Chasing the Illusion of Closure: Capital Punishment and the Aurora Shootings

I think most of us have felt it: hunger for the death of someone who's done something awful.

The trial of James Holmes, who shot up an Aurora, CO movie theater not quite three years ago, is about to begin. Driving to work this morning, I listened to an NPR report that included brief interviews with the parents of one of the shooting victims--a young man who chose to shield his girlfriend from the bullets. I imagined what it would be like to be the father of that man, to learn how he died saving the life of his beloved. I imagined it was my own son, several years from now.

I felt the hunger for death. But the father and mother of the dead young man were at best torn in their feelings about the impending trial. Whatever their hungers, they knew that the trial would not restore to them their son. They knew that their deepest longing wasn't for death but for restored life. And nothing anyone did to James Holmes could satisfy that desire.

They wanted closure. They knew the trial wouldn't give it. They knew the death penalty wouldn't give it. They knew that the delay in the trial was making it harder--was ensuring that whatever steps they'd made towards moving on were threatened by the demand by the court that they now go back. Perhaps they even understood that the court delays were in part caused by the death penalty itself. In cases like this, defense attorneys see it as their job to prevent their client from being put to death--and every delay is another day of life. Perhaps they knew that if James Holmes is sentenced to die, the appeals could continue for decades.

But still there is the hunger for death. And support for the death penalty in America is largely fueled by that hunger. There are other things driving that support, of course: views on deterrence, more dispassionate ideas of what justice demands. But the hunger for death that we call vengeance is what leads death penalty supporters to set up a grill outside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester whenever there's an execution...and fry bacon as a human being dies.

Revenge stories play on that hunger. I can remember seeing some of the Death Wish movies as a teen, and feeling that distinctive kind of pulse-pounding satisfaction as Bronson's character pursued his murderous vigilantism.

But I've always been suspicious of that feeling. If it has a cognitive content, it's this: While a person's premature death is ordinarily one of the worst things there is, it is rendered intrinsically good when the one who dies is a murderous villain. Intrinsically good. Not a tragic necessity, but good in itself.

It's as if the villain's death can somehow fix what the villain has done. But of course it can't. A murderer's victim stays dead. The hole left in the world by the loss of someone beloved can't be filled by tearing another life out of the stream of history.

While hate can flood into the place where love once lived, hate is a poor substitute for love. It can't complete you the way love can. It can't expand your sense of self, making you bigger than your narrow ego. It can't bring joy. It doesn't gesture to the transcendent.

In the grip of hate, you don't feel as if you're on the cusp of understanding the meaning of it all.

Loss can lead to hate, which sparks the hunger for death. But feeding that hunger doesn't restore what was lost. That can't be done. What can be done is this: We can endeavor to live so that the loss doesn't kill what is best in us.

What's best in us is the power to love. And the cancer-spread of hate is the thing that most surely kills in us this power. To indulge the hunger for death is therefore inimical to realizing the most significant sort of closure. What brings real closure isn't death but forgiveness, because forgiveness is the victory of our power to love over the urgings of hate.

At least that's how I see it. And this is why I don't believe in the death penalty. I understand the death penalty, at least to the extent that someone who hasn't had a loved one murdered can understand it. I can vicariously appreciate the emotions that could drive someone to long for the death of the person who's torn their lives apart.

But closure is about healing. It isn't about feeding hungers born of hate.

I've heard the stories of people who have sought revenge, chasing the closure they think they'll find when the person who wronged them suffers in kind. Some of those stories were told to me by killers in prison, when I volunteered as a nonviolence facilitator in intensive prison workshops. Weeping, they told me how they hungered for the death of those who'd wronged them. Full of rage and hate, they struck out--sometimes at the real target, sometimes at a vicarious victim who represented those who'd tortured and tormented them.

But the act didn't bring the closure they were hungering for. The hunger for death tells us that closure will come by turning a living human into a corpse. But the hunger lies. It misdirects our energies, obsessively driving us away from what will really satisfy.

Some of these murderers eventually realized the truth. Some of them saw the futility of their path and knew that letting go of hate and vengeance was the real path to healing. Some realized that until they forgave the father who abused them, the drug-addicted mother who neglected them, the pawns of the system that marginalized them because of the color of their skin, they would have no closure from their anguished past. Rather, they'd be ruled by it. To move on, you must let go. And hate is about clinging on tight.

