages of belief and God without those 2 vital elements. The want the benefits without the benefactor.

C.S. Lewis was an atheist but came to the realization that what he really needed was God and then spent a school term at the college where he taught feeling hunted by God. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He did not stay that way. Indeed he titled his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy. But at the time he realized that he would have to change his lifestyle. If God is God and we are not, we need to stop playing God and follow our Creator, who, after all, knows how we are designed to work.

And just as he has designed us to sleep regularly so that the body can flush toxins from the brain, so we need to take time periodically to look at ourselves and deal with toxic thoughts, speech patterns and behaviors that have built up in our lives. And we need to ask God to help us remove them.

Personally the hardest thing about repentance is often trying to feel bad about some sins. It's difficult to find the motivation to get rid of something you enjoy. Ask a diabetic who had to give up soda or a heart patient who had to cut out fats and salt on doctor's orders. It's tough to give up what feels good even when you know its bad for you. You revel in your sarcastic wit though you realize it can hurt your kids' self-esteem or your coworkers' morale. You get charged up by venting your anger towards people or things which are stupid in your estimation. You enjoy the titillation of flirting or going farther than you ought to with people you are attracted to, regardless of whether you both are free from other relationships. And this is true even if you don't enjoy these things as much as you used to and are just doing them, not out of passion, but out of habit.

At the jail I talk to people all the time who know they must change but find it hard to want to. In their case they are paying a heavy price for their self-destructive behavior and yet it is difficult to find the determination to change their pattern of living. I like to use Viktor Frankl's principle that the person who has a strong reason for getting through some ordeal can endure anything they must in order to do it. He learned this in a German concentration camp. But it works in getting yourself free from any trap or prison you have gotten yourself into. The reason may be a child or other loved one whom you don't want to fail. It can be a different way of life you wish to live. It can be the chance to repay the love and grace God has shown you. Athletes learn to discipline themselves and shed anything that keeps them from achieving their goal. We can too.

And we are not on our own. Athletes have a coach and so do we. God sends his Spirit to live in all who answer his call. The Spirit, God in us, is a reserve of strength and calm we can call on at any time. But we have to stop doing what the dog wrapped around the pole keeps doing: pulling the wrong way and resisting our Master's tug in the right direction. We need to quit struggling and patiently let him do his work. We need to stop barking at him and listen to his instructions. We need to let him untangle us from the knots we have tied ourselves into and free us from the cords we are strangling ourselves with. He is trying to be gentle with us but we won't feel that if we are roughly trying to slip out of his grasp and futilely trying to rectify our situation through flailing.

One rabbi said that the Hebrew word for “repent” means not merely “to turn back” but “to return”, that is, to turn back towards home. And when we walk our dog that is the ultimate destination. The sights and smells and sounds and experiences and exercise of the walk are exciting but it is so good to return to our home, where we are warm and protected and where we get our food and our love. And that is the purpose of repentance: to return to God, our refuge and our reward. He is our home, where true warmth and shelter and nourishment and love dwell. God is our heart's true delight. As St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”