Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned

So, a struggling young actor and a middle-aged pastor walk into a bar… What sounds like a setup for a lame joke was in fact how I spent part of an afternoon a few weekends ago in the Rocky Mountains. My wife was attending some meetings for a board she sits on, and I was tagging along for a few days before we continued further west for a holiday on the BC coast. The actor was there with his fiancé who was also attending the meetings. As we both had nothing to do one afternoon, we found ourselves meandering around town before parking ourselves in the glorious autumn sunshine on a patio pub.

The conversation had been proceeding along pretty safe terrain thus far. Where are you from, isn’t this some weather, etc. I asked him what he did for a living and for the next twenty minutes or so, we did a deep dive into the world of film, of sets and screenwriters, of Hollywood strikes, of the difficulties of breaking into what can be a cut-throat industry, of how the pandemic wiped out two years of prospects, etc. It was interesting. I don’t come across a lot of actors in my day-to-day life, and my new friend was an enthusiastic and colourful conversation partner.

And then came the moment. The moment I always dread. The moment where I know that things can either get really interesting or go seriously and awkwardly off the rails. The moment where the question comes: “So, what do you do?”

I took a deep breath and said, “Well, I’m a pastor.” I doubt he would have looked more stunned if I had told him that I was a ballet dancer or a dog food taster. He stared at me for a second, grinned uncomfortably, before blurting out, “Oh wow, well, forgive me, for I have sinned… like a lot.” I laughed (I’ve perfected the art of deflective laughing in these contexts). “Yeah, well, don’t worry,” I said. “So have I.” There was a bit of an awkward silence where he looked nervously at the beer sitting in front of him. “So, like is this ok…?” he began, before noticing the obvious (that there was a beer in front of me, too). I don’t think he had ever met a pastor out in the wild before and he was clearly struggling to fit this strange experience into his existing categories.

He warmed up, though. “You know, I’ve been thinking that I need to pick a faith or something,” he said. I smiled. “A faith or something?” “Yeah, you know, I think I’m missing something spiritual in my life and, you know, I’ve been thinking that I need to get into God.” I asked him if he had been raised in any kind of a religious or spiritual tradition. He looked at me blankly. “No.” I inquired as to the extent of his knowledge of the various expressions of Christianity. “Nothing. Um, well, I think a Seventh Day something or other came to my door once. Hey, aren’t you supposed to be wearing a collar or something?”

I tried to explain the difference between a pastor and a priest. But I couldn’t do that without talking about the difference between Protestants and Catholics (which he had, incredibly, heard almost nothing about). And I couldn’t do that without talking about vast swaths of earlier Christian history. He followed attentively throughout, but it was clear that we were almost literally starting from zero here. Most of the guys I talk to in the jail have more by way of knowledge of basic Christian categories than this guy did. This was well and truly a product of the secular age.

We moved on from Christian history to his own story. He told me of occasional struggles with substance abuse, of addiction in his family, of a temper that could get the better of him. It wasn’t hard to detect a bit of a crisis of meaning and identity in some of his vocational challenges. I mostly listened, tried to interject something hopeful where possible. It was very clear that he did not have many opportunities to explore stuff like this. I tried to encourage him to plug into a Christian community in his home city, somewhere he could connect with others on the journey of seeking God, meaning, etc. I tried to gently dissuade him from the notion that “picking a faith or something” was a solitary, individual task, not appreciably different than picking something to watch on Netflix. He nodded at all the right times. I don’t know how much of it landed.

I thought about my young friend throughout the rest of that day. I couldn’t help but reflect on two things. First, this idea that “I’ve been thinking I need to pick a faith, get into God, etc.” Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. So goes the oft-quoted passage from Augustine. I really do believe that no matter how irreligiously someone is raised, there is something within each human being that somehow knows or senses that there is more to this life, how inchoate and unformed this sense of “more” might be.

Second, his “forgive me for I have sinned” comment, while humorous and predictable on one level, also points to something real. Again, I think to be human is to know that we very often miss the mark. That there is some standard that we fail to meet, some flourishing (for ourselves and for others) that eludes us. And that we are at least partly to blame.

Now, both things could be nothing more than reactive, reflexive responses to the odd phenomenon of meeting this weird creature called a pastor. It could be the case that my young friend was just saying things that he thought I might want or need to hear. He could have just been trying to kill some time before scurrying back to secular safety (and telling his fiancé what a weird experience he just had!). All of this could be the case.

But I don’t think so. I really do believe that the God-shaped hole is a thing. I really do believe that to long for forgiveness is a human thing, not some kind of weirdly “religious” thing. I really do believe that however confusedly it comes out, however scrambled and incoherent our categories are in a secular age, we do long for a transcendent meaning that we do not have to invent for ourselves. Hearts get restless, after all. It’s how they’re made.

Image source.