Explainer

Confession

Creed

14 June 2023

6 min read

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

We all find ways of not simply saying sorry. Not just former prime ministers. Graham Tomlin unpacks why it’s getting harder to say sorry in our culture.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A politican stands holding a bible, in front of a committee room table. Behind him an audience waits expectantly

Boris Johnson prepares to give evidence to the House of Commons Privileges Committee.

Why is it so hard to say you’re sorry? Over recent weeks we have watched the story unfold of Boris Johnson and the Downing Street parties, his disdain towards the Privileges Committee report suggesting he misled parliament, and his resignation as an MP, insisting he was the victim of a witch-hunt rather than saying he had made a mistake and owning up.

And it’s not just Conservative Prime Ministers. Tony Blair has never quite come clean to say it was a mistake to lead the UK into war against Saddam Hussain on the basis of faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

Church leaders don’t escape either. Too often in the past, abusers have been shielded and moved on, and when the avoidance is revealed, ways have been found to avoid simply saying sorry. And then we all know the kind of apology that goes “I’m sorry you feel that way” which of course is not an apology at all.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones.

Confession is difficult. Try it sometime. Next time you make a mistake, resolve to come clean before your friends, your spouse, your partner, your team at work. Confess your sins. Not straightforward, is it? If you find it as hard as I do, then join the club.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones. If you are found out to have said the wrong thing, admit you have changed your mind, or that you made a horrible mistake, you are likely to get accused of inconsistency, cancelled on social media, sacked from your job, vilified at the court of Twitter. It could mean losing your reputation, your job, your friends and, well, everything.

A line of books have come out in recent times, pointing out that we live in one of the most censorious of cultures. Andrew Doyle wrote a book called The New Puritans, arguing that identity politics and the social justice movement has spawned a quasi-religious form of cultural revolution, driven by claims to moral purity and tolerating no dissent. Similarly, Noah Rothman wrote The Rise of the New Puritans, identifying progressivism as a movement whose primary goal is to limit happiness.

They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Yet perhaps the problem is not so much that we have become too much like the post-reformation Puritans, but that we are fundamentally unlike them. Puritans were a group of Protestants who first emerged in the 16th century, who wanted to ensure that Reformation in England was carried out thoroughly, broadly according to the agenda of John Calvin in Geneva, and not (as they saw it), half-heartedly. The word ‘Puritan’ was in fact invented by the group’s enemies, accusing them of a joyless obsession with purity, an insistence on keeping rules, confessing sins and avoiding pleasures. As always, caricatures tell half, or less than half, of the truth. Of course there were censorious and frowning Puritans, but they also had a profound and ambitious notion of grace and goodness alongside a nuanced moral ecology that we have largely lost.

The Puritans had a strong notion of the nexus of sin, confession, grace, forgiveness, absolution and the possibility of moral reformation. If your conscience tells you that you had done something wrong, you had best confess it sincerely to God (and possibly to other people as well), which would be followed by the promise of divine forgiveness, which in turn had the potential to bring about a deep change of heart and habit, so that the fault was not repeated again. They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Now we have lost most of this. If you confess a sin in public, you are very unlikely to receive absolution in the court of Twitter or public esteem. The passing of time may mean people forget what you did and enable some rehabilitation, but forgiveness? Never. And if you think the likelihood of forgiveness is remote, what is the incentive for confession? You might as well brazen it out, pretend you’ve done nothing wrong, deny all charges, as the alternative is to see your career go down the tubes.

Moreover, we don’t tend to believe moral change is possible. A leopard never changes his spots, we say with a knowing look. Ex-offenders find it hard to find jobs with a criminal record behind them, and disgraced politicians are unlikely to find a way back into public life.

We are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible.

