3/15/16

I went to my first reconciliation service today, which wasn't quite what I'd expected. I find many religious rituals interesting, and see in them a social dynamic that I think explains their continued popularity and relevance in an increasingly secularized world. Take the sacrament of reconciliation, for example. Despite how most people view it, the sacrament itself isn't meant to appease some vengeful deity (especially if one believes that God is love and mercy). Rather, it's meant to help us heal ourselves and our relationships with one another. And how do we do that? We start by admitting the mistakes we've made and the areas where we fall short and endeavour to do better. It's not meant to be some kind of magical sin-sponge that sucks up all the selfish and lustful and harmful and deluded things we've done, but an honest reflection of who we are and who we want to be. And the expectation of this particular sacrament is that we're willing to do something about it, that we're willing to try to make amends and live a more compassionate and skillful life, which in turn we do by following the example of spiritual teachers like Jesus, who make a point to illustrate our interdependent nature. This idea might be a little out there, but I think the act of confession, while having a more religious connotation, is a universal compulsion among most human beings given our social nature. Fr. Michael once said something to the effect that, we sin because we suffer. And that got me thinking that perhaps the root of sin is this suffering, and in particular, the suffering that arises from holding onto what we can't admit to. Expose this root, and it withers away. And to confess, to freely share this difficult thing, this source of anger or shame or whatever it causes us to feel, is to expose the root, which thrives in darkness, into the light of awareness, freeing us from its hold and the shame we feel. In this way, then, the act of confession, of saying out loud what we often can't even bear to think, is salvific. But rather than being saved from the fires of hell, we're saved from the fires of our own shame and self-loathing.

3/1/16

Sunday, Annie and I went hiking at Smith Rock on a weekend getaway for our twelve year anniversary. Smith Rock is a beautiful cathedral of peaks and cliffs in the midst of central Oregon's desert plains. As it happened, the first reading at church that morning was the passage from Exodus where Moses goes up the mountain and hears the voice of God. Many ancient peoples from around the world held mountains to be sacred places, and standing upon the summit of Smith Rock, I could easily understand why. In that quiet and solitude, surveying the natural beauty of the landscape surrounding me as far as the eye could see, I felt at once both insignificant and the centre of the universe. And in that moment, I felt so overwhelmingly thankful for everyone and everything in my life and wanted to share that feeling with everyone I knew. But the feeling faded once I was back home and separated from the conditions that gave rise to it; and the question that I now find myself faced with is, How can I cultivate that same kind of feeling in my day-to-day life?