Dear Church Family,
You’ve asked me to write a Contact series about how to meet one another’s spiritual needs. The overview article is here and a piece about the second need is here. Since I’m heading into a weekend retreat – the annual Womxn’s retreat – focused on forgiveness and freedom, I thought I’d take this opportunity to write about the third spiritual need assessment, the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Someone who has this spiritual need unmet may be stuck in a story about their victimhood or about their transgression, repeating that story over and over, and caught like a broken record on feelings of guilt or anger. Here’s a story that taught me a lot about how to cut free from that loop.
I was taking a cross-country Amtrak train with a clerical collar on, as a seminarian’s social experiment (a good experiment, and fruitful!). A teenage girl got on in Chicago, traveling alone and scared, and she imprinted on me like a baby duck. Her family was vaguely Catholic and she had a picture of me as some kind of priestess – even though I tried to explain Presbyterian terms and where I was in the ordination process – and so I guess I was the safest person around. She sat with me in the cafe car and talked my ear off. At first I felt a little trapped by how much she wanted to talk, but I reminded myself that this was the experiment I’d gotten myself into by wearing clericals in public. And I was ultimately glad I let her talk my ear off, because she gave me the best real-life story of sin, guilt, and forgiveness I’d ever heard.
“If you’re not a priestess, then do you take confession?” She asked, head cocked curiously.
“Well in the Presbyterian church we don’t have confession booths. We believe in everyone confessing together. We don’t think one person gets to give you forgiveness, but you can go directly to God.”
“So anybody can confess to anyone?”
“Basically,” I said, thinking this was probably close enough to our corporate prayers admitting that all of us have fallen short and need God’s help.
“I haven’t ever gotten to go to confession. And I feel like I need to. Because I probably killed a raccoon.”
My eyes widened – this conversation had escalated quickly – and she shrank back, but I reassured her saying “it’s OK! We can talk about it.”
“Well, we have archery class at camp. I loved it. But it was hard. And they made us shoot across a big field,” she held up her arms in an unskilled approximation of the archer’s stance, “like as far as that tree,” pointing out the window. “And I shot, and I missed the target completely. And then we saw a rustling in the woods, and heard a squeak. So we went to see, and there was this raccoon bleeding a little and looking really zonked. So I had hit it, but the arrow kind of went off and just bumped it, and didn’t kill it, but it was hurt. We didn’t want to touch it, it was hissing at us, but we left it with a bowl of water and an old blanket in case it was in shock or something and needed to rest for a bit.”
“It sounds like you did your best,” I said, “You just missed the target. That’s a really freaky accident, and I don’t know what else you could have done.”
“Well it wasn’t there in the morning and so I thought it was OK, but later I overheard the counselors talking about it and I think they had taken it and buried it or hidden it or something in the woods.”
“Wow,” I said. “How long ago was this?”
“Two years,” she said. “And I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since.”
I repeated my reassurances. “It wasn’t your fault. Sometimes these things just happen. And you did everything you could afterwards. It’s OK to be sad about it but I don’t think you need to feel guilty.”
“Thanks,” she said, relaxing and smiling. “That means a lot for me, considering you’re practically a priestess already.”
This simple story really stuck with me. It struck me later that the word “sin” actually had its origin in archery, as a term of measurement referring to how far you missed the mark. Her story also was an important reminder of our power to help one another, and how straightforward that can be. We Presbyterians believe in the “priesthood of all believers,” meaning that we all shoulder the priestly duties together, confessing as peers to peers and receiving our assurances from one another and from God.
Someone who needs reconciliation needs a mirror held up to them, lovingly and truthfully at the same time. In this girl’s case it was such simple work: holding up a mirror that said “you didn’t mean to do it, and you clearly did your best” was liberation to her. She saw it more clearly and was released from her stress. In other cases the truth-telling may be more intense and hard to hear, like holding up a mirror that says “you were in the wrong, and you could make it right.” It’s important to have people in our lives who can tell us the truth no matter how it comes, reassuring us in our insecurities but also confronting us on our bullshit. This is work that we all have to do, though some may be more gifted or comfortable at it. Lots of therapists and teachers are especially good at this kind of confrontation. But we Presbyterians don’t get to specialize it, or leave it for someone else to do, because we believe in the priesthood of all.
So if you ever find yourself facing someone looping endlessly around an old story of guilt or anger, imagine putting on your priest(ess) hat — we all have one — and lovingly holding up a mirror to show the truth.
Every Blessing,
Talitha