OF BORING SINNERS AND LESSONS OF HOPE

As a priest, part of my gig is listening to people tell me their sins. Each week, for hours in the confessional, I simply sit and listen. They come in all sorts: the rich and the poor, the very young and the very ancient, the scrupulous and the pharisaical, the convicted and the contrite. They all tell me their sins, at least as they imagine them. They come because they want absolution, some sort of peace, or the ease of an anxious conscience.

And to be honest, it’s boring, very boring.

I’ve learned there’s nothing so uncreative as sin, nothing so repetitive and dull. It’s not sanctity or clairvoyance on my part, but I could probably tell you what your sins are before you ever opened your mouth, human sin being what it is: mindless, dumb and visionless. A palette of but a few grays, at our most sinful and stupid, we rarely create anything new. Most of us look pathetic naked. It’s a humiliating truth.

But here’s the strange thing. The overall effect of this experience for me has been to love these people, to love humanity in general, and even this bitter, ugly world. The effect has been to love them more, not less. Hearing all this sin has given me hope.

Strange, because you’d think it would have the opposite effect, that I’d have become by now a bitter cynic, having seen the incessant endlessness of human stupidity and depravity. But that’s not THE CASE. RATHER, I ind Hope, like FAINT GREEN Growth AFTER A ire or the faint blue of earliest dawn.

Maybe it’s the parent in me, the priest in me, or both. Ultimately, I believe it’s the Father’s love, but I don’t want to turn my non-believing readers off. There is something to it, though, something strange and irrational, something above cause and effect. Something more than sympathy, this love and this hope I feel whenever people tell me their worst most pathetic deeds. It’s something beautiful, something new.

Now this is a column, not a pulpit, and I don’t want to preach. I simply want to say that because of my experience, I think there’s reason for hope: for me, for you, for all of us. I’m speaking in religious terms, and I know that’s Dificult For many, But what I’m talking about is also social virtue, hope meant for all of us.

In this world of bitterness and wickedness, Conlict AND sin, this angry world of pathetic hellish tedium, there is still reason for hope: not immediately in politicians or elections, of course, nor in any movements or philosophies, but in us. That is, in our consciences, which are still sensitive in most of us and which have yet to be explained away.

Pick your villain, whomever it is. Name a problem, whatever it is. In each there’s still truth, in each a Good AND An Evil At war. THE selish git who knows no one likes him; the everyday bigot who knows he’s trapped By FEAR; THE leshly ADDICT of whatever kind - each is in a battle with himself, each worthier of pity and love than hate and ridicule. This is our real democracy, our common but varied criminality. Like our nature, it’s what makes us alike, all either hypocrites or friends together. And it’s what we should remember the next time we excoriate our usual favourite fools.

Because for all the tabloids, Twittershaming and hashtag righteousness, it’s the only thing that will help us make the world better, the truth that we’re all sinners, that even in the worst there is still some good, some possibility of redemption.

Again, translate this into secular language if you must; it’s true however you write it. And it’s the only truth that can help us get past the bitterness, this truly hellish tit-for-tat, this endless ight For THE last word, THE truth Absent the abyss of social media, the truth of redemption.

Which is why today I’m thankful for the boring sinners who come to me, for what they teach me and give me. Sinners saintlier than I am, give me hope, because they teach me that because God hasn’t given up on them, then neither should I. And that no one should ever give up on anyone.

That’s the beautiful lesson. And it’s why, for their sin and stupidity, so much like my own, I’m grateful.