These are lessons I've learned from murderers, from the stories they've told me. And it didn't miss my attention that these murderers, when they killed, were motivated by the same psychological forces that drive our cultural enthusiasm for the death penalty.

The people who fry bacon outside the prison walls during an execution are closer in spirit to the one being killed than are those who stand a candle-lit vigil to oppose what's being done. The latter repudiate the spirit that led the murderer to kill. The former, unwittingly, stand in solidarity with the killer they revile.

They have allowed the spirit of hate, which tore their lives apart, to be a spirit that helps define them. This is like seeking to close a wound with a knife rather than with stitches.

I don't mean to suggest that forgiveness is easy. Nor do I think that victims can let go and release hate right away. I think that there are things we can do as a society to make it easier for the victims of horror to move forward with their lives, and that we aren't doing those things.

There are things the perpetrator of horror can do to make forgiveness a more real possibility for the victims. I think they have a duty to do these things, but to do them requires that they confront what they've done honestly and without excuses or illusions. And there are things a justice system can do to help make this happen.

Victims need to understand why. They need to know that the why wasn't good enough, and that the perpetrator knows it wasn't good enough. They need to witness the perpetrator's genuine cry of remorse, the anguished realization that they are responsible for horror. And they need to see the perpetrator take on penance, a sincere project of reform and restitution that can never restore what was lost but can express the depth of their remorse through endless efforts to do good.

I say "need," but I have witnessed victims of horrific abuse perform the miracle of forgiveness in the absence of these things. I've seen it happen in prisons: Inmates who were violently molested for years, forced to abuse siblings, thrown into foster care only to be sexually molested by foster parents--these same victims found ways to let go of hate and to forgive. I have seen the trajectory of lives change. I have followed their course in stunned wonder.

To witness it is to witness a miracle. It is a reason I believe in God.

I'm tempted to say, "If criminals in prison can do it, then so can we." But public policies can't be built around miracles. And such miracles happen most often after people hit bottom. So I suppose these miracles are more common for those imprisoned for their crimes than they are for the victims of crime who are trying to move on.

What we need is a criminal justice system that focuses more of its attention on meeting the needs of victims. And to do that, we have to stop assuming that victims' needs are best met just by punishing offenders. Victims have a right to confront perpetrators, to demand the things described above. They have a right to the help of trained facilitators who have the skills to challenge offenders to really hear their victims--without excuses or rationalizations, without hiding behind emotional walls.

In short, they have a right to something like the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. The death penalty offers the illusion of closure. But the deeper truth is this: What victims get from the execution of a loved one's murderer is not closure but the opportunity to finally begin to pursue closure--an opportunity that has been deferred because they've believed that erasing the murderer from the world is what was needed. But they begin this pursuit of closure when much of what can help provide it--a confrontation with the killer culminating in the killer's remorse and repentance--is no longer possible, because the killer is dead. And so all they can hope for is the miracle.

For the survivors and families of the Aurora shooting, I wish for something more satisfying than the death of James Holmes, than years of deferring the search for closure while they wait for an execution that will not meet their needs. And if our justice system can't or won't help them pursue their deepest needs, then I hope they get the miracle.

Self-Forgiveness

Self-forgiveness is important for emotional health, and yet it is elusive. Some of the most forgiving people I know—forgiving when it comes to others who have hurt them or let them down—carry a heavy weight of guilt and shame over their own perceived wrongs.


Even if not everyone finds it harder to forgive themselves than to forgive others, it seems clear that what it takes to forgive oneself is different from what it takes to forgive others. But I think it may be true that genuine self-forgiveness is uniquely difficult to achieve.

I want to offer some thoughts here about self-forgiveness--what it is, what it isn't, and what impedements stand in the way of it--that might (I hope) be helpful for those who find it hard to do. My thinking is deeply shaped by my faith, but I want to offer an account of self-forgiveness here that brackets the more explicitly religious notions that feature in my own full understanding. Those who have any familiarity with Christian teachings about forgiveness, especially within the Lutheran tradition, will nevertheless see the imprint of those teachings on what I have to say.

