The Metaphors of Sin; The Possibility of Joy

Sin, Hamartia, Tragic Flaw, Missing the Mark, Trespass, Debt.

What we ask forgiveness for we try to corral with words that tell of owing, of unauthorized entry onto another’s territory (capitalist/private property oriented words), of innate character traits that lead us to trespass and incur debt but which we have the power to overcome—will—and by a metaphor of a failed attempt at shooting a weapon. Of all these words only “sin” is opaque. It suggests only a name for the field inside the corral. Its etymology is contested and speculation on its origin doesn’t illuminate its meaning. It has lost any association with “being” it might once have had; it always seems to have been so abstract a word for wrong that it is now as arbitrary as any mere name. It’s the part of a man’s personality that comes from naming him Howard—i.e. no part at all.

Sin is the general name that for which we ask forgiveness. It designates whatever we acknowledge that we have done wrong. We don’t ask forgiveness for what happens to us. We may ask forgiveness for act committed by chance, but this is mere politeness. If a neighbor’s cat runs out in the street in front of my car and is hit because I could not react in time, I may say “I’m sorry” as a formal, ritualized request to absolve myself and maintain peace and make the neighbor feel better, to reduce the chance of violence against me. “I’m sorry” means “I’m sad about this too.” It doesn’t mean I’ve actually done anything wrong. Everyone knows this. If the neighbor thought I was actually asking for forgiveness, he’d say, “so you did it on purpose.”

There is also a space, exploited by tragedy, between accident and willful action, the million things we aren’t sure about. We’re on a diet and eat a cookie we know we shouldn’t eat. But are we sure the will is involved? Are we sure we could have resisted the cookie? The answer is ideological. No one’s certainty either way can be taken seriously. Nor does it help to assert that free will is an illusion. That’s an untestable philosophical proposition, a hypothesis, a perspective that is in no way helpful. If true, no one needs forgiveness for anything anyway and there’s no such thing as sin. If untrue, we still can’t always reliably mark the border between a willed act and an unwilled one, or the degree of will involved in the eating of the cookie or the murder of the neighbor. (The question to ask is merely this: how does believing in or denying free will change how you live your life? This is not the place to explore that question, but it is one worth exploring.) The notion of sin assumes the reality of will.

We all live as though we have choice, and as though some of our choices are ones we should not have made and that we should or could have known or did know we shouldn’t have made and that we could have not made. We all have things we regret or should regret. Some of those regrets are sins.

Those choices we regret which are sins are sins not because they failed—missed the mark—unless the mark they missed is understood not has the thing they were aiming for (you may sin by hitting that) but because the mark is what Saint Paul calls righteousness. Failure is good when it is not also sin. (The statement is too categorical, but I must move on.) The choices we regret which are sins are sins because they grieve someone—another person, ourself, or God.

Trespass: this tells me others have rights to some field of themselves. I may not enter that field without permission. But what if I do no damage to that field? What if they do not know I’ve jumped their fence and crossed their field, taken a shortcut through their property? No harm, no foul?

What if their field is not their land but their body? The Peeping Tom.

If I’m caught crossing someone’s private property and doing no damage, I am tempting the proprietor to a sin far greater than mine. I may also be spurring him to virtue; every opportunity to sin is also an opportunity to exercise virtue, and there is no way to exercise virtue outside of a world in which sin is possible, an “imperfect” world, but it is possible to exercise virtue when not to exercise that virtue would not be a sin. It might be virtuous to give $5 to an unhoused person and more virtuous to give $10 but there is no right amount of money in this case and no end to the help one might give. (Our thoughts want to stray again; we’ll pull them back.) I cross your property and cause no harm and no one notices. Have I sinned? It’s strange that something could become a sin retroactively by being noticed. Being noticed changes potentially the virtue/sin ratio of the action. This makes more sense with the Peeping Tom.

First notice that in both cases—the property crosser and the Peeping Tom—the reaction of the violated person is part of the equation. I can put up a no trespassing sign and not care when I see you taking a short cut through my property. I can discover your eyeball at my window and, if I don’t feel threatened, lift the shade. Think of the attitude of a nudist. Or I can want to shoot the trespasser or have them arrested. I’m not at the moment concerned with the property owner or victim, but with the trespasser. Always keep in mind that ultimately every act is particular and is judged in its absolute particularity and is overwritten by larger social conventions and expectations, power and threat, and programmed attitudes; if I have to get home to stop a fire, or to protect my children or save my dog, then it’s virtuous to trespass on your field, sign or no sign, even if the owner wants to have me shot or arrested. I cannot envision any similar mitigation for the Peeping Tom, but that act too will vary in its culpability when all factors are weighed.

