The Season of Lent, far from being negative, gives us special tasks and brings with it great opportunities for personal growth. Its main requirement is that we sufficiently humble ourselves that we may “walk the narrow path”. This path does not depend on one’s spiritual tradition—its demands cross spiritual traditions. (For a similar view see the post The Gate, the Raft, the Bridge: On What Will Pass Through.) Sin must be faced and acknowledged. This is not a comfortable or an easy subject, necessary as it may be. It is safe to say that most of us are haunted by memories of our failures—our sins against God and others. We want to wipe the slate clean. If only sin could be forgotten. There are several “windows” through which this can be viewed, each with its different perspective.
It should come as good news that there is the forgetting which comes from God. There are two amazing affirmations from the writer of the Book of Hebrews. The first is from Hebrews 8:10 [Jerusalem Bible]: “No, this is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel when those days arrive—it is the Lord who speaks, I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour [British spelling] to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, ‘Learn to know the Lord’. No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest, since I will forgive their iniquities and never call their sins to mind…” Hebrews 10:16-18 follows closely: “I will put my laws into their hearts and write them on their minds. I will never call their sins to mind, or their offences [KJV “and their sins and iniquities I will remember no more”]”, concluding “When all sins have been forgiven, there can be no more sin offerings.” This is the “assurance of forgiveness” which concludes the Confession of Sin at the beginning of the traditional liturgy.
Next, this may be viewed is the product of the meditative experience. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has proposed the analogy of dying a piece of cloth analogy to meditative practice. As he describes it, in order to dye a white cloth to be yellow the cloth is dipped into a vat of yellow dye and then hung out in the sun which fades the cloth. Then the cloth is dipped into the dye again and put into the sun again but this time the cloth doesn’t fade quite as much. By repeating the process numerous times, the cloth finally becomes colorfast. He goes on to state that the Transcendental Meditation technique infuses Pure Consciousness into the mind, and that, through regular practice, the mind would eventually hold onto Pure Consciousness even while in activity. Might it also be true, then, that the “washing” of sins in confession, over time, has a related effect? We all have clothing which has faded through repeated washings. Could it be that, through the “washing” of confession with its calling of sins to mind lessens their effect, their power diminished? Those who believe in Christ, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:10), are given this assurance through his spiritual agency. It is by no coincidence that confession of sin is a necessary component the beginning of the traditional Christian liturgy.
Two teachers from the post-WWII era honed their messages to those who lived through that tumultuous time. In them are contained the wisdom they sought to transmit to those of their own time, and to us as well.
Written in 1946, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind served as a beacon of hope to many in dealing with the traumatic years of the war and the tumultuous postwar period. In the preface, he writes, “It may seem strange for a man to write a book about peace of mind in this age of fierce turmoil and harrowing doubts. I have written this book in the conviction that social peace can never be permanently achieved so long as individuals engage in civil war with themselves. In this book I try to present some answers that have proved helpful to me about the universal human dilemmas of conscience, love, fear, grief, and God– crucial problems that present themselves in every kind of society, and, I believe, will present themselves as long as man is man.” Liebman recounts how, as a young man, he compiled a list of all of the “goods” of life he could identify: health, love, power, riches, fame, etc. He then showed it to a wise elder who, with a look of amusement, said, “You have forgotten the one ingredient lacking which each possession becomes a hideous torment, and your whole list an intolerable burden.” Then, with a pencil stub he crossed out the list and wrote ‘peace of mind’.Furthermore, one’s religion must assist in dealing with his metaphysical fears, providing comfort and courage in the face of death. What stands out in my mind is a chapter titled “Grief’s Slow Wisdom”. There is no easy formula, no magic bullet. It is a process which must be wrestled with, worked through, difficult, but an effort worth making: Liebman writes, “We achieve inner health only through forgiveness, the forgiveness not only of others but also of ourselves.” And further, “Nature does not demand that we be perfect. It requires only that we grow.”
Coming a few years later, Rev. Harold Dittmanson’s Grace in Experience and Theology was a radical statement which re-set the entire subject of grace in a new and refreshing context. I was told by an acquaintance who knewhim that a special focus of his ministry was to returning World War II servicemen struggling with post-traumatic stress. His role in the ongoing theology of grace was to expand its entire realm to one which was all-inclusive, relevant, and free of those qualifications which many had previously placed on it. As opposed to an over-theologized, over-qualified view, Dittmanson quotes Martin Luther (who echoed St. Paul),: “These two words, grace and peace, do contain in them the whole sum of Christianity.” He goes on to state, “The attempt to say over and over again what is meant by grace is a difficult project. Grace is so central to our faith that any effort to explain its meaning makes it almost necessary to give an account, at least in outline, of the entire Christian religion. For the doctrines of Christianity do not, or should not, exist as a set of unrelated propositions. They are closely interrelated and give witness to a single reality, namely, the gracious activity of God.” In a subsequent passage he states, “…the idea of grace is not first of all a dogma of theology, but a datum of experience.” In other words it is a real-time experience confirmed by many who have experienced its washing, its cleansing, its renewal.