So: I think self-forgiveness is distinctively elusive, perhaps harder for most of us to realize than forgiveness of others. Some might raise their eyes skeptically at this, thinking about all those people who let themselves off the hook for every failing while moralizing righteously about everyone else. But while there are lots of people like that, I don't think they're practicins self-forgiveness. Genuine self-forgiveness needs to be clearly distinguished from other self-directed attitudes that might be confused with it. Specifically, the starting point for self-forgiveness is honest acknowledgement of the scope and severity of one’s own wrongdoing. Forgiveness is a response to a wrong, and so cannot occur in the absence of acknowledging this wrong.

Many people seek to escape feelings of guilt and shame, not by forgiving themselves for wrongs acknowledged, but by denying or ignoring the wrongs. Sometimes we simply pretend that we have done no wrong—like playing a role. When we can’t do this, we rationalize and justify our behaviors or shift the blame to someone else. And then there are all the "misdirection" techniques: most notably, we focus our attention outward to the sins of our neighbors, and by responding to those sins with sufficient indignation we manage to distract ourselves from all the ways in which we do similar things.

However it’s done, the failure to take responsibility for our own wrongs is a very different thing from self-forgiveness. We can’t forgive ourselves for a wrong done if we haven’t admitted that we did it and that it was wrong. Self-forgiveness thus begins with a repudiation of the act we are forgiving ourselves for.

Self-deception and misdirection not only preclude self-forgiveness but are problematic in their own right. To pretend you have never needlessly hurt another person is, to put it bluntly, to live a lie. To move through life as if your own actions never violate your deepest values is to move through life with an ongoing inner dissonance. It is to be out of touch with reality.

Why do so many of us choose to live in this kind of denial? We do it because the only alternative we see is shouldering a frightening burden of guilt and shame. We want to be happy. But we can’t be happy if we see ourselves as unworthy of happiness—as warranting misery. We cannot be happy if we think that the fitting attitude to have towards ourselves, given our behavior, is loathing.

Of course, most of us acknowledge that some wrongs can be repaired, our guilt washed away by the proper compensation. But while washing away the “stain” of wrongdoing through appropriate reparations might sometimes be possible, some harms are beyond our power to repair. Furthermore, even if harms can be repaired, there are so many ways (large and small) in which we fall short every day that, absent forgiveness, the call for reparations threatens to be overwhelming. And if our limitations lead us to go wrong in all sorts of little ways every day, what chance do we have of not going wrong with respect to the reparations? Expecting people to repair every past wrong amounts to responding to those who have failed to handle an initial set of requirements by heaping even more on them.

In short, if we acknowledge our own wrongs fully, we risk imposing conditions on our own acceptability that may be too much to bear. So, we see ourselves as forced to choose between a life of denial and a life of miserable self-flagellation. Denial seems better. But such denial—and the pretense of self-approval that comes with it—is not self-forgiveness.

Self-forgiveness is a third alternative. It is the alternative of taking honest responsibility for our wrongs without beating ourselves up, without regarding ourselves as unworthy of happiness or love, without carrying with us a soul-crushing burden of guilt and shame.

Since this alternative presupposes taking honest and conscious responsibility for our wrongs, self-forgiveness involves something that is not typically required in the case of forgiving others. Typically, when others wrong us, we feel the wrong immediately. As the victim of the wrong, what we experience is the pain of being violated, not the prospect of guilt. And so we have a direct sense of wrongness without the circumstances that trigger denial-inducing defense mechanisms.

But in the case of our own wrongs, we need to take active steps to resist the defense-mechanisms and acknowledge the wrong. In other words, a necessary condition for self-forgiveness—a first step, if you will—is deliberate confession. We must formulate in clear terms a truth we are often prone to hide from: “I did this thing. This thing was wrong. I am responsible for this wrong.” Until we take this confessional step, we can only have a cheap imitation of self-forgiveness, a sense of self-acceptance based on pretense and distraction rather than on truth.

But this confessional step, while necessary for self-forgiveness, is hardly sufficient. What else do we need?

