Redefining sin and repentance

[staranise]

I'm a Catholic who's been distanced from the Church for a few years. I didn't grow up Christian; I converted of my own accord in my late teens. I sometimes feel like, since I didn't grow up as very religious or around people who are very religious, I have the faith but I don't actually know how to live it. I had to step away from the Church because it was pulling me places emotionally that rammed straight into the depression and anxiety that I've lived with for most of my life, and I didn't know how to fix things.

Part of the problem, I think, is because I haven't met many people who understand theology and mental illness at levels that were useful to me. I'm used to being like Allie Brosh and her goldfish (the bit that begins "And that's the most frustrating thing about depression"). No, see, that is a solution for a different problem than the one I have.

I went into Reconcoliation once and confessed, "I hate myself." "But why?" asked the priest, startled. "I don't know," I said, "I just do. I have depression." He kept pressing: "But what are you depressed about?" "I don't know, everything. I hate myself and I think I'm worthless and unlovable."

He ended up advising me to go "find a nice gentle Catholic boyfriend." I guess it seemed like a fix to him, and I count it among the most useless advice I've ever received. I remember thinking, I'd love to, but seeing as how I'm worthless and unlovable, it is probably not going to happen. (For a brief moment I was worried that this was my penance, so I'd have to; but no, instead I just had to go back out and pray the rosary.)

So more recently, I've taken to having lunch with commodorified when she has a layover in Vancouver while travelling back and forth from Ottawa and Castlegar. She's the first person in a while I've been really able to talk religion with. Marna is an "Anglican Socialist weirdo", who knows what it's like to pit your faith against experiences that want to tear you down inside, and she commended the guest houses of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, and the work of theologian and poet Kathleen Norris. I'm keeping the idea of spiritual retreat in my back pocket when I have work and school a little more sorted out, but I have gone so far as to get a copy of Norris's Acedia and Me and read some interviews with the author about it.

As Norris puts it, "I think of acedia as the spiritual aspect of sloth. The word literally means not-caring, or being unable to care, and ultimately, being unable to care that you can't care. Acedia is spiritual morphine, but it does more than mask pain. It causes us to lose faith in ourselves and in our relationships with others."

Which, oh boy, really resonated with me. I know that demon: it's the embodiment of isolation, immobility, and disconnection. I've been fighting it a long while. I think very somatically, and I'm in therapy that focuses on bodily experience; I feel depression and anxiety physically as rigidity, like the physical sensation of holding my leg unnaturally straight to avoid putting stress on a bad knee. What therapy (and my body) keep telling me is that moving towards health means moving toward movement, responsiveness, and communication. This feels like the opposite of how I thought that worked: I always associated anxiety and unhappiness with frenetic, mindless movement, and health and wellbeing with peace and stillness. Which isn't untrue, it's just complicated.

So what I've been turning over in my head is just what kind of thing acedia is. Some describe it as a demon; others an affliction; it was eighth on the list of "bad thoughts" that folded acedia into sloth and became the Seven Deadly Sins. And affliction, I understand; but sin felt like something different to me, so that to call acedia a sin was to redefine how I thought about sin.

I think I got the impression along the way that sin was a bad thing to do, so when you realize you're doing it, you should stop right away. That's what I thought repentance was: not doing it anymore. But depression and acedia aren't things you can "just stop". They're states of being; to combat them means to slowly and patiently chip away at them and hope things get better. They don't just go away.

So I literally went back to the basic definitions of these things. Sin on a theological level signifies disonnection from God, loss of charity for others, or transgression against God's law. Okay, that makes sense: apathy and inability to care can lead to all three. It's definitely not a thing you want to feel if you want to be spiritually alive.

Repentance, Google tells me, is to "feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one's wrongdoing or sin." The simplicity of it--just feeling bad--kind of pulled me up short; I'm used to repentance being synonymous with conviction to change. I was expecting an "and" in there. Feeling bad and fixing it.

This is part of why I've been away from the Church for so long. I have sins I don't know how to stop doing, that I know I'll confess and turn around and do again as soon as I'm out of the building. I've felt like sin is this constant, low-grade fever, and until I got rid of it I wasn't able to re-enter the communion. Until I had tried harder and succeeded, I wasn't good enough. But if I could acedia is a sin, how could that work? That might well keep me out of church my entire life. And Norris was here reminding me that the way to deal with it is to keep trying, even if the spirit isn't there. It isn't something that can be flensed and stripped away; instead it's barren soil that you have to try to grow something on.

I'd confused repentance with self-blame. I thought that repenting my sins meant being cruel to myself. I didn't think that it meant to grieve, to acknowledge how badly being in a state of sin had hurt me, how much I disliked it. I was allowed to say, "I don't know how to stop and I don't think I can and I'm really afraid of what will happen if I do, and I wish it seemed less impossible."

So I texted this little brainstorm to Marna, who replied: I think being willing to ask for help with a sin also = repentance. And confession is a way of asking God for help. I think the question wrt repentance is: are you willing, even if not necessarily able, to have that sin removed, to stop doing it, but afraid you can't, or do you just want to wash your hands so you can get them dirty again? Because the first is true repentance, maybe moreso than when you can say "I'll never do THAT again."

Which is a good distinction. And a good question. I know I'd honestly love if God took my depression away--but my bisexuality? I'm not so sure.

But it felt like this was easing a few things that had been knotted up and holding me rigid. This is a repentance that's more like the other agents of change that I know. I know from my job that blame and shame and punishment don't inspire people to genuinely change; love and acceptance and encouragement do. This repentance feels more like I'm a psychotherapist forming a treatment plan for an affliction than a lawyer leading a self-prosecution. And that matches up with something I found as my depression and anxiety improved: the gentler I am with myself, the better able I am to self-examine and find places where I've genuinely done wrong and need to make amends.

From the space of a few days I can also see where in my religious education I got things confused. I was thinking of all sin as though it were mortal sin; but mortal sin is deeply grave, fully knowing, and fully consenting. If something is totally voluntary, then it can be voluntarily stopped. But if there's a word for my depression, voluntary sure isn't it. This is not to say that traditional repent-and-do-penance models aren't valid, but they're not the only ones. Once again: that is a solution for a different problem than the one I have. What I need are solutions that actually work for what I'm dealing with.