Now of course there are good reasons for our nervousness about this. Someone with a weakness for booze, sex or vulnerable children might never lose that tendency, and it’s often better to be cautious than to allow an abuser to abuse again. Yet at the same time, Christian moral theology has always held together in some tension a savvy awareness of the depth of human fallibility and self-deception, with a belief in the possibility of deep spiritual and moral change. Christian faith paradoxically holds at the same time the most pessimistic and the most optimistic view of human nature – that we are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible. It’s not always easy to spot the genuinely reformed character from the charlatan, but that is where wise discernment and character judgement comes in, holding the tension between naivete and cynicism.

Back in the day when more people went to church, they at least once a week had an occasion where they were invited to reflect on their sins of the past week, to confess them and receive absolution. That pairing is perhaps the key to the whole thing, and why saying sorry is so hard in contemporary life – because we have not only lost the ability to say sorry, we have also lost the ability to forgive.

Of course, it’s possible to go through the motions in church of saying you are sorry for your sins. It can be a means of ‘cheap grace’ as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to call it. But we are creatures of habit. Being forced to think back over the past week, the time you spoke to your kids in a harsh way, told a white lie to get out of trouble, or forgot to phone someone who needed help because you were just too busy, somehow alerts you to your own inner mess. Add to that the promise that a heartfelt confession will be met with the pronouncement of genuine pardon, then it makes it just a little easier to say an abject apology to someone else when you need to, not evading the truth, not excusing yourself, just saying you messed up and got it wrong, because you know what’s coming afterwards – forgiveness.

The dynamic of confession, forgiveness and the possibility of moral change doesn’t take away the need for shrewd judgement of character, but its loss arguably makes it much harder for us to say we are sorry, and are truly repentant.

Politicians, pundits and other public figures may find it hard to say sorry. And we are perhaps right to expect them to do so. But unless we learn how to forgive, then we will reap a harsh society where ‘sorry’ is not just the hardest, but the rarest word.

Essay

Art

Awe and wonder

Creed

Trauma

7 December 2024

10 min read

What good is a beautiful Notre Dame to a traumatized world?

Beauty reminds us why life is worth preserving.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

Stone columns and walls frame round and arched stain glassed widnows.

Notre Dame interior.

Notredame.fr.

On the day the Notre Dame cathedral burned my daughter was just a few days shy of her fourth birthday. She was serious and silent as we watched, on our computer screen, the flames lick through the roof and the spire fall. When I closed the computer, my daughter slipped quietly upstairs to her bedroom and pulled out her collection of pennies scrounged from parking lots, sidewalks, and in between furniture cushions. She placed them into an envelope along with a drawing of the cathedral (spelling wasn’t in her tool kit yet) and directed me to please post it to Paris “for them to fix Notre Dame with.”

It was a beautiful thing to do. And while, unfortunately, it was going to take rather a lot more than a few US pennies to do the job, my daughter was instinctively picking up on something that many others were too: first, that we didn’t want to lose Notre Dame, and second, that it was going to cost a lot of money to save it. Within the first 48 hours €900mn were pledged to the restoration effort from French sources alone.

It was heartwarming at first, France and the rest of the world rallying to save this architectural and historical treasure. But a sour note soon crept in. This sudden appearance of so much money, ready and available to help rebuild the cathedral left many wondering why that money had not been directed toward improving and even saving lives in France and throughout the rest of the world.

A few weeks later, ethicists Peter Singer and Michael Plant co-authored an article echoing these concerns. Bluntly titled “How Many Lives is Notre Dame Worth?”, Singer and Plant argue that the €1 billion currently pledged to Notre Dame’s reconstruction would be better directed to, for example, bed nets for impoverished people in malaria-stricken regions of the world. They estimated that €1 billion dedicated to this cause could prevent approximately 285,000 premature deaths.

It made me uncomfortable, the facts stated like that. Is it right to be devoting so much money to a project that is largely aesthetic when there are people dying of want? If my daughter were in danger of dying from malaria or malnutrition, I would wish for her to be prioritised over a thousand cathedrals.