Most obviously, the capacity to forgive ourselves is bound up with our capacity to forgive others. If we refuse to forgive others we are implicitly embracing the idea that someone’s wrongdoing puts them outside the proper scope of our good will, outside the reach of our embrace. And if we think this true about wrongdoing in general, then we’ll think it true of our own wrongdoing. And so, acknowledging our own wrongdoing will mean for us that we are unworthy of our own good will, our own embrace. In short, for those who generally can’t or don’t forgive, confession isn’t a first step towards wholeness but a leap straight into self-loathing.

So, a general capacity and willingness to forgive is necessary if we want to forgive ourselves. But again it’s not sufficient. I know many people who quickly and easily forgive those who have hurt them but who, when it comes to their own failings, can’t stop beating themselves up.

Why is that? There are, I think, at least two reasons. First, when you hurt me I am the aggrieved party. If I choose to set aside my hurt, to not hold it against you, then that is my right. In effect, because I am the one who was harmed, the hurt is mine to do with as I will. And so I have the authority to set it aside and say, “This won’t come between us. This will not exclude you from my good will or my embrace.” But when I hurt you, the hurt is yours. While you may have the right to set it aside, I have no such right. Since I am not the aggrieved party, I lack the authority to let myself off the hook.

This means that often, when we confess our wrongs, we don’t feel entitled to forgive ourselves until we have been forgiven by those we have wronged—until we have received their absolution. If they don’t set aside the wrong (perhaps because they can’t), then neither do we.

That is part of why so many of us find it so difficult to forgive ourselves, and I will return to this piece of the puzzle in a moment. But there is a second piece as well, one that stands in tension with the first. Suppose I’ve done you some significant wrong, and suppose you do explicitly forgive me. I may still find it hard to forgive myself. Why is that?

Here’s the problem: What you are setting aside in forgiving me isn’t the same as what I need to set aside. In order for you to forgive me, what you must set aside is the hurt that stands between us--your hurt. To forgive myself, what I need to set aside is my guilt.

Guilt involves a sense of debt—an inner urge to make something right, to fix what you have broken. If you erase a debt I owe you, that’s a magnanimous gesture. It comes from a position of moral authority. But for me to accept such a gesture, I have to relinquish something—not moral authority, which I’ve already lost by committing the wrong, but some lingering shadow of it. So long as I continue to see myself as owing you, I reserve for myself a pathway to making it right through my own efforts—by paying off the debt. To forgive myself is to genuinely give up on the idea of restoration coming about through my own works, to forego ever seeing this restoration as earned.

Forgiving others, in other words, is the exercise of a certain kind of power. Forgiving myself, by contrast, is a kind of abdication. It’s about releasing control. I give up on trying to retroactively repair my past self, trying to make myself fully worthy of happiness and love. I concede that I am too small and too flawed to fix every harm I’ve done. And I compassionately embrace myself anyway.

None of this means that when we forgive ourselves we ought not to make amends for wrongs done. Here is where I think the answer to the first problem—the idea that we have no right to forgive ourselves for harms we’ve caused to others—can be resolved. I think this problem is rooted in a failure to understand what self-forgiveness really is. Others who have been hurt by us may have a claim on reparations. They don’t have a claim on our self-loathing.

Let’s put this another way. Those who have been harmed by us can, within reason, legitimately expect us to make amends, and self-forgiveness isn’t about refusing to do so. What it’s about, rather, is this: When we do make amends, it isn’t in order to earn the right to be happy or loved or at peace. Self-forgiveness is about letting go of the idea that our acceptability to ourselves, our right to pursue joy and receive love, depends on successfully expiating our sins. And it is therefore about letting go of any effort to make our experience of joy and love contingent on how well we fix our past wrongs. It is about regarding joy and love as unearned gifts, and then receiving them on those terms--in a spirit of gratitude, rather than as payment due.

Paradoxically, we may find that we are better able to repair past harms and avoid future ones if the motive is love for our neighbor rather than the effort to expiate and avoid guilt. We see where we have caused hurt and, out of compassion, reach out to heal the hurt. This is a far cry from beating ourselves up about it…and then trying to fix the hurt so as to earn back the right to be happy. Self-forgiveness frees us from this inward fixation on ourselves, on our own merits, allowing us to love more freely and more fully.

Put another way, it may well be the case, ironically, that we owe it to the victims of our wrongs to forgive ourselves, so that when we make it up to them it is for their sakes rather than our own.

