[LJI Exhibit A: Week 2] God-scale
When I was a little girl, I confessed my little, childish sins to the “nice” priest, the older one, relieved that it wasn’t the one who I thought would laugh at me.
The cookies and the pieces of candy I took without asking.
The pretending to be asleep in the car when I wasn’t, but just wanted Daddy to carry me.
The Saturday afternoons I was “lazy” and reading books instead of helping around the house like I was supposed to.
The “mean things” I thought about other kids when they weren’t nice to me, instead of praying for them.
And he'd give me the prayers to say, because that's what you do in confession, but he'd also talk to me about how I could work on doing better. That I would sin, being human and imperfect, but that there was always a chance to work on not doing it as much. And that I should remember that God is always willing to forgive.
As I got older, it seemed as though that idea of God got lost, or at best was only paid lip service to. There was the Infinitely Terrible Being with the Endless Book of Laws, and to break the most minor law in the most minor way would lead to Infinite Punishment for anyone who couldn't prove just how sorry they were by a steady stream of humiliating tears and deprivations.
Is it any wonder I wanted no part of this? That I did not want to keep company with a spiritual ideal that said that driving two miles per hour over the speed limit and vehicular manslaughter might as well be the same offense?
In my path of spiritual seeking, I hoped to find better. It was all that Catholic guilt, it was all that judgmental Christian stuff that was messing up the culture, and once we got beyond it we'd be free.
Or not. There were new sins, and no sin against the Earth Mother was ever, ever too small. No environmental purity was ever pure enough, no fair trade fair enough, no open mind open enough (or closed fast enough when it came to, well, those unbelievers who didn't understand the complexity of reality the way we did), no un-dogma un-dogmatic enough.
It is only in coming back to something closer to the religious mainstream that I can look at the idea of "little" sins having close to the same impact as "big" sins in a new way. I used to think that in God-scale, they were all big. But an infinite God of infinite love and capacity for forgiveness must see them all as small.
No Infinitely Terrible Being with an Endless Book of Laws.
Infinite love and endless grace.
On God's scale, it is all the same - small things lost in the endlessness of time. It's only as humans living in the world with each other that we can differentiate based on how much harm our sins do to one another.
How much better to celebrate each other's victories, no matter how small, than to criticize each other's sins, no matter how big.
The cookies and the pieces of candy I took without asking.
The pretending to be asleep in the car when I wasn’t, but just wanted Daddy to carry me.
The Saturday afternoons I was “lazy” and reading books instead of helping around the house like I was supposed to.
The “mean things” I thought about other kids when they weren’t nice to me, instead of praying for them.
And he'd give me the prayers to say, because that's what you do in confession, but he'd also talk to me about how I could work on doing better. That I would sin, being human and imperfect, but that there was always a chance to work on not doing it as much. And that I should remember that God is always willing to forgive.
As I got older, it seemed as though that idea of God got lost, or at best was only paid lip service to. There was the Infinitely Terrible Being with the Endless Book of Laws, and to break the most minor law in the most minor way would lead to Infinite Punishment for anyone who couldn't prove just how sorry they were by a steady stream of humiliating tears and deprivations.
Is it any wonder I wanted no part of this? That I did not want to keep company with a spiritual ideal that said that driving two miles per hour over the speed limit and vehicular manslaughter might as well be the same offense?
In my path of spiritual seeking, I hoped to find better. It was all that Catholic guilt, it was all that judgmental Christian stuff that was messing up the culture, and once we got beyond it we'd be free.
Or not. There were new sins, and no sin against the Earth Mother was ever, ever too small. No environmental purity was ever pure enough, no fair trade fair enough, no open mind open enough (or closed fast enough when it came to, well, those unbelievers who didn't understand the complexity of reality the way we did), no un-dogma un-dogmatic enough.
It is only in coming back to something closer to the religious mainstream that I can look at the idea of "little" sins having close to the same impact as "big" sins in a new way. I used to think that in God-scale, they were all big. But an infinite God of infinite love and capacity for forgiveness must see them all as small.
No Infinitely Terrible Being with an Endless Book of Laws.
Infinite love and endless grace.
On God's scale, it is all the same - small things lost in the endlessness of time. It's only as humans living in the world with each other that we can differentiate based on how much harm our sins do to one another.
How much better to celebrate each other's victories, no matter how small, than to criticize each other's sins, no matter how big.