looking up

It is almost the end of my birthday. My 32nd celebration of my inauguration into this world.

I just came in from a few minutes of staring at the stars from my mom's back porch. It has been a while since I have seen so many stars. You can only see the brightest ones from the city so it seems that your focus in drawn downward, rather than upward.

It is easy to loose hold of oneself in a place where you feel rushed, and pressured and torn in many different ways. Looking up sometimes gives one some perspective, a realization that there is so much more in the universe than waking up, working, coming home and sleeping.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam all tell us that there is something flawed about humanity. That we tend to "sin" or in more familiar language, make mistakes. For some of us, that is our character, we constantly make the same mistakes over and over, these are the black sheep, the family members we don't talk about, the guy that everyone knows as a living example of how not to be. Then there are some of us who are generally on the straight and narrow, but they make a mistake, and it is not something you would expect. Those people react in different ways, usually based on how they view themselves.

They can either hide their mistakes or make them known. Hiding is a function of not acknowledging that one has made a mistake. It is the action of trying to erase the mistake by making it fade with time. But that mistake will always live with whoever committed it and it will shape their future actions. Owning up to one's mistakes allows them to be put to rest however, acknowledging that one has erred allows that person to call on help from others to help prevent that error in the future.

Since I don't profess to know a significant amount about Judaism or Islam, I can't say I know how they deal with the idea of sin. In Christianity(at least in Orthodoxy), sin is dealt with as a disease, something that infects a healthy organism and that organism tries to fight it off. One characteristic of Orthodoxy is that sin is not transmitted at birth, meaning that a baby is sinless and has the possibility of staying sinless. What is transmitted is the potential, even the propensity toward sin. Think of this as analogous to someone that is very fair being born in the desert. They have the possibility of avoiding sunburn and eventually sun cancer, but they are far more likely to get a sunburn and eventually a complication because of it. The tools of the church are supposed to be like sunscreen, in a way. You confess to prevent yourself from hiding and letting your mistakes and errors fester in secrecy, you pray for forgiveness to attempt to unburden yourself so that you can have the strength to avoid those mistakes in the future. This is a long, and arduous process of self-perfection that tries to account for the fact that humans aren't perfect.

I suppose in some ways I find that process beautiful and simple and incredibly hard to put into practice for myself. I come from a family and background, where emotions are bottled up and one tried to fix stuff on their own. My heart is full of misdirected pride and the tendency to hide my mistakes because I don't want others to know that I make mistakes. But, trust me, I do, in spades. Whenever I do something that is really out of character for me, I hide that more. I convince myself that it will be better off if I hide it and just focus on avoiding that behavior in the future. This routine never works and I end up disclosing my mistakes at a time when the consequences of those errors in action and judgement have been compounded by the secrecy and hiding. In general, I am not very good at being a Christian. Thankfully, I am not asked to be good at it, but rather to not give up and be honest with myself.

This last year has been hard, and I have to work on being better about acknowledging that I make mistakes. I have made more mistakes than there are stars in the sky. Perhaps my vision of myself has just been blurred the way the light of the city obscures the billions of little stars shining above me. Sometimes I just have to be in a dark place to see things more clearly.