Prayer of Confession for Perfectionist Children

Today, after lunch, we had a family meeting. The meeting occured in lieu of going to church.

We had every intention of going to church this morning. We'd missed last week because of a family trip, and we'll be missing next week because my wife will be running the Dallas Rock 'n Roll half marathon. So we really wanted to make it to church this morning.

But things happen. Some of it this morning involved a harmonica being snatched from an elder brother (and the subsequent drama of trying to get a four-year-old girl to relinquish the stolen toy and apologize for the theft). Some of it, however, involved what was supposed to be a pleasant mother-son run before church, but which took much longer than anticipated (and was less pleasant). My wife and son planned to run to the bagel shop (a little over a mile away), eat breakfast together, and then run back. But as the return journey was about to start, after my wife had told my son she'd be happy to carry his full bottle of orange juice home so that it wouldn't get wasted, my son threw it in the trash.

My wife scolded him for wasting orange juice. Now my son hates to do anything wrong, and responds very strongly when he feels he's done something he shouldn't have done. The wasted orange juice (which he's decided to give up for Lent and so only drinks these days on Sundays, making it a special treat) inspired a sulk that slowed the run into a ponderous walk, which then delayed the return home...which he then felt bad about. In short, he descended into a cycle of self-recrimination which culminated in a hand-written note delivered to my wife. The note said, simply, "All the bad things that happened this morning were my fault."

And I was reminded of my Lenten meditation from last week. I recalled the liturgical Prayer of Confession with which my son is familiar. For those unfamiliar with it, it runs essentially as follows:

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your son, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

This prayer is often misunderstood, treated as a kind of litany of self-recrimination. But I don't understand it in that way, because the prayer is really about forgiveness, about acknowledging our common human condition, our collective tendency to be less than we can be--and then looking forward (and upward, towards the divine resources that not only help us to forgive ourselves, but also to do better than we knew we could do).

So I thought about how to word that idea in language that would make sense to a very precocious, perfectionist seven-year-old. I wrote something up and gave it to my son during our family meeting. I told him I tried to put the meaning of that prayer of confession we said in church into second-grade language. And he seemed to really appreciate it. He seemed to think it would help him stop beating himself up so much when he did something he shouldn't have done.

Just in case others have children with similar personalities (or have inner children with similar personalities), I thought I'd share this children's version of the prayer of confession--really more a meditation than a prayer--on this blog. Here it is:

We all make bad choices. That's part of being human.

But we can all make better choices, and God helps us do that. We pray for God's help to be better than we thought we could be.

We shouldn't beat ourselves up for making bad choices. God doesn't. God loves and forgives us. So should we.

Instead of being mad at ourselves for our bad choices, we should say, "I can do better," and then try to do better next time, with God's help.

A Lenten Meditation

The other day I was cleaning up my office and found—in a stack of papers—the 2010 Ash Wednesday bulletin from my church. Since Ash Wednesday was only days away, I decided that instead of tossing it (which is what I’d typically do with a year-old church bulletin), I’d leave it on my desk to look through on Ash Wednesday.


And so there it was this morning. I sat down and read through it as a kind of morning devotion: Psalm 51, the extended responsive confession, the prayers. And I found myself pausing over certain key phrases, phrases that jarred me because of a conversation I’d had earlier in the morning, when someone I love had been beating themselves up about their personal failings.

I won’t repeat exactly what I said in response, but it involved the importance of recognizing one’s positive qualities and not exaggerating the negatives. It was a short exchange, but I kept thinking about it on the way to work. I was thinking about the difference between acknowledging honestly when you’ve done something wrong and making the commitment to do better, on the one hand, and defining yourself in terms of your failings, on the other. You can look at your bad choices and say, “I shouldn’t have done that; I’m better than that,” and then commit to doing better in the future. Or you can look at your bad choices and say, “That’s who I am. I’m a miserable failure of a human being.” The former gives you a good name to live up to, inspiring you to reach for the resources that will help you to grow into your best self. The latter imposes a kind of roadblock: You define yourself in terms of your worst moments: it’s who you are. And if it’s who you are, then you don’t have the resources to do better.

