I Would Like To Argue I'm Not That Hard on Myself

Today’s Old Testament reading in the daily office struck a difficult note.  It was a reading from the book of Lamentations and it essentially described the deep longing God’s people had to return home, but at the same time understanding that it was their sins that brought them there.  Often times people will argue with me and tell me that I am too hard on myself.  When I make a mistake, more specifically, when I knowingly fall into a destructive pattern of behavior, hurt others, and/or stunt my spiritual growth, I tend to speak hyperbolically about how I have upset the cosmos.  The response from my friends is generally, “what about grace?”

Here’s my thought about grace: if you read most liturgies for confession or reconciliation, they generally follow along the lines of, “I was lost but now I am found.”  My point is, yes, you were can come back to the community whether it be in an existential way or a physical one (say your actions got you excommunicated), but what does it mean to be lost.  I guess “lost-ness” for me means that for a few days before I repented for my sins I was depressed and felt bad.  So this is what I get for betraying a covenant? 

This is where I struggle with books like Lamentation, the middle parts of Isaiah, and other parts of prophetic literature: the price for betrayal is exile, real exile, where your teeth gnash, and you wail for forty years and your children eat nothing but gruel.  So those people’s sins, their betrayals and their deviances got them generations in exile and all I have to deal with is guilt?  That doesn’t sound like justice to me.  Furthermore, I wonder if we are even worshipping the same God.  There has to be more to lost-ness than just feeling bad.  I would say this especially because there are plenty of things I do that are probably considered sinful or betraying God that I don’t necessarily feel bad about.

My pondering is essentially, what have I lost?  What great dream did God have for me that I have lost because of my shortcomings?  Am I alone today, still dealing with feelings of rejection and isolation because of the sins of my past?  These are simply just questions and the answers to them are unanswerable, however, I do believe they point me to the seriousness of our sins.  Have we lost respect for our God?  Has our narrative of free grace and the freedom to come and go as we please, sent us into an exile that we don’t even know we are in?  The humanist in me would like to argue that the world is getting better, we are becoming more socially conscious and less violent.  But, this can’t possibly be the Promised Land! 

This brings me back to my original point: our sins are serious.  I worship the same God whose people generations ago found themselves in exile because of their betrayals.  I cannot possibly be exempt from that kind of suffering.  I suppose the good news is, I haven’t arrived.  This so-called enlightened place I find myself in isn’t the Promised Land.  There is a better life, a more whole life, a more communal life out there, however, my biggest fear is that my exile will last longer than my years in this body.