We had gotten to the “Confession” part in our program, and Catholics aren’t the only believers who are familiar with that word. As a recent convert to grace even after lifelong churchgoing (as if those two are undeniably linked!), I’ve focused on abandoning the guilt-mongering and self-deprecation and faux humility that goes along with confronting my shortcomings. But this week, the voice from the front clarified. The world at large tends to, when the bill for such shortcomings is due, glance around wildly and look for a target to which we can pin the blame. Make excuses. Look for an out. But this confession, in its upside-down kingdom, counter-cultural way that is so the mark of grace, was not about that. It was about fessin’ up so that the bill could be paid not by the one we blame in our abdication of responsibility, or by our own morality, but by the only one who never owed anything.

So in this vein, I admitted to God the ways I’d put my own mark upon being an ass that week. And the vaults of forgiveness were released, flowing in response.

Our cultural moment, this post-modern, post-patriotic, post-post-9/11 era, is marked by the most excoriating and simultaneously permissive bunch of confused, over-analytical navel-gazers (whose ranks I join every time I indulge the luxury of writing a blog). The Husband and I watched Lincoln the other night, and other than revealing how shrunken my attention span has become, it made me wonder what the president and his contemporaries would think if they could see us now: a generation of freedom-fighters and slavery-abolishers beholding hipsters in Starbucks typing on their Macs about how they shouldn’t be required to pay back their student loans. (“Hold my musket while I punch this whiner in the face,” is a response I imagine.) Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” updated for the new century would read something like: Two roads diverged in a wood and I/I rued the lack of options and wondered, “Why?”/And my lack of commitment has made all the difference. The bombings in Boston this week brought out the best of society (hospital caregivers, people offering homes) and the worst (Twitter feeds of the far-right and -left). We yearn for a name, a face to hold the blame, even as we try not to be too hard on the poor guy. We’re all over the place.

I feel the urge to blame take root in my own life, when the doctor says we can’t perform The Kid’s MRI today and it sounds like he’s equivocating but these are maternal ears now and therefore not so objective, until he tosses out a teething statistic that I know is wrong and I bite my tongue because nothing good will roll off it even as I silently push pins into a voodoo doll bearing his likeness in my head. Later I tell TH, in a moment of raw honesty, that I’m really mad at myself–for not going to bat more for TK–and he reminds me that if it happened this way, it was meant to–which is just a dialect of “God is sovereign and doesn’t need you to gather ammo and run his office from down here.” Then I go to work and pull the front teeth of two one-year-olds in a row and want to get someone to hold my musket/drill so I can punch their parents in the face, and when I go to the bathroom to cry and have a come-to-Jesus I’m reminded–and gently provided with foreshadowing–of all the mistakes I’ve made and will and it turns out that my floorboards may have their own secrets.

Which is not an argument against the dispensing of justice as much as it is an admission that none of us can deliver it perfectly–being a little less than free to cast the first stone and all. When it comes to evildoers who kill innocents (interesting that the Boston bombers and Gosnell populated the same news week…), there are laws broken and punishment to be meted. (Sidenote: METE IT, criminal justice system–mete it HARD.) But when it comes to the guy who just cut me off in traffic, or the mom who’s doing it differently than I would…I have some work to do and grip to loosen before the stones are freed from my hand.

Because these cultural wars between left and right and radical and fundamental are mirrored in my own heart, the back-and-forth of flesh and spirit, flawed and forgiven. I have been freed from duty, but that doesn’t always stop me from showing up to the battlefield, musket in hand, ready to assign blame. And the recipient is others (what a jerk!/how could she say that?/they’re just so wrong) only when it’s not me: how can I do better/try harder/make fewer mistakes? Then the light turns green in this moment at dawn, and I look up (it always happens then). And the response to all my blaming and misdirection is a rising sun, the same one that rose yesterday, now a golden ball of glory that I would miss were I not on my way to work–and the war within, the self-motivated guilt as I drive away from TK, is a tiny candle beside which I try to warm myself while the blaze of grace beckons to a story written just for me.