These were the thoughts going through my head as I read through last year’s Ash Wednesday bulletin. And my attention was caught by verse 5 of Psalm 51: “Indeed, I was born steeped in wickedness, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” I read and reread the extended prayer of responsive confession, a litany of our offenses “in thought, word, and deed,” our failures to love God and neighbor. And more: “…our self-indulgent appetites…our neglect of human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty…our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us…our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us…”

And I imagined those words becoming a kind of self-flagellation, a litany of verbal self-abuse.

It occurred to me that for many people, that is exactly what these words mean, and that is exactly what the season of Lent is about: beating yourself up for being such a miserable sinner. I recall all the times I’ve witnessed Christians repeat the words, “I confess that I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself.” Sometimes it is just rote words, repeated without meaning. But sometimes it is something more terrible. They are lashing themselves with the words, as if being in bondage to sin were the same thing as being nothing but a sinner—as if the cage were the only thing, as opposed to being what was keeping the dove from taking wing.

But in Psalm 51 the confession of wickedness is preceded by an assurance of God’s compassion and mercy; and the fifth verse, which seems to define the sinner in terms of their sin, is immediately followed, in verse 6, by the following: “Indeed, you delight in truth deep within me, and would have me know wisdom deep within.”

And then the psalm moves forward into the beautiful words so often repeated (sometimes sung) in Christian liturgies:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
  and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
  and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
  and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

The Psalm is about cleansing. And for something to be cleansed, there must be more to it than the dirt which is washed away. While Christians insist that we cannot cleanse ourselves, that we need the grace of God, this does not mean that there is nothing beneath the dirt. The words of Psalm 51 insist that sin and wickedness do not have a definitive hold on us. In its own way, at least for me, the psalm evokes the Genesis assurance that deep within we bear the “image of God,” and that despite our failings this is what we most essentially are. In our innermost being there is something precious, something that touches upon the divine—something into which divine truth and wisdom can flow, to cleanse us from the inside out.

The purpose of confession, of recognizing the scope of our failings, is not to justify self-loathing but to inspire the self-transcendence that comes when we open ourselves to that essential connection linking us to the divine. The narrow self that does not love enough, that neglects human suffering, that is indifferent to injustices, that wastes and pollutes the world—this self exists only to the extent that we cling to our sins, only to the extent that we say to ourselves, “This is my essence.” When we do that, how can we perceive cleansing as anything other than self-destruction? By conceiving ourselves too narrowly, by telling a story about ourselves that makes no room for the image of God, Lenten confession is reduced to beating oneself up. And so we are forced to choose between denying our sins (hiding behind self-righteous justifications) and hating who we are.

But Lent isn’t about letting go of false self-righteousness in order to hate ourselves more perfectly. It’s about reaching for a third alternative. When the psalmist says, “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a troubled and broken heart, O God, you will not despise,” there is an assurance here: Honestly facing our failings does not require that we hate ourselves. Why should we despise what God does not despise? It is possible to fully confront our most heart-breaking offenses in all their troubling reality, because they are not the end of the story.

If these offenses defined us, then being heart-broken about them wouldn’t be possible at all. It is because we are more than our sins, even our direst sins, that we can weep over them. To let our grief over offenses rise to the level of self-hatred is therefore to reach the wrong conclusion. That we can grieve over what we have done means that we are more than that, that we are greater than that. That we can grieve over our offenses means that self-hatred is misplaced, because there is in us that which rises above our worst acts.

In grieving over our offenses, we give voice to that within us which is of God. But in hating ourselves for our offenses, we blind ourselves to that within us which is of God. Lent is about the former, not about the latter. And because it is about the former, it does not end with grief and confession. It only begins there. Lent is a journey of self-transformation whose starting point is honesty over how we have fallen short. But we must say, “I am better than this.” And for Christians this acknowledgment is deeply rooted in our understanding of ourselves as beloved children of God.

Even if our sin is intolerable to God, we are not. If our sin is intolerable to God, it is because we are better than that. Divine forgiveness is nothing more and nothing less than God’s unblinking attention to that which is greater than our sin—greater precisely because it was born in an outpouring of divine love.

Lenten repentance, if it is to reflect this spirit of grace--if it is to be the window to divine grace that it is supposed to be--must be a recognition that we are better than our sin, and that this is what makes our sin so heartbreaking. And to perceive our sin in that way--to see it as God sees it--is to forgive ourselves as God forgives us.