At some point in your life, you’ve done something wrong, very wrong. Something you are not proud of, something you wish hidden and secret, something that makes you cringe when you call it up into the light. We all have.
Call it a sin, a bad deed, a violation, a transgression. Our lives are filled with them. Not a one of us is without such marks.
At some point, when you are ready, and if you are lucky, you talk about your deep-heart offences with your closest loves, those you trust, your friends, and with your God. It is a talk that goes on and on, sometimes it lasts for years, sometimes a lifetime.
When a public figure is caught in a moral peccadillo, or something even more serious, the sin-talk usually begins, and then keeps coming. Lately, it is hard to miss that the papers are full of confessions of personal sin. I’m not sure this public dialogue of hand wringing is such a good thing. It starts to sound like yammering.
Sin is not a sound bite. Neither is shame, repentance, or forgiveness. They are heavy, serious, meaning laden words. One must be careful bandying them about. You can’t utter such words without calling up the notion of God, Religion, Faith, and Judgment.
When such concepts are tossed about for clearly agenda-driven purposes, my lips curl up like I’ve been chewing on tinfoil, my teeth ache, and that fingers-on-the-chalk-board shudder starts up in my ears.
There is a place for public confession, particularly when the public has suffered, or when the crime, dishonesty or scheming has damaged us or our faith in our institutions. At best, public confession can be is cathartic, honest, and full of integrity and lessons. But forcing public figures into press-conferencing private sin is not something I’m interested in.
When a public figure is called out over a private sin, how to handle it is, of course, up to him or her. I just wish the rest of us weren’t so comfortable with the voyeuristic nonsense, or with the simple-minded confessions we hear in response.
Some things in our lives are cut and dried. The need for food, and air, shelter and drink come to mind. But most things in our lives are far from it. Our human frailties pile up and tumble down around us on a regular basis.
Private, and I stress the word private, issues of sin, shame, repentance and forgiveness are never cut and dried. They are deeply intricate, multilayered, and personal. They involve complicated relationships with family, friends, and God. They are hope and redemption, the chance of growth and change, on the highest level. It would serve us well to let them remain complicated and effortful. They cannot be, honestly, reduced to a sound bite.
Unless the individual did something that clearly makes it impossible for him or her to represent or lead us now, then I don’t want to know about the private mistakes each has or has not, made. It is not my business.
Forcing people into public confession spawns a pony-show kind of TV piety, a cut and dried fake reckoning, that makes deeply complicated failings and recoveries sound trite and easy. They are not.
A deeper connotation is buried in all this calling out business: the disturbing idea that we, as American’s, want to hear about every sin committed by our leaders. And following that, an even more disturbing implication – that we somehow want our leaders never to have made mistakes.
We all falter. We all fall down. Then we get up again and trek along.
I prefer people who have made mistakes. After all, people who say they haven’t made mistakes are liars.
