According to Christian teaching, original sin, our ancestral curse, means that none of us — not one — is righteous. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The only way we can restore harmony between ourselves and God is through uniting ourselves to the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate. That cannot be simply a mental assent to propositions. It requires recognizing our own sinfulness, asking God’s mercy, and making a firm resolution to repent … and to keep doing it.
As I wrote in my book about Dante, this was a very hard thing for me to do with regard to my relationship with my Dad. I only pushed through with it because my pastor said I had no choice, as a Christian. The same Jesus Christ to whom I appealed for mercy and forgiveness for my own sins said that we will only be forgiven insofar as we forgive others. There was no hope for healing within me for the wrongs my Dad had done to me if I was not willing to forgive him, even if he didn’t ask to be forgiven. This is not what I wanted to hear at the time, but it was what I needed to hear — and it turned out to be true. If I had not taken that hard road, I would not have been there to hear my father, near the end of his life, ask for forgiveness. I would not have been able to be with him in his last days, and to see him off holding his hand. Christianity, which teaches us that there is no human way to make full restitution for the evil that we do, makes it possible to re-integrate ourselves into society, and to reconcile. As Auden puts is, “You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart.”
The aptly self-described L*sbian Satan puts before the DeSales community — and all of us — a stark choice: accepting the Accuser’s claim that there can be no forgiveness and restoration for anybody who was ever guilty of the sin of racism, that there can only be what amounts to a symbolic sacrificial death (in this case, expulsion from the community); or that there is a better way, a Christian way, that allows for people to confess sin and vow repentance, confident that they will be shown mercy not only by God, but by the Christian people, who have been told by their Lord that they must forgive if they themselves want to be forgiven.
What a drama at DeSales University! Is it going to assert itself as a truly Christian institution, or will it surrender to the bloodguiltiness imputed to this penitent young man by the Accuser? Will it put this student on an inquisitorial show trial for sins he committed as a 15-year-old high school boy? The future of the university hangs in the balance. It will either be Catholic, or it will be pagan. The choice put to them by a student called L*sbian Satan makes the moral and spiritual stakes explicit.
And beyond DeSales, what about the rest of us? Do we want to live in a world in which some sins are unforgivable? Because that is the world we are rushing towards at breakneck speed. Riot indeed.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
