Dear friends,
To Err is … Annoying
The latest mistake: not to check whether a gift purchased online incurred import duties. £70 down the drain – how annoying is that!
But however annoying our own mistakes might be, they pale into insignificance when compared to the mistakes of others. Our mistakes are, really, stupidities, avoidable next time by being a bit more careful or thoughtful. We know that we didn’t deliberately attempt to screw up, or set out to harm others.
We may not be so sure of others’ intentions and may even be quick to judge them with a measure we would never use for ourselves. Jesus nailed this first-person bias in his Sermon on the Mount: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
We all make mistakes, and mistakes can have terrible consequences, however accidental or unavoidable they may be. The firearms officer who killed Adrian Daulby, as he tried to defend his synagogue from an attacker, made a mistake he would never have wanted to make, which he would have been trained to avoid if humanly possible. Yet the shot was fired and a life lost.
Though the officer’s mistake was made in the line of duty, many of our own could be avoided to spare others their dreadful consequences, for example, by not driving our own lethal weapons while tired or distracted.
There comes a point where the word ‘mistake’ starts to creak and we need a richer language to capture the moral and relational elements of ‘error’ and ‘erring’, words which by a common derivation carry the idea of wandering and straying from a right path.
Mistakes are a symptom of a deeper malaise. They display the prejudice and violent intent of minds and hearts when nurtured in hate, bitterness and resentment, as we lose our way from loving our neighbours as ourselves and from loving the Creator above all.
These difficult, deep dynamics within us trip us up more frequently than we would like to admit. We would much rather admit to behavioural glitches than to soul sickness. However, the remedy to this inner darkness is to confess it honestly.
The synagogue attack was, ironically, taking place on the holy day of Yom Kippur. After a ten-day period of penitence, and finally after 25 hours of fasting, the Jewish community seeks mercy and forgiveness so that at the start of the New Year each member can be returned to right relationship with their neighbour and with God.
To confound a gathering of faithful Jews in Manchester with the undoubted atrocities of Gaza is more than a mistake; it is to take hateful thought and feeling to its limit. And sadly we are all capable of taking steps down that stony and desolate path.
To err is human, but when we go astray, we have penitence and faith by which to return to the path of love, and the mercy of God to uphold us.
While the Book of Common Prayer is perhaps unsurpassed in confronting worshippers with the ways in which ‘we have erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep’, most of our liturgies begin with an act of recollection and penitence. Confession quickly leads to absolution and then to praise and thanksgiving for the gift of forgiveness.
Here is a story that may help on that journey: imagine that a rope attaches each person to God in heaven. Everyone’s rope is the same length at birth but each is fragile. Whenever we go astray, it snaps, and the bond between us and heaven is broken.
We ourselves cannot repair the rope but we can hold it up to God in penitence and faith, who will take both our end and his and tie them together in a sturdy knot. Every time God does this, the rope is strengthened and the distance between us and our Maker shortened.
May God bless you on this path to love and peace that the righteous of Judaism, Islam and Christianity all share.
As the Bible says, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’. (1 John 1.8f)
With blessings and best wishes,
The Revd Canon Dr Roland Riem
Interim Dean of Winchester