Recently there was a question posed on Off the Left Eye about our life review when we die. The comments were weighty with guilt. As a team member, I respond with compassion about God's great mercy. The purpose of that review, as I understand it, is for self reflection. If we see how our actions have hurt others we
are in a better place to choose differently.
Years ago at preschool a little boy was playing with the tiny silver spoons and wooden food. When the teacher began her song that signals clean up I saw him look longingly at the spoons and slip one in his pocket. I wondered if the ache to keep it was too much to bear.
I swung back through time to
when I was five. Amazingly, though I have lived in seven states in the interim sixty years, the memory transpired in the classroom across the hall. My teacher, Miss Eleanor, had long red hair that she wore in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was very kind. In her collection of playthings was a little red horse, just the right size for a fairy to ride on to escape a mouse. I loved that horse. One day, the longing was too great. I clutched it in my hand when I ran out the door. I stole
it.
The details about discovery are lost to me. Did I confess? Did my mother notice a guilty cast on my face? No matter. What was stamped indelibly on my heart is the enormous shame I felt, and the inevitable apology when I brought it back. I could not even look up at my beloved teacher as I admitted my transgression.
Although I will never know, I have a feeling she could not conjure up enough disapproval to frown at my bowed head.
The sin seemed mammoth to my young spirit, but perhaps to her it felt smaller than a fairy's getaway pony. If I could find her today I doubt she would even remember.
She forgave me.
Maybe she was as much as ten times my age. Likely her longevity helped her hold my deed in perspective. It seems safe to assume she had seen worse.
One time a dear friend was bent over with the weight of her
failings. A circle of women had gathered to support her with chocolate and our full attention. She felt an urgency to tell us her wrongdoings, and to ask our forgiveness, as proxies for the people she had hurt. We gave it.
I felt the presence of other women in the room with us, women from her past who love her. Although time gets slippery when you try to measure it in celestial terms, I feel confident that there were angels who have seen a
thousand springs. I imagined them gazing down at her penitent head, listening without transcribing her wrongdoings. In contrast to the heaviness of my friend's remorse, the angels held her mistakes lightly, forgotten as quickly as a cloud of breath spoken on a frosty morning.
"I will forgive your iniquities, and your sin I will remember no more." Jeremiah 31
"God cannot turn away from us or even look at us with a
frown."
True Christianity 56, Emanuel Swedenborg