Let’s remind ourselves of the question we are exploring, perhaps even trying to answer: what does it mean to “sin”? What are the dynamics of “forgiveness”? How will we know we have been forgiven? How do we experience forgiveness?

Debt and trespass are the metaphors we must come through. It is not a sin to be in debt. It is a sin not to repay the debt. The financial and private property aspects of these metaphors must not be taken too literally. In their literal manifestation they are crass. Private property is ultimately arbitrary; debt is rife with capitalist complications that are problematic and likely sinful in practice. But the reality for which these metaphors are useful pointers allows us (gingerly) to use them. To sin is to grieve oneself, one’s neighbor or God. But God is grieved by the grieving of oneself or one’s neighbor, never directly. My Peeping Toming, my crossing of your land is a sin if it grieves you or me. Whether you learn of my actions or not, if my actions diminish me, I must acknowledge this and ask forgiveness. I may judge, whether rightly or wrongly, that you are better off remaining ignorant of my trespass or debt. If I can repay you (if you’ve forgotten that I owe you money, I can nonetheless pay that money back in some way), I should. I probably should—for my sake if not for yours in order to experience the absolution and gain the value of my failure and my forgiveness, even if you do not know I have repaid you. But the pay back is a sign of the forgiveness, not a precondition of it nor a payment for it. Not the permission that led to medieval indulgences. You don’t pay off the debt by anything you do as the one who has sinned. You pay off the debt by forgiving others. I was caught crossing your land. I apologize and you forgive me or you don’t. Your forgiveness of me is not relevant to my soul. God forgives me. My gratitude and my experience of the divine forgiveness is that I say to the trespasser of my property: I forgive you.

What if the trespasser doesn’t want forgiveness? That doesn’t matter. What if the trespasser scoffs at my forgiveness? Doesn’t matter. What if the trespasser crosses my property every day and for no good reason—even for a bad reason, even just because he hates me, goes out of his way to trespass though I have done nothing to cause him to resent me, and he has no particular beef with the notion of private property?

If it is my property I can choose to make a better fence. I can choose to have him arrested, or I can choose to ignore the trespass. I can decide what is, according to my best judgment, best. Jesus suggests the default is to ignore the trespass if it does you no harm or little harm, causes you little inconvenience. He’s trying to get a rise out of you for no reason you can trace and none he himself understands. He’s just plain mean. Don’t give him the satisfaction. But circumstances always being particular, never general, this default may not be required or expected or virtuous in a particular case. It may be the wrong thing to do. It may be love to ignore him; it may be love to put him in prison. It may be no action on your part will be of any value to him. Make the best choice you can; repent and seek forgiveness if you miss the mark. You may not realize for some time that you (if this means anything) should have known that you should have done something other than what you did. This is why we need forgiveness and how we learn from our mistakes, how failure is positive and essential when it is. We move on.

Experiencing forgiveness: we haven’t gotten to the hard part yet. To preview: my suspicion that the church has always put too much emphasis on seeking forgiveness, important as it is, or has done so in an unproductive way, and, secondly, my analysis of the times when you do not know whether you’ve sinned or not.

Let’s proceed to the second one. It’s likely that no act is entirely virtuous, though it may be that some acts are entirely sinful. When we know we have done what we should not have and what for which we have no excuse—that’s easy. It’s also rare. When we’ve done imperfectly what we could have done better, when the action is intermixed with what is sinful, what is neutral and what is virtuous, we are acting the way most humans act most of the time. Let’s say I’m not a Peeping Tom, I am an adulterer. All specific actions are (I repeat) that: specific, particular. Each act of adultery like each act of robbery is itself and may be overridden with virtue or neutrality (if there is such a thing) as well as with sin. Adultery may be an act of love as much as of lust. All the good of human intercourse, connection, compassion, charity, is potentially at play in an act of adultery, as is all the evil of neglect, estrangement, guilt, violation of oath. An act of adultery is an act that transpires between three people at least, the one to whom one is sworn, the one with whom one is acting, and oneself. There is almost certainly virtue as well as vice in relation of the self to each of the three. There is no need to illustrate this. Someone may be loved who needs to be loved. Someone may be betrayed who does not deserve to be betrayed. And as for the adulterer himself, he may be enriched by his new lover in all the ways that one person may enrich another. And yet the adulterous love may be corrosive as lies and secrets almost always are. (Another path, through the subject of adultery, opens up, but we will not take it.)

