29 sept

I love relics, I love religion and I love sins. I also love the way we Catholics, as I am still proud to call myself, deal with these kind of distortions from the way we should all behave. I mean with confession. Never done it officially, but when the theory is right the practice doesn’t really matter, as we economists like to think.
I like thinking about sins, ask forgiveness for my daily shortcomings, and feel kind of robbed of the opportunity to confess. I mean, confession went out of fashion when I was young. Probably rightly so. It is kind of strange to go and ask somebody else, supposedly an in-between between you and God, for forgiveness of most ever blatantly forgetful so called sins.
What are real sins?
Most of the dutch experience of confessing, as far as I know, relates to sexual improprieties. They are the boring sins, as everybody really knows. Lust after another person than the one you are in a relationship with; even stronger, infidelity; oh my goodness, a divorce. It has become a quite limiting way of looking at improper behaviour.
To me the ultimate sin is to not live up to the reasonable expectations one could have of one’s own life. Of course I am struggling with this, being basically jobless, homeless, but luckily in a strengthening relationship. But then: I love sins.
And then, what is reasonable and what can be said about expectations? There is no ultimate answer as far as I know.
I was thinking about these questions, reading the lovely book ‘Clochemerle’ by Gabriel Chevallier, that my good friend Alan gave me before going on this adventure. It is written in the thirties of last century and writes so happily about a woman having an affair with the best buddy of her husband and a priest having sexual intercourse – it is a quite technical process – with his housemaid, that I came to realise that it is completely nonsense to focus sins on the quite unintelligible, but of course completely fascinating, tales of human’s sexual affairs.
One other thought, I remember my grandmother, my father’s mother, telling me about the pastor of her church, in Luyksgestel, visiting her neighbour and then the backdoor would be locked!
Me, quite naïve really, asking if she thought they were having an affair. ‘Oh, no, no that was out of the question’, contradicting evidence with logic in a few small words.
But then again, in what way did it harm the reasonable expectations he could have about his life? Probably not too much.
But still, thinking about sins is a helpful way, I do think, for people to deal with their own lives. Come to think of it, I will go and do a confession during this trip. I might need one, I am sure. I am not sure if the priest is going to be able to deal with my request for absolution of not being able to meet the reasonable expectations I did have about my life. But then he might be able to help me rephrase them. There are still miracles in this world.