Capon on Forgiveness & Repentance…

I’m going to quote a paragraph from Capon’s Exit 36; as his theology is generally served to the reader on a ‘bed of story’ as it were, I’ll have to set things a very little bit for the passage to make sense.

Anne is the wife of a man who killed himself, a priest who was having an affair with Pat.

And how about forgiveness as metaphysically identical with forgetting? Anne, presumably, doesn’t know about Pat yet. In a way, she is reconciled to her right now, both in time and in eternity. When she finds out, however, she’ll be unreconciled in time, and will have to work her way back to her present state. But then it will be a matter, not of involuntary ignorance, but of voluntary forgetting. Repentance, therefore, is a willingness to forget what Christ forgets when he sequesters evil in the eternal death of his human mind; an acceptance, as out of circulation, of what he has taken out of circulation; an agreement to stop insisting on what the word doesn’t want to talk about. Repentance as shutting up and putting on the wedding garment.

My Apologies for Your Age…

Last evening a seventeen-year-old fellow cast member of Oklahoma!, an awesome young actor made a statement of some sort that underlined the differences between our ages.  A sum of twenty-nine years.  He then politely apologized for pointing out that I was (much) older than he.

I asked him the question:  Do you actually believe that it’s better to be seventeen than forty-six?

His answer was a reversion to our youth-worshipping culture’s axiomatic: “Of course…”

I countered by stating that I was fairly proud of what I’d accomplshed and learned, both materiallly and spiritually in the past thirty years – ending with the fact that I’ve no interest in ever being seventeen again; or even twenty-five…

I don’t think he ‘got’ it.