Again, one may act in such a way that one knows that what one is about to do is sinful and do it anyway and announce to oneself and God that one is going to do it and then do it. How does one seek forgiveness after that? “I’m going to kill my neighbor’s dog. I know it’s wrong to kill my neighbor’s dog, but I’m going to do it anyway.” And if the neighbor’s grief passes quickly and you are never found out and you now have peace from that horrendous barking that kept you up at night? You know the neighbor loved the dog and you acknowledge that the dog by virtue of being alive had the same right to live that you yourself have. And you feel bad about having killed the dog, but you feel good about it too. How do you ask for forgiveness for that? And can you get it? And even if you get it, can you experience it? (Are you not like Claudius in Hamlet, unable to pray effectively? And perhaps you’re even in a worse place because although Claudius can’t bring Hamlet back, he can renounce Gertrude and his throne. But you can’t revivify the dog. But then again Gertrude loves Claudius and renouncing her compounds the sin; it adds further sin into the act of repentance.

And you can say, “God help me become the kind of person who doesn’t kill a dog as I killed that one.” But you have no guarantee that you’ll ever become that person by any effort of will or divine intervention. Will you also kill the next barking dog? If you had it to do all over again, would you still kill that one? You’re seeking forgiveness now for your hamartia, your tragic flaw, some part of who you deeply are. You’re asking God to overlook who you are, what you cannot overcome. We all have imperfections that no act of prayer or concentration of the will will remove. We can ask forgiveness for them if we acknowledge them, if we don’t become complacent and say, “Well, look. That’s just me. I murder dogs.” Or I sleep with whomever I can, or yell at my children when I’m overworked etc. etc. etc.

You can ask for forgiveness for your debts and your trespasses and your tragic flaw.

And you should do this regularly—in your daily prayers. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And now the church part. In the only churches I know well, the liturgical ones, particularly the Roman Catholic and the Episcopalian/Anglican, the breast-beating part of the service weighs so much more than the forgiveness part of the service as to have the effect of a perversion. The message of the mass is “you are sinful, you are evil, you must constantly ask forgiveness for all the things you’ve done and all the things you’ve failed to do, and this forgiveness will never take.” This is all functionally in the service of the church, not of your soul. This is about creating a need for the church. You have to go back and keep doing this because you are so fundamentally useless. Jesus was not about self-loathing as the way to heaven.

I know I am a sinner. I’m tired of the constant reminder of how great a sinner I am against the lack of celebration of my forgiveness. The effect of constant confession is to experience the sin every day and the forgiveness never. The sin cannot be forgotten. It cannot be all celebration. The sin is both a state (hamartia) and a part of even my most virtuous actions. But the forgiveness is also a state, the one in which I exist and a part of even my most sinful actions, even those with no virtue. Celebrate more than you berate. Joy is the sign of the kingdom. But it’s the joy of forgiveness, not the joy of complacency.

Here's the final word. To be forgiven is not to have your sins erased. The debt no longer needs to be paid. It was paid (if we have to live in this very problematic economic metaphor). But it wasn’t erased. The trespass happened, and you are who you are as a result. We won’t count these things against you, but you will become a better person for the forgiveness than you would have been even for the erasure of the debt. This is the only justification for the world you live in, a kind or degree of revivification of the felix culpa. There has to be a good achieved that could not have been achieved had this world as it is not existed. (This is a final path we won’t go down right now except to say that if this world as it is did not exist, you could not exist, and God would miss you. If you hadn’t sinned and you weren’t to die, then you wouldn’t be able to become who you can become, whom you must become. And this is the reason for the idea of hell. If you choose to refuse forgiveness, you place yourself in hell.) Joy is possible not just in this world that has missed the mark but a kind of joy that would not be possible but for this world that cannot hit the mark.