Repentance is awesome

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This guy has a lot to repent. Then again, so had I.

Rabbi Steinsaltz writes in his book The Thirteen-petalled Rose that God created repentance before He created the world. That may sound absurd, but in the view of the Rabbis, repentance does not just bring us back to the same state as if we had not transgressed, but to a higher state.

Obviously you cannot take this to mean that we should look for opportunities to sin so we can repent. Nothing good can come from that. We are already human, after all, so there is absolutely no need to go out of our way to make mistakes. To err is human, so any one of us will find something already in our life if we reflect on ourselves. This is certain to be true.

The purpose of self-reflection and repentance is not to depress ourselves. Repentance brings joy and gratitude. Of course it does not feel good right away when we look at ourselves and think “What the hell have I been doing?”.  If we can feel sadness at such a time, it is a grace, a gift from Heaven. But if we can repent even if we feel nothing, that is also a grace. In any case, no matter what we feel, when we realize the error of our ways, the Truth will set us free. Though sometimes we have to pent and repent until it sticks.

So yeah, I’ve been repenting. It is awesome. I am very grateful that the escalator of repentance was created, whether it was before or after the world.

***

If we go to bed and mysteriously cannot sleep, it may be a message from our subconscious that we need a timeout, to “commune with my heart on my bed” as the King James Bible says.  In the past, when there was no electric light and the night was long, it was common to wake up in the middle of the night and lie in silence for a while. This is a good time to look back on the day if we have not already, and ask ourselves :

Was my day worthy of my aspiration for life and eternity? Did my mind point steadily toward my goal like a compass needle?

Humans are beings who make mistakes, so there is a good chance we made some.  Some are small, some seem small until we get a good look at them and go OMG what the Hell was I thinking?? And if we realize that and don’t defend ourselves, then we will definitely be closer to the Light than when we started, even if we experience some sadness along the way.

13 thoughts on “Repentance is awesome”

  3. There are those who have the capacity for relating to the unseen, but there are usually only a few crossroads in life where you can change your perspective. These are the times when life is pulled out from under you: As a teenager, when you are losing your childhood. Midlife “crisis”, when you are losing your youth (and frequently your parents, and in some sense your children as they grow up). Life-threatening illnesses and accidents. Home fires, natural disasters etc. These are the times when the routine world becomes fragile and transparent, and through the cracks those who have eyes can see a different world, terrifying and amazing.

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  4. Have you ever seen through “the cracks”?

    How do you tell the difference between a religious/spiritual experience and insanity or a hallucination?

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    • Short of waiting for some disaster to crush your existing worldview, a more humane approach is to laugh a lot. Humor, except perhaps in its crudest forms, is all about the unexpected, the sudden change in perspective. A diet of high-brow humor is a good way to keep yourself open to the unexpected, not seeing what we expect regardless of what actually is there.

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    • Yes. The classical philosophers, when they talked about the higher things, would talk about a kind of trinity of “the good, the beautiful and the true”. These are still things that are obviously “higher” in the sense that they are not in the service of mere survival. As I sometimes say, we can understand that bees like flowers and boys like girls, but why do girls like flowers? Scientists say that the parts of our brain that experience beauty must have evolved for some other purpose and accidentally became attuned to what we now call beauty. That may well be true, in the same way as the lungs and legs of proto-amphibians presumably had some other purpose, and then “accidentally” let them colonize the land world that already existed. We too are in such a phase, colonizing a world that our furry friends cannot see, and some of their hairless colleagues among us neither.

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  7. Heh… So Yngwie Malmsteen, Iron Maiden and Metallica can bring me closer to God?

    What music gives you “chills”?

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    • I suppose Metallica can bring you closer to God if you are far enough away… In any case, music can crack the shell of the mundane so you can glimpse the invisible. There are other things than the divine there, of course, so we need to keep an eye on how things influence us, what effects they leave – the aftertaste, if you will. But if this music increases the beauty in your life, I won’t tell you to avoid it. In Judaism there is a common saying that God will hold us accountable for every pleasure that was allowed but which we refused to enjoy. That one never made it into the Bible, but there are several passages that recommend people to enjoy their work, their wine and their wife. Who am I to disagree…

      Music that gives me the chills? It varies, actually. Live performances of band marches is a pretty sure one. And for some reason dirges like these from the Age of Conan music album: Ere The World Crumbles and Memories of Cimmeria (both YouTube), especially the last half.

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