When Baxter makes a mess he works at covering it up. I guess it is an instinct in cats to do this. If he loses his lunch on the floor, he paws the spot ahead of the mess to create an imaginary pile on top of it. Even after I have discarded the distasteful residue, he may still come by and paw the floor around where it was, still thinking he is covering up the evidence. I expect cats’ need to cover up any mess they make evolved as a safety measure. You don’t want your enemy knowing where you are, especially if you are sick, so you cover your tracks, hide any evidence that you might be nearby and not at your best. Baxter looks a little strange when he paws the bare floor, but old habits or instincts are hard to change, even when they don’t serve a useful purpose any longer.
We can fall into the same trap. We think we can cover up the effects of our wrong doing and no one will know it happened and who did it. Some in the church tried this with the child sexual abuse crisis and the financial scandals. Criminals attempt to cover their tracks, removing all evidence that they were involved finger prints, electronic communications, paper trails, etc. When caught, we seem to have a first instinct to say, “It wasn’t I.” We do what we can to disassociate ourselves from the wrong, even to the point of convincing ourselves that I wouldn’t do anything like that--when we did! Seeing the results of our wrong doing is hard to stomach, so we either push them off by blaming someone else or cover them over with pleas of ignorance. It is very hard to look at a mess we created and say “I did that.”
Trusting in the Lord’s forgiveness is the first step. God’s forgiveness doesn’t clean things up for us immediately. It allows us to take ownership for what we have done, so that we can begin to remedy the situation step by step. At first, we have to accept the consequences of our actions, and do what we can to reverse their negative effects. Next, we have to analyze what led us to do what we did, so that we can avoid repeating it in the future. Then, we need to face those who stepped into our mess and in a heart-felt way ask for their forgiveness. We have to try to empathize with what our wrong-doing did to the lives of others, whether its effects were physical, emotional, spiritual or all of these. Sometimes the worst consequences of our sin are not seen at first in others--mistrust of ourselves and others and apathy towards living. Finally, we have to create not just different procedures to deal with each other, but a different way of being with each other. We have to imitate God’s way of being with us.
God is true. There is no duplicity in Him. What you see is what you get. God is good. There is no malice in God, wishing to get ahead of others for His own advantage. God places others ahead of Him, conforming to their condition in life to save them. God is love. He wishes only the well-being of others, their enhancement and peace. He is not out to eliminate His enemies, but to win them over to see their own truth and goodness through which they too can love others. Imitating God’s way in our relationships with each other is a tall order. It can’t be self-taught or learned quickly. Accepting God’s forgiveness because we acknowledge the mess we created is the start of a process that will take years, and ultimately, a lifetime to finish.
There is much talk these days about transparency and accountability in all our institutions government, religion, education, law enforcement, medicine, law, just to name a few key ones. As Christian believers, we need more than policies and procedures to make this happen. We need to change the culture around our institutions, so that the humility to ask for forgiveness is a valued virtue, so that we are not afraid to face our messes in faith and start the process wherein we learn from each other how to rebuild trust and confidence in life’s goodness.
Baxter’s pawing the floor is a futile attempt to cover his tracks, born out of instinct. Our kneeling before our loving God and asking for forgiveness is an act of faith that is our only hope for a better church and world.