And yet, envisioning a world in which everything beautiful, but not strictly necessary to keeping a heart beating – ballet companies, art galleries, poetry publishing houses, infrastructures that protect the world’s national parks, ancient cathedrals – is neglected and left to crumble until every human on the globe has their basic, practical needs met seemed to me to be self-inflicting another kind of deep poverty. What ought we, as people who want to make the world better for everyone, to do with our resources of money, time, and strength?

Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

Recently, a book entitled The Ethics of Beauty, by Greek Orthodox ethicist, Timothy Patitsas, has informed my perspective on this quandary. In the preface of his book Patitsas critiques the definition of contemporary ethics (“the rational investigation of morality”) in its elevation of two of the Socratic transcendentals, Truth and Goodness, to the exclusion of the third, Beauty. He writes,

“. . . we find Ethics identifying itself as the investigation of ‘the Good’ by ‘the True’ . . . But, in discarding Beauty, Ethics itself risks becoming not only unlovely but also an affront to loveliness and loses its power to motivate the human soul except through the force of argument.”

I recognize this modern approach in Singer and Plant’s article. They extrapolate what goodness would be (directing money toward providing bed netting) from what is true (the number of needy people and the lives that could be saved). Patitsas suggests, instead, an approach to ethics that leads with Beauty, then flowing to Goodness and Truth. “If we do not begin with Beauty,” he writes, “it is all too easy to miss the full complexity of human personhood.”

Patitsas believes that only those who have “encountered the very antithesis of Beauty” can judge whether the “Beauty-first” approach has any merit, and so his first chapter is a discussion of how it might serve those who have suffered severe trauma. Citing the work of psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, Patitsas explains that a traumatic experience is the profound learning of a soul-shattering “truth”, resulting in a profound excommunication of the sufferer from their fellow humans, from God, and from themselves:

“In any all-engulfing experience, you obtain a knowledge that totally overtakes you, but when such an experience includes trauma, other effects are added, including the cutting of communion, the unraveling of character, and the learning of heretical truths.”

These “heretical truths”, according to Patitsas, are newfound, deep, perhaps unarticulated, revelations that the world is hostile towards the sufferer, and that their life is not situated in a mutually dependent, mutually beneficial relation to their fellow humans. Instead, humankind is a threat to them, and God, at best, has no interest in their flourishing. In other words, it leads the sufferer to view and position themselves as something outside the bounds of humanity. Patitsas writes, “When we experience trauma, our very being is thrust away from coherence and solidity and towards non-being - and this is hell.”

Shay found that suicide among traumatized war veterans increased significantly when they were treated using talk therapy, an exclusively truth-centric Freudian approach. Instead, Patitsas argues, the trauma sufferer must be “recommunicated” through Beauty – Beauty being the only agent with experiential power sufficient to meet the potency of trauma. Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

When I first read Patitsas’s description of a Beauty-first path back from trauma I immediately recognized it as my own. In my twenties I experienced, within 18 months of each other, the violent deaths of my brother and my baby son. And truly I felt like a razor blade had engraved in the marrow of my bones the heretofore concealed truth of the universe: nothing precious will survive. I viewed other people as a threat, either for their propensity to suddenly die and break my heart, or the way they caused harm either deliberately or accidentally. God became my worst enemy, all-powerful and merciless.

And yet, most of the rest of the world did not appear to know what I now knew, so I felt forced to cut myself off in order to protect myself and to stay true to truth itself. I was a Gollum-like creature living in the shadows, reduced to panic-attacks set off by ordinary noises such as the doorbell ringing or an object being dropped. Sometimes I just lay in a ball on the floor and screamed for no particular reason other than that the world was so terrifying, so horrifying. I used to be a sane person, now “truth” had made me insane.

