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Contrition is difficult because it invites us to hold ourselves accountable to a particular set of standards. Here is where Sample is right; contrition invites us to be the sort of people that Jesus Christ would have us be. We are challenged to live a narrative rather than choose what accords with our own desires at the moment, or to attempt to calculate what is in our best interest. It is only when we stand before judgment that we experience grace and are free. We are only free when we live in such a way that our path can be called into question. Contrition, it turns out, requires a standard by which we can be judged and come to repentance. We need a rule of life that admits contrition, amends, and transformation.
According to Gregory Fruehwirth, superior of the Order of Julian of Norwich in Waukesha, WI, our contemporary situation urgently needs people who have been transformed. Those who seek to do God’s will and be transformed “can do nothing more helpful than committing [them]selves to a rule of life under spiritual direction, within the framework of a worshiping community. Until,” he writes, “we engage a regular rule of life, and until we are willing to see ordinary life as the place of our encounter with God, exactly as it is, we will be unable to grow spiritually.”[15] Turning from lives centered on our fears, desires, and anxieties, we commit ourselves to a spiritual rule and begin to walk in the way that leads toward intimacy and presence and action. Doing so, “we become presence workers in the world, an epiphany of God’s presence and Jesus’ life and energy here and now.”[16]
The entire ninth chapter of the Gospel of John is devoted to the story of the blind man whom Jesus healed and who was subsequently subjected to the questioning of his neighbors and the Pharisees. Eventually Jesus finds the man again and, after the man’s confession of Jesus’ Lordship, Jesus says: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” The Pharisees, overhearing this, said to him, “Are you talking about us? Surely not.” Jesus replies, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains” (John 9:39-41).
As I read this, the act of contrition and the recognition of one’s turpitude is the key to vision/sight, but failure to see one’s own shortcomings and one’s neglect of others—nay, even complicity—is to fall into blindness. The references to incarnational sight and lack of it are instructional. The failure to be sensitive to others and to recognize the truth bodily is a curse. To remain complicit in one’s sin and to attempt to evade it is one way of choosing to follow one’s own desires and anxieties rather than to follow a rule of life that transcends our whims and complacency.
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Turning to another, secular, way of saying this is discovered when we turn to cultural and political theory. An important volume, Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice “contends that when complicity is silenced, especially when preparing for an act of commitment, injustice remains facilitated and perpetuated.”[17] Rather than being understood as an immobilizing or aversive condition, complicity is seen as an enabling force of commitment. That commitment, in the terms of this essay, is liberating when it travels through contrition to responsibility.
Contrition Reconsidered
These elements, when taken together, form a sort of etymology of contrition. Roberts calls emotions “concern-based construals” and indeed we perceive in the above elements a mix of feeling and thought. As we moved through those elements, they increasingly concerned our flourishing.
At some point in this excavation of contrition, I began to realize that what I was drawing out of the experience of contrition was that contrition itself is a means of grace. It began to look more and more like flourishing itself. The notion (and it was barely more than an intuition at that point) that steps six and seven depended on the shape of contrition was spot on. Perhaps by the time we are blessed with contrition, we begin to see the way forward into transformation. Some of the steps—connectivity, community, and a rule of life—begin to suggest what transformation might look like. Were there space, I would try to describe in what sort of ways the grace of contrition could re-educate our desires and calm our anxieties.
Let it suffice to say, the great strength of contrition is this: that it slingshots us into actions that are intended to ameliorate the condition that gave rise to our complicity and contrition in the first place. Contrition alone is not sufficient to effect full change, but it does further our willingness to attack such issues as hunger and homelessness. The area of the global food supply system and our own personal eating and drinking are areas which feed into how we flourish; it is difficult to flourish when we recognize that the food we eat comes to us through others’ misery. But recognizing that, we can be freed to flourish by the act of contrition.
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Shannon Jung is Franklin and Louise Cole Professor of Town and Country Ministry at Saint Paul School of Theology, Kansas City 64127-2440. An ethicist and Presbyterian minister, with a PhD from Vanderbilt, he has worked on small church revitalization as well as the theology and ethics of eating. His latest book is Hunger & Happiness: Feeding the Hungry, Nourishing Our Souls (Augsburg, 2009). If you have feedback, he can be reached at the following email: [email protected].
Notes
[1] Jung, Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
[2] Jung, Hunger & Happiness: Feeding the Poor, Nourishing Our Souls (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2009); see also Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickled and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2001, new afterword, 2008).
[3] For an extended compilation of statistics and arguments to substantiate these claims, see Hunger & Happiness.
[4] See Julian Cribb, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2010), and also Ellen LaConte, “Garden As If Your Life Depended On It, Because It Does,” AlterNet, posted on March 29, 2011. Accessed at http://www.alternet.org/story/150428.
[5] See my essay, “The Re-education of Desire in a Consumer Culture,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 32 (forthcoming).
[6] Jesse James DeComo, “The People’s Interest: A New Battle Against Usury,” The Christian Century (January 12, 2010), 25.
[7] See Jung, “The Re-education of Desire in a Consumer Culture,” for some specification of what I presently believe such transformation will involve.
[8] Mark Bittman, “Stating the Obvious: Hunger Is a Disease,” New York Times (March 31, 2011), accessed at http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31.
[9] In what follows, much is owed to the students in my Theology of Growing and Eating class as well as to Marilyn Rochon, Rebecca Todd Peters, Patti Jung, Jerry Hiller, Craig Nessan, and a host of theologians and ethicists via their writings. See also my “Consumption, Complicity, Community,” in Dialog: A Journal of Theology 49:4, Winter 2010 (December issue), 284-290.
[10] Vitor Westhelle, “Exposing Zaccheus,” Christian Century (October 31, 2006), 27. I would claim that it is grace that allows us to be alert to our sins and the evil in which we cooperate and that, without such grace, awareness is impossible.
[11] Tex Sample, “An Address at the Rural Ministry Conference of the Center for Theology and Land,” Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa (March 7, 2011). As a Calvinist, I hold that it is important to attend to both who we are and how we learn to live a moral life.
[12] Eerdmans, 2007.
[13] The question of whether this sense of turpitude and new possibility necessarily involves forgiveness by God is an important one. We Christians would say yes, but allow the possibility—I think—that God’s forgiveness can be mediated and our lives redeemed without our own conscious decisions through God’s action on our behalf. This implies a strong theology of creation/creativity as well.
[14] Related to regret may be a sense of emptiness, of having to block out certain negative emotions. This may entail a sense of the question, “Is that all there is to life?”
[15] Gregory Fruehwirth, “Letting Go: Stages of the Contemplative Journey,” The Christian Century (November 4, 2008), 10-11. It strikes me that the twelve step process that I identify with Alcoholics Anonymous is such a rule of life.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Begum Ozden Firat, Sarah De Mul, and Sonja van Wichelen, eds., “Introduction,” Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Co., 2009), 10.
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