Guilt and atonement
Been thinking about guilt and atonement and the different mindsets people have about them.
I was raised Catholic. And on the one hand, it's kind of weird that one atones through a ritual, rather than more literally making reparation. There's something hokey about the way that normal, everyday confession works--getting automatically forgiven for your sins just by going and telling them to someone and maybe saying a few prayers after. It doesn't fix what you did. It doesn't mean other people forgive you. It seems like you're getting away with something.
But I think about what Jewish tradition says about atonement. There's the story about the rabbi who asked a sinner to cut open a feather pillow in the middle of town, shake out all the feathers, and then try to gather them a day later--illustrating that it's really hard to take back a bad thing once you've done it. And I see the guilt that that mindset causes in some people, and the fear of doing anything that might later turn out to be wrong.
And I start to understand the purpose of an atonement ritual. The point isn't to downplay the gravity of what you did, so you can go on blithely. But when you're truly sorry, and after you've done your very best to fix what you can--it helps to have someone say, "It's okay now. You're human, you make mistakes. This one doesn't have to weigh on you anymore." I can see how finally being relieved of that burden could be worthy to be called a sacrament.
[And yeah, I know that Catholicism has its guilt, and Judaism has its atonement rituals. I'm not talking about the religions specifically, mostly about the difference between believing you can be forgiven for breaking something you can't wholly fix, and carrying that guilt with you forever.]
I was raised Catholic. And on the one hand, it's kind of weird that one atones through a ritual, rather than more literally making reparation. There's something hokey about the way that normal, everyday confession works--getting automatically forgiven for your sins just by going and telling them to someone and maybe saying a few prayers after. It doesn't fix what you did. It doesn't mean other people forgive you. It seems like you're getting away with something.
But I think about what Jewish tradition says about atonement. There's the story about the rabbi who asked a sinner to cut open a feather pillow in the middle of town, shake out all the feathers, and then try to gather them a day later--illustrating that it's really hard to take back a bad thing once you've done it. And I see the guilt that that mindset causes in some people, and the fear of doing anything that might later turn out to be wrong.
And I start to understand the purpose of an atonement ritual. The point isn't to downplay the gravity of what you did, so you can go on blithely. But when you're truly sorry, and after you've done your very best to fix what you can--it helps to have someone say, "It's okay now. You're human, you make mistakes. This one doesn't have to weigh on you anymore." I can see how finally being relieved of that burden could be worthy to be called a sacrament.
[And yeah, I know that Catholicism has its guilt, and Judaism has its atonement rituals. I'm not talking about the religions specifically, mostly about the difference between believing you can be forgiven for breaking something you can't wholly fix, and carrying that guilt with you forever.]