Yom Kippur began at sundown last night and
continues until dusk tonight. It’s the culmination of the Days of Awe in the
Jewish calendar, and the time for a sort of moral Spring cleaning—the Day of
Atonement, when you’re meant to rummage through your behavior over the previous
year, acknowledge your shortcomings with respect to your fellow humans,
apologize (to those they’ve trespassed against and to God) and resolve to do
better.
Then—having cleared the slate, so to speak—you’re
good to go for another year.
Well, the deal is that God opens the Book of
Life on Rosh Hashanah and inscribes your name in it, but doesn’t close-and-seal
it until the end of Yom Kippur. You have those ten Days of Awe to get your
ducks in a row.
In recent times, people have taken to issuing
blanket apologies for transgressions, presumably in the hope that anyone
who’s actually suffered at their hands will happen by at the time the apology
emerged, and will catch it in passing. And, of course, SoMe
has amplified this impersonalization of what should be a very personal act
of contrition.
I have never subscribed to the
one-size-fits-all approach to giving or receiving apologies, but that’s just
me. I mean—in the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation, we’re meant to
hawk up actual things we’ve done, say
them out loud to the confessor and accept the penance we’re given. (Toughest
priest I ever knew wouldn’t give you any generic Hail Marys or Our Fathers; no,
no. If I’d been pissed off at my family, he’d tell me to go back and be
specially nice to them. Killed me, he did.)
Anyhow, last week, my ex-manager emailed me to ask
if we could reschedule a regular Wednesday morning meeting this week, on
account of it being Yom Kippur. I said sure, adding, “May you be inscribed in
the Book of Life. And your family.”
He replied, “Thank you. Please forgive me for
any sins of omission or commission that I have committed, whether known to me
or unknown.”
I suspect he’s being smart-assed. Pretty sure
he doesn’t remember
this, ah, incident, although it immediately sprang to my mind.
Jury’s still out on whether I forgive him.
2 comments:
Once, in Oxford, at the crack of dawn, I arrived at the gates of Blackfriars College just as a friar was unlocking them. I asked him to hear my confession (as I intended to hear Mass in a few minutes and wanted to communicate), but he told me, in a marvelous R.P. voice (as though he were Jeremy Irons) that he'd just moved there and hadn't yet been granted faculties, but he'd call another friar. That friar heard my confession, and assigned me five decades of the rosary as a penance. Well, if you added up all the penance I'd ever had, it wouldn't equal five decades of the rosary. He added, "You do know how to pray the rosary?" "Yes, Father," I replied, it's just that I wanted to receive Holy Communion--" "Oh, you can do it later," he said.
Contrast this with what a priest told me after he'd given be three Hail Marys after I'd confessed what seemed to me a very serious sin. (Oddly, or maybe not oddly, I don't remember what it was.) I hesitated, and asked if that were really enough. You could almost hear his eye roll. "Look," he said, "how much is enough? You've offended the infinite God. You can never do 'enough.' Just take this penance and be grateful for mercy."
I've never forgotten that.
Ah, well--you've put it all in context. And given me much to consider.
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