Heroes and Villains

There’s a story in the good book, about a cup that is clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. The cup is golden, pretty to look at, and almost certainly the first one that you would take off the shelf. But you wouldn’t want to drink from it, because you’d probably get sick. The point of the story is to illustrate the fact that things aren’t always as they seem.

Sometimes when I am alone in my car, or before I go to sleep, I find myself thinking about what my own cup is marked with–but usually just for a minute or two, before I go back to concentrating on polishing my shiny external surface.

I don’t for one second think that I am better or worse than anybody else. Or that anybody is so very much different from me. It’s probably human nature to run down the ol’ laundry list of personal transgressions late at night in the quiet of your mind, when no one is looking and no one can hear. Just as it’s human nature to change the channel if things become too unpleasant to watch.

After I had a baby, I felt like I understood some very basic truths. That people are simply these sad, crazy sacks of muscle and bone and might. And even though might gets us out of bed in the morning, it will also eventually do us in. In that hot July of ’88, looking into my baby’s eyes, I was overwhelmed by love and terror. To this day, I swear I saw the whole world laid out plain. The helplessness, the hunger, the beauty, and the suffering. The hilarious vulnerability of it all. How ultimately, this is all doomed to failure.

Sure, that might have been postpartum depression. But things were different back then. Wellbutrin hadn’t been invented yet. What I mean to say is that as human beings, we want love, attention, safety, and food. Our will gives us the ambition to seek and possess these things, but somehow, even if there is enough to go around, there will never be enough seats at the table. It’s this kind of innate selfishness that makes an otherwise reasonable person believe statements like “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” (Never mind that the chlamydia follows you home on the plane.)

We’re not meant to be altruistic. I mean, we’re meant to try. And the punch line is that we are also meant to fail, so that we can bear witness to our shortcomings and learn from them. So that we can transcend our base nature.

So it was then, at my baby’s birth, that I felt like I understood. I understood who we are as human beings and the nature of wrongdoing, of sin: the sin of intent, the sin of omission, and the sin of the spin. The sin of the spin is a tricky one because it happens way down deep inside our hearts where no one else can see. Like maybe when we’re alone and thinking about the thing we shouldn’t have said, or the thing we should have done, or any of the garden-variety activities that make up the sediment of regret each of us carries at the bottom of our cups.

I don’t know about you, but in my mind what usually happens with the sin of spin is that I identify something I did wrong, and then quickly come up with four reasons why my behavior couldn’t have been helped. If I can’t come up with enough reasons, I change the channel. I don’t get away with this all the time because good lies, even the ones you tell yourself, have to bear the ring of truth.

You can’t change people, no matter how hard you try. But people do change. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in others, and in myself. And so, if I believe in the idea of earthly sin, I also have to believe in redemption. In my experience, the quickest route to redemption is forgiveness. To forgive is to free. To salvage what might otherwise be lost. It’s not easy to forgive, or to live with the realization that I am a person who is in need of forgiveness. But few things in life that are worthwhile come easy.

The words “forgiveness” and “sin” are turbo-charged social no-no’s, but I’m not particularly interested in convention late at night, before I fall asleep. When I’m alone with the contents of my gray matter, I know that forgiveness and sin exist, just as I know that the monster doesn’t live under my bed but rather in it. In my DNA, and in everybody else’s. But it’ll be okay, I think. The hero lives there, too.