From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

430 Jesus means in Hebrew: “God saves.” At the annunciation, the angel Gabriel gave him the name Jesus as his proper name, which expresses both his identity and his mission. Since God alone can forgive sins, it is God who, in Jesus his eternal Son made man, “will save his people from their sins”. In Jesus, God recapitulates all of his history of salvation on behalf of men.

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It’s easy for us to believe in God. Most of humanity has accepted the existence of some kind of transcendent power, and in spite of the efforts of David Hume et al, there’s still a certain logical and aesthetic comfort in simply admitting that something bigger than us slapped this grand old world together. As Andro Hsu points out, it’s just plain healthy for an animal saddled with the burden of consciousness to believe in eternal values and life after death. With respect to the existence of God and our biology, we’re all Catholics.

Yet as Walt Whitman writes, “And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God”. Insofar as we think God infinitely great and wise, we should tremble to compare our own wisdom to that greatness by saying what God is like. An even greater form of hubris is to say, “God wants this, God expects this, God demands this,” for an infinite God cannot possibly lack anything.

It’s no surprise, then, that people start getting off the boat when the Church starts talking about forgiveness. Interestingly, the concept of sin may be easier to accept than that of forgiveness. Sin is in some sense arbitrary: we tend to believe that God makes all these rules to test our obedience, make life difficult for us, or give himself an excuse for our suffering. But to say that we need forgiveness implies, not that we’ve broken some arbitrary speed limit, but that we have actually hurt God.

Even in an age that denies the performative power of language, we have such incredible difficulty saying “forgive”. Now, of course it’s hard to say “please forgive me”, because it requires us to admit that we were in the wrong. But to say “I forgive you”, and really mean it, is to admit something far more frightening: that you were wounded in your inmost being, that your defenses were compromised, that you were weaker than the one who hurt you. What’s more, you have to cancel the account, release the debt, and refuse to hold the hurt against the other person, all in the knowledge that you’ll probably be hurt exactly the same way, seven times seventy times.

I know that I try to avoid this experience at almost any cost. I “forgive” too easily: I say “It’s all right”, or “no big deal”; in reality I’m refusing to admit that I was actually hurt. Or I confuse the hurt with the anger that results from it. At some point I master my anger and think I’ve forgiven the debt, when in truth there’s still some secret mark I keep against the person who wronged me.

The danger is that by failing to forgive properly we deny ourselves an understanding of God’s forgiveness. We think that God still bears a grudge against us, or that being forgiven is just some hoop we have to jump through to get to heaven. But can God really be hurt by some puny human? I don’t think it’s possible to understand Jesus or his mission without accepting that awful, frightening mystery. And the only answer may be that God allows himself to be hurt by us because he loves us, which in turn is an even more awful and frightening mystery.

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I continue to have difficulties with this process. I’m beginning, slightly, to regret taking this class at Newman Hall. I don’t know if it’s a failing particular to multi-culturalist Berkeley or to Catholicism in general, this emphasis on our own subjective efforts. Father Al led us in the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) as a meditative exercise, and said that we could use it, as an exercise, to “find Jesus inside ourselves”. I’m not denying the importance of subjectivity, of allowing the Word to speak to us where we are, but I just don’t see how there’s any hope in something that’s purely internal. If God is not objectively searching for us, if he does not communicate objective truth to us through Scripture, aren’t we just living at the mercy of our own experience?

I find myself in a particularly devious Catch-22. I have to take up with liberals to satisfy my concern for human things (and my politics), and I have to take up with conservatives to satisfy my concern for divine things (and my belief in objective truth). I continue to hope (I always hope beyond hope) that Catholicism offers a way out of this bind, because I just don’t see any unity between these things in Protestantism.