Alienated from our personal splendor
It was difficult to reconcile my immersion in my difficulty with the growing awareness that this vulgar tape might now not, after all, doom candidate Trump’s possibilities. I was some weeks into a sabbatical when the tale of the Access Hollywood tape broke. Alone at an author’s retreat, I attempted to limit my publicity to the information, figuring I might take to coronary heart the invitation—elemental even to an educational sabbath—to stop and relax. Avoiding the inappropriate tale felt necessary because my sabbatical task changed into exploring splendor, the particular contours I desire to explore in a destiny column.
Many months later, it is a new day of reckoning. Not a lot for this president who appears—forgive the foul pun—untouchable, however for powerful men from each social sector whose violations had been publicly cataloged, their reputations shattered, and their crimes now not concealed or defined away.
T is likewise the start of Lent. We’re asked to attend to our internal lives with rigorous self-scrutiny for forty days. At the same time, as these many months had been demoralizing, demanding, and 100 different matters for absolutely everyone who has experienced sexual harassment or assault, I am surprised if Lent makes matters even tougher. I can be given to schadenfreude with every new revelation of sexual impropriety or criminality. However, Lent bids me not to forget my sin, particularly abhorrent.
What does this mean in this specific cultural moment? Maybe those topics provide a case for revisiting the revisioning of sin—the transferring ways Christian theology has come to look at, call, and comprehend it in ourselves and others.
In the 1960s, feminist theologians commenced tough the notion of sin as pleasure or the assertion of ego, arguing that such a view presumed a sense of self and autonomy that most women do now not own. Their work additionally faced more than a few theological and cultural orthodoxies, including the excessive blame located on ladies for all ways of human sin and the view of women’s bodies as dangerous sources of sexual temptation.
While there have been troubles with those early revisions of conventional Christian doctrine (the belief of uniformity of women’s enjoy, for one), they did vital work in reevaluating sin as a theological category and contesting inadequate bills of each personhood and the nature of God. They made it viable to ask more illuminating questions. What does it mean to confess the sin of a loss of self? And how is a sin, at its root, systemic—much less about character weak points and more about institutional cruelty and human collusion?
Feminist theology also challenged conceptions of divine strength distorted by patriarchal norms. The first-rate of these paintings has recovered a view of God as a social being. It envisions God’s electricity as divine eros, a desire for reciprocity and kinship, not possession or domination. Sarah Coakley describes divine being as ecstatic overflowing, a choice born now not of want or lack but plenitude and longing love.
To call God’s energy in such methods is to apprehend its non-coercive character. To understand ourselves as humans created inside the picture of this God is to condemn all styles of coercive energy—and to admit while we fail at this.
And here is wherein I’ll carry splendor into my first column despite everything. If beauty, as Elaine Scarry argues, assists in addressing injustice, it does this now by requiring perceptual acuity and revealing what lifesaving reciprocity looks like if there is asymmetry of family members. Beauty is equity in every experience of the phrase.
If the ceaseless love of the Trinity is the essence of splendor, then Lent allows humanity to consider its alienation from its very own splendor. In Jesus’ disagreement, together with his Roman abusers, he hanged deformed on the move. But his deformity, Augustine insists, is our splendor. His self-emptying love imparts the present of our being created anew in his likeness.
Like all items, this one may be obtained well or poorly or by no means. We can refuse to stay in imitation Christi, choosing well-worn paths that demean us and others. We can also fail to obtain this present because of ignorance, fear, or wounds. Sin, a falling quick of God’s preference for proper, can be committed willfully—as in the violation of every other’s dignity. But sin may also result from weakened capacities for which one isn’t immediately culpable: the incapability, say, of a victim of abuse to consider their belovedness.
These are the shadow facets of ourselves and the places where we recognize that sin is social. Sin’s insidious work distorts our humanity and alienates us from the splendor for which we were made, a splendor that is God’s own existence: reciprocity, kinship, and asymmetry of relations.
Sin’s social size also means that I may be complicit in the sin of others—their failure to get hold of God’s items. Lent calls me to reckon with my shadow aspect, with how my motion and inactiveness have dehumanized my pals, making it more difficult for them to include God’s lifestyle desires for them. And, if that weren’t enough, Lent additionally calls me to reckon with my tendency to look at the abuser as past the limits of divine love.
Lent asks us to reckon with these tough truths and face our shadow sides in the conviction that none of us is past God’s grace and redemption. This is the season’s difficult, however vital work.
