moral sentience

There are three ways to deal with the past: Repent your mistakes, embrace your mistakes, reinvent yourself.

I always try to the first. Admit what I've done wrong, owe up to my errors in judgement, build from there. It's a philosophy rooted in Christian tradition and theology, it's the right thing to do. It isn't always popular, and it makes things tough, because my mistakes were not always made in an empty room, with no one else involved.

Embrace my mistakes, not admitting they were mistakes? That's a road that quickly leads to pride in my flaws. That opens the door to real evil. Evil isn't strength, it's cowardice...it comes from taking pride in mistakes. Rationalization is another word for lie, in most cases.

Reinvention: No good. Unless I'm ready to bury every person, burn every book, deny every truth, it won't work. Besides, it is dishonest. Dishonesty is a cancer, it infects and infests, spreading until life becomes a walking, waking death. It also creates an atmosphere of distrust. People wonder who the real me is, I wonder who they really are.

For the record, I have been a liar, an adulterer and thrown more than a few punches in my day. I've cleaned up my act on all three counts, and I take no pride in my past failures (or my current credit score), and I recognize that there are those who will never trust me or care for me because of my past failings. But I sleep at night, not worrying if anyone will uncover "the truth". Not worrying if that video tape will surface or that incriminating recording will get played or someone will discover I denied something I'd done or taken credit for something I didn't.

I would have loved to have heard St. Paul preach. I bet he built his talks, at least in part, on his own past as a professional assassin, hunting down and killing Christians. He didn't stand up there and pretend to have been something he hadn't been.

Real growth is only possible when you shed your skin, and when you acknowledge that you had once been a smaller person than you are striving to become. Twelve step programs often use this, as part of the healing process is writing down everything you ever did wrong, confronting who you were and what you did. I'm not in a 12-step program, but I have many friends who have been, and I have attended meetings with them and read the literature.

It is tough. My life would be easier without that nagging spark of moral sentience I picked up somewhere along the way.

A clean conscience is an act of faith, and a work in progress. Like me.

I may be about to get crapped on, at any moment, by those who don't like me, my thoughts, my words or my history. But I am content that God knows where I have been, where I am at, and where I am going.