"In the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French. . . "
-----Montaigne

I don't think I ever really understood, at a gut level, what Christianity was about. In fact, for most of my life I've had it horribly wrong. What I've learned over the last couple years, via the help of counseling and with the love of good family and friends, is that it's a much more freeing state of affairs than I was brought up to believe.

You see, the bottom line is, we're broken. And I don't mean broken in that candy-ass Sunday school way of speaking, as if brokenness were some humiliated inclination of the affections that you kept trying to foster in your mind. I mean broken like an engine that's blown a rod. I mean broken as part of the definition of who we are, in all the Augustinian sense of the word. Irreparable.

When I was growing up, I internalized the Christian faith as something that made me better, or said differently, as a key to making myself better. I thought you accepted Jesus and all the tumblers just fell into place. I thought that by accepting Jesus one was magically given the ability to have actual victory over one's brokenness. That "you" could in essence make yourself perfect. I honestly thought this is what it meant to be a Christian. This is no doubt due in part to my own narcissistic tendencies, my own desires to master myself and others and to be in control. But I think it's also fair to say that the church instilled a great deal of this bogus thinking in me (because I still hear it preached). I'm not here to point fingers though. You take what you've been given and you learn as you go. What I want to say is this: Pascal was right. The beauty of Christianity is that it at once shows man's greatness and his depravity. In doing so it answers the riddle of the world. We are broken, and our prime worthiness comes in that we are looked upon favorably by God.

The thing that I didn't understand when I was younger was that sin is a part of us. I can no more remove it or make myself better than a frog can fashion wings for flight. I sin like I breathe air. The mystery of faith in Christ is not that you accept Christ and then work harder to be holy. The mystery is that Christ's love is given for you in spite of your constant failure. It is this acceptance, and only this accecptance, that motivates and moves us to love one another, to do as He said (however lamely), and to be at peace. It is our humility in accepting this that makes us perfect. Anything else is just background noise of our own making.