Consequences

‘Be sure your sins will find you out’ reads the ‘sandwich placard’, possibly one of the first set of letters to form a coherent sentence in the mind of the novice reader. There are all sorts of psychological strands to be followed up from this early impression of sin, leading perhaps to a life time’s neuroses rooted in the fear of being ‘found out’.

Guilt, fear and sin are all of a piece. They set us on a trajectory which takes us further and further away from the source of light, the true light which ‘finds us out’, so making healing and forgiveness possible. This running away from the healing light is the basic gist of the Adam and Eve story. It is also what we call conscience, something which nags and needs to be numbed. Conscience sets us apart from animals, or so we tell ourselves, because animals are not endowed with conscience or with free will. They do not make moral choices.

This week Joshua Oppenheimer’s film ‘The Act of Killing’ has been nominated for an Oscar. It revisits the circumstances of the 1965 Indonesian massacre of thousands of ethnic Chinese people. Oppenheimer uses one of the most notorious death squad leaders, Anwar Congo, as one of the film’s main protagonists. In the film, Anwar boasts of his killing exploits. He recalls how the smell of so much blood nauseated the killers, obliging them to resort to a simpler and ‘cleaner’ method, strangulation with wire. In the film, he also finds himself playing the part of his victims, re-enacting scenes of their suffering and ultimately experiencing them for himself at that level of consciousness which we also call conscience. He finally comes to terms with his own choices and with the depravity and suffering which those choices brought about. His sins do indeed ultimately find him out. He experiences remorse.

The Indonesian massacre was not the last of its kind. There have been similar atrocities committed there and in other parts of the world since that time, atrocities which occupy our living room space for weeks on end. But we can distance ourselves from them because they are not happening to us here and now. Switching TV channels, or getting on with preparing the evening meal, if the news coincides with that time of day, gives permission to forget about consequences and the way in which, as human beings, we all share in the choices made by other human beings, both in the past and in more recent times. 

Here in the UK, the weather is a case in point. Who knows when the warming of the planet began to seriously damage the earth's natural infrastructure and affect our way of life today? Possibly back in the early part of the 19^th century, or with commercial air travel. Whenever it was, and whatever the cause, climate change signals that we are all connected with the choices made by others and with the consequences of those choices.  And to complicate matters further, we are not always free to make ‘right’ choices now. If you live in remote parts of the countryside where there are no bus or train services, you have to use your car, even for relatively short journeys.  If you live in a city, it is hard to grow your own food or to be self-sufficient in other ways. On the other hand, if you live in the country, you might be able to feed yourself independently, especially if you eat less meat. You might even be able to extract heat from the land you live on, or have a solar panel or two, thereby compensating for a tiny fraction of the environmental damage caused by others.

Good choices help to re-balance things across society and ultimately across the world. When it comes to the consequences of bad choices, good choices set us off on a new and re-creative trajectory towards the light. Persevering in bad choices has the opposite effect.  It turns us back on ourselves and ultimately shatters our humanity. The shattering of our humanity, whether it is the result of psychological stress which leads people to commit acts of genocide, or prioritising the short term political needs of those wishing to remain in power here at home, all amount to what we call sin. Sin is the disfiguring of creation and of the face of God in others by the suffering we inflict on them through our bad choices. Repentance is about remembering what that face looks like and striving to recover it through the choices we make now. Not such a difficult task if we put our hearts to it.