The way back to the land of the living was not, for me, through rationality. I cannot, to this day, say why these tragedies happened; I don’t imagine I will ever feel at peace with them. And it was a long time before I was able to speak the truth of what had happened without feeling that I was just twisting the knife in my wound. The first time I caught an inkling that maybe I still might find a place in the world was through a work of fiction. I read of a young Italian who becomes a soldier and is caught up in the ravages of the first World War. He loses everything and everyone precious to him over the course of the war and he witnesses and participates in situations contrary to all moral order. He survives the war, but must discern whether and how to live in its aftermath. The book is his recollection and reflection, as an old man, upon his life. He dies pronouncing the sum of it all as beautiful and precious beyond measure. And reading it I could see that it was. I could recognize myself in much of his pain and struggle, but for the first time I had seen a vision of a way of living that does not deny all that is traumatic and cruel, but can yet hold it within a vessel of costly and weighty beauty.

When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole.

Another agent of recovery was a recording I owned of the great pianist Artur Rubenstein performing the second movement of Chopin’s first piano concerto. The way he touches the piano keys at certain moments is the tenderest, gentlest thing I have ever known. I used to lay on the floor, a bloody mess, and break my heart into that music and feel it miraculously held. I found that my heart, though black and almost smoking with ruin, surprisingly arose and responded to that gentleness. It could live in that small corner of the universe, completely without fangs. I could still find a home among such things.

There was also a very large, old cemetery, an oasis of big trees, flowers and grass, in the midst of the gray concrete city in which we lived. I used to walk the miles of paths through the cemetery and watch the seasons change: the flowers in the spring, the leaves in the autumn, the green grass in the summer, snow in the winter. I would read the inscriptions carved into the gravestones by the people who loved them, and I could not deny that although death was here in abundance, so too was life.

It was then, once Beauty had cracked the door open and enabled me to at least consider the possibility that I might still be able to live, that was I able to follow where Beauty had gone ahead and allow people to touch me with love. Then I could speak of my pain in a way that could heal instead of just fester the wound.

As I have spent time pondering Patitsas’s thesis, it occurs to me that a worthy definition of Beauty might be that which regifts to all of us – trauma sufferers or not – the goodness and truth of our humanity. From the earliest days of the Judeo-Christian faith, Beauty has been believed to be a manifestation of God in the world, a showing-forth of his character. Since this tradition also teaches that the primary identity of humans is that we bear God’s image, it seems logical that Beauty might also act as a corrective and restorative mirror to us humans in a world in which our humanity is constantly barraged both from within ourselves and from outside influences. When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole. Beauty does not flatter us that we need no improvement, but rather, it acknowledges our limited strength, limited power, limited knowledge and wisdom, limited desire and ability to do good, and yet assures us that it can hold these wounds and that we possess incorruptible dignity. And when we grasp the reality and blessedness of our own humanity, we are able to recognise and embrace it in others as well. Then we are moved to provide bed netting for those who need it, food for those who are hungry, medical help for the sick and wounded, companionship for the lonely, and all other acts of kindness and mercy.

And so, I affirm with all my heart Singer and Plant’s assertion that we ought to make great efforts to save lives and ameliorate suffering. Indeed, these actions are themselves beautiful! However, it is only at our very real and profound peril that we discount Beauty as a waste of resources. If we do not allow Beauty the seat at the head of the table, we are in grave danger of forgetting why it is that we must do what we can to ease suffering, of forgetting why life is worth preserving, of forgetting that it is possible to have every physical need met and yet be dying.

In this world we are often constrained to choose between tragic options, and there may come a day when Notre Dame must be left to crumble. However, even though I live thousands of miles from Paris, it does my heart good to see it so wonderfully resurrected, and I sense many share my joy.

Notre Dame is already birthing more Beauty into the world. According to a recent article, the reconstruction project has injected a surge of life into the arts and crafts sector. I hope it will result in the creation and preservation of many good and beautiful things. And I hope that we will, all of us, become artisans of the world, creating and tending Beauty. May Beauty appear as stories, music, art, and architecture. May it show up as the tending and protection of nature. May it be food, clean water, mosquito netting placed into hurting hands. May it be caring medical attention. May it be gardens tended and work well done. May it be patience, forgiveness, and grace extended. May it be measured, considered words spoken and printed. May it be children generous with their pennies.May it be Notre Dame standing another 800 years and more.