Do you forgive yourself?
Self-assessment is the price of introspection. Look within – without flinching – and one can’t help asking, “How did I do?”
Only the dimmest confine their account to bank accounts. “I did OK” or “made or lost a bundle”, while facts, hardly tell us much. Jesus, ever the subversive, made material success a hindrance to salvation: “it is easier,” he said, “for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Who sets the criteria for self-judgment? You do. Your hopes, dreams, better angels. Deep down, any sane person knows right from wrong, good from evil, and that the verdict in any public court, especially the court of public opinion, ridicules the truth. Innocence isn’t easy to prove if you’re paying attention. Anyone who believes they aced the game of life set their goal too low.
Self-assessment may be unwelcome, but that’s not our choice. Dreams keep hauling us before the judge. Just now I woke up tumbling over my excuses: “Your honor, let me explain…” I fled the courtroom of sleep into the sanctuary of wakefulness, where our activities protect us from inspection. Don’t trouble me with guilt when I’m walking the dog!
Some folks seek forgiveness from spiritual authorities. Back in the day, the clever Catholics sold indulgences to supply their coffers. “Your sins are forgiven” resembles a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card in Monopoly, a pleasant fiction. No one can forgive you but yourself. Saint Peter at the pearly gates looks a lot like you.
Some claim verdicts don’t matter: your facts are your facts, you’ve been who you’ve been, don’t brood. Immunity to self-assessment is spiritual sloth. If your performance on earth doesn’t matter, what does? If nothing matters, why bother being?
Some cut themselves slack by comparing. Yeh, they may have funked a charge or betrayed a trust but look at all those other no-goods! As bodily health doesn’t mean less sick than the other guy, so with spiritual health, well means well.
I fare poorly in the court of my unconscious. I writhe, grind my expensive fake cuspids, wake in a sweat. I try shaking off my compunction by getting busy. No “mea culpa” while Henry’s peeing. (I’m shaking off my compunction now.)
I’m a big disappointment to myself: not worthless, I’ve done a few things OK, but far from whom I had in mind. And I’m running out of time to set things right. Naturally one can never make amends – most of those I wronged are dead – but one feels better trying. Loving rinses the soul, if it does not bleach it. (For me, writing is loving.)
I write about self-mortification not to elicit sympathy or regard, but because I believe this process is commonplace, not confined to any creed or oddballs. We all judge ourselves more or less – and we are all more or less found wanting. What should interest us is our response to this verdict. Do we insist on our innocence, the evidence notwithstanding? Or whistle fault away as unimportant? Or buttress our self-confidence with comparisons? Or do we do our best to mitigate the harm?
Jane and I are listening to lectures about saints: who were they, how did they get made? Reliably, their road to sanctity began in self-revulsion. A better way was revealed miraculously. Whether these revelations are labeled self-scrutiny or God, they amount to the same disclosure. A door opened from their disappointing past onto a more shining future – and with trepidation they went through that door.
We all can be better than we are.