ParkerD:
Thank you for your thourough response. I can see (although I think you are mistaken in your interpretation), where you get the idea of the “conflicting commandments”.
One thought I wanted to expand on with you, however is this idea of “if we are called to accountability, we have a right to explain our actions”. One of the amazing things about the catholic faith is the regular opportunity to confess our sins to a priest, which usually involves discussion of those sins, motives, so forth. My experience has been (and perhaps I have a particularly un-reflective mind) that when I try to do just what you suggest, that is, explore the reasons I did what I did, the answers are never satisfactory, I could always have done better, I always knew better. There is never a tragic conflict between competing visions of “good” behavior - just me putting my will before God, my family and others. At the end of the day, there is really only one response to a self-examination of sin before God: “Lord have mercy!”
Or, as Longfellow put it:
Hereafter? -And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book
To find her failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors!
JHow,
I hope I can put this in a way that preserves your total and complete free will to do precisely as you wish in those matters your post expressed.
First, thanks for the lines from the poem by Longfellow, “In the Churchyard at Cambridge”. It reminds me of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, which has always been one of my favorite poems with its striking poetic language/alliteration. One of its lines,
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”
can remind that God sees all things by comparison to what mankind sees, and certainly sees our inner hearts and motives.
The prospect of trying to change and really, deeply commit to making those changes in my life through sincere repentance after being guided by the Holy Spirit, often through prayerful contemplation or just through personal reflection toward figuring out what impure motives lie behind some of my actions, is not an unwelcome prospect so long as I acknowledge that the Savior really is there to help me make those changes and guide me toward making them.
Self-honesty thus may work differently for me than for you. I would probably have difficulty trying to express and put into words the reasons underlying my sins to a priest (particularly with the prospect of being thought of as expressing “rationalizations” or “excuses” rather than just be allowed to say, “I think I have figured out why I did what I did, but I’m still learning to know myself.”)
I am strongly impressed from Biblical teachings that repentance moves along a line where a person learns to know themselves better, and makes changes as they do come to know themselves better and to “see things as they really are”–even within their own behavior. All that coming to know oneself is directly guided by the living, loving Savior with no intermediary and no need to have someone else on the outside listening since He knows the hearts and feelings and even things not able to be well put into words.
This exchange has tapped into one of the underlying, striking differences in beliefs that I have tried to allude to many times, but here you go bringing it out front.
Peace and good day to you and all.
Why else do you believe Christ suffered and died, if not to atone for our sins? You think this was for something that we do by accident? Or do you think that sin is something that God wants? Really, what do you think sin is?