The Buddhist approach is as refreshing as it is radical, cutting across the prevailing philosophies of its time and continuing to our own. Nirvana is a time-honored approach transcending the limitations of conventional consciousness. In John Grimes’ Dictionary of Sanskrit Terms, it is “extinction, the Great Peace, ‘blowing out’, ‘cooling’ (from the verb root va,“to blow” + ir, “out”).” Others have described it as “liberation from every limit”, “the ultimate goal”, “the final state of being”, “beyond change and becoming”, “conscious rest in omniscience, returning to the Source from which we came”. Further descriptions include “cessation of passions”, “cessation of attachments”, “at-one-ment” (i.e, atonement). David Loy writes that The Buddha “compounded the mystery by emphasizing that nirvana is neither annihilation nor eternal life.” In one of his Sutras the Buddha says, “Do not think that this is an empty or void state. There is this consciousness, without distinguishing mark, infinite and shining everywhere; it is untouched by the material elements and not subject to any power. A Christian interpretation is that union by grace [my emphasis] with the person God is the highest state because then whatever work one does, or whatever devotion or knowledge one possesses, it is derived from this source.
Buddhism’s primary value, to me, lies in its objective stripping down of the process of dealing with pain. It instructs us, beyond the pain itself, to deal with “the pain of pain”. A similar empowering thought is the usefulness of the “garbage” of our lives and the positive results to be gained by wisely utilizing it. For those who are interested, I have dealt with it in the post Did You Take out the Garbage?
Bede Griffiths, the Western mystic who founded an ashram in India where he and his followers lived in this manner, concludes, “All the great religious traditions, it might be said, are trying to help one to reach this inner centre [British spelling} of one’s being and to discover this inner peace, this perfect joy.” This is not the same as the Christian vision of God.” He further clarifies, “There is a tendency to say that when one reaches the supreme state everything is the same and that there are no differences any more, but I do not think that that is true. In a sense the experience of the ultimate truth is different for each person, since each person is a unique image of God, a unique reflection of the one eternal light and love.”
Moving to contemporary philosophy, Louis Hyde’s 2019 A Primer for Forgetting occupies a unique niche in philosophical/psychological thought. In it is the concept that letting go of the past proves at least as useful as preserving it. Beginning with anthropology, he credits oral societies with keeping themselves in equilibrium by “sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance”. He credits both Buddhist teachings and St. Augustine with the elimination of the transitory world, which is tied to endings and death. He states paradoxically, “Every act of memory is an act of forgetting.” Other paradoxes include “we dream in order to forget”, “to study the self is to forget the self”, “you have to be somebody before you can be nobody”. He prizes Buddhist thought and the qualities of those who do not lament over the past, nor yearn for what is to come, but maintain themselves in the present. Forgetting, he writes, is the “erasing angel”, making it possible for time to flow again, for dwelling on past or future “makes self” of them. Historically, he credits amnesia with Europe’s postwar recovery, quoting Germany’s first postwar Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on the day that Adolf Hitler died, “Forget as soon as possible!” This could be applied to the antidote for refusal to abandon the past. The “double forgetting” of Buddhism is mentioned, epitomized by “Firewood becomes ash, and does not become firewood again”. It is the absence of the memory’s usual content, whose being is not being spread out in time. The revelation of the true self requires…forgetting—of habits of mind and of the time that would otherwise separate the present from the past.” Moving to the future, “No longer must the seeds of possible actions blossom into actual actions but are allowed to return to the breath, which is an elemental form of self-forgetting.”
Forgetting may be likened to modern data processing, where an unneeded file is not actually erased, but overwritten with new information. Computer memory is re-allocated, made accessible to what has replaced it, an analogy to the mental process itself. It is easy to see the relationship between the machine process and that of awareness of sin, confession, and repentance. Oh, that our sinful nature be overwritten by our love of God!
I will end with a final view of forgetting, that all things tend toward dissolution. This may be uncomfortable for some. I agree. In his later writings, Bede Griffiths says that this is not annihilation, just as salt water, having dissolved the salt, still contains the salt itself, though in a different state. Nothing has been lost. It only changes its form, its identity. There is resolution, peace, a state which transcends all that lies before it. Much remains to be said of this state in future post.
May forgiveness, led by God’s forgetting, lead us to peace in the days and years ahead. Amen.
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