Breaking teapots, keeping calm, and moving on

The writer Anne Lamott posted the following tweet reacting to a bad review of her latest book, a sort of memoir with spiritual overtones:

“A bit of a set back here: just got the single worst review of my life prominently featured in the New York Times, brightly illustrated for maximum visibility. [She] had a LOT of fun writing it. Feel doomed. Am going to sulk, and overeat.”

I have no doubt that faithful readers are sticking by Lamott and are reading the book. She made her fame exposing her vulnerabilities by writing about periods of recovery from addiction, bad relationships, and loss. “Almost everything I know about life,” she wrote, is that “it is a precious gift, and hard; that it is full of pleasures, messes, delights, loss, suffering, love.” Lamott will get over the knock to her confidence and write more.

But is there anyone alive who hasn’t at some point shared the sentiment in her tweet? In translation, it is the equivalent of “stop the world, I want to get off.”

Valeria Duca (Norway). The Three Graces. Oil on canvas, contemporary.

Did you experience personal failure or a setback at work? Was it relationship breakdown? Betrayal? Yours or someone else’s? Sometimes emotions are undone by a single word: did someone make us lose confidence, or feel embarrassed, or small? Was someone’s judgement damaging and brutally unkind? These experiences expose our personal inadequacies and leave us feeling raw. Even when exaggerated by a fragile ego, it’s enough to send us on another trip to the fridge.

But what about our part in the moral side of these failings? What happens when our actions turn into the moral equivalent of a car pileup on the side of the road?

Facing these questions is never easy. This is why Sunday worship gives us company to be with. And why, in the economy of grace, collective actions of repentance and forgiveness are liberating practices breaking the shackles of condemnation and shame.

Film still from film Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini

One definition of sin is that we have missed the target. Or that we once again aimed for a moral low and hit our mark. That we have yet to get it right. It means that there is wrongdoing we are responsible for with consequences that are out of our control. And that there is behaviour we need to say sorry for, that we need to determine to do better, do reparative work where we can, and learn to move on.

At the same time, however, sin says that it is me, but not just me; it is others, but not just others. There is a bigger picture: God’s image in the world is broken, and somehow this shows up in egocentric, self-serving instincts in us. Instincts, truth is, we too readily feed.

To be clear, then, there is personal responsibility in all this. But in the bigger picture I am pointing to, the sin we repent for is not just an individual failing, it is our collective sharing in a world which is broken when we arrive.

When I was five or six, I knocked over a lamp sending it in pieces across the living room floor. When my parents asked questions later that day, I insisted that “It was like that when I came in!” I stuck to my story even with their promise of no consequences, a ‘get out of jail free’ card, if only I told the truth. Days later, I was still trying to puzzle out how they knew. Years later I am still breaking things, six teapots in our household in the past ten years. Reader, they did not break themselves.

We break things, that’s a fact, and it’s a fact that not everything we break can be replaced. That is not something we can easily live with. Some wrongdoing needs time to heal, and some will never heal, we only learn to live with the pain. We don’t always know the difference: that too piles up the pain. But this is what the prayer of repentance and words in the Sunday service helps us to face.

Ellen Gallagher (2006). Salt Eaters. Hauser & Wirth, London.

Each of us comes with fracture lines, fissures already scored where we most easily splinter or tear. That might be the voice of an inner critic, or the scathing malice someone unleashes on us, or simply the fragility and worries of our day-to-day. Apparently even the ancient Vikings were the sensitive sort: our word ‘scathing’ comes from their word for anything coarse that causes injury or leaves a wound.

Still, bodies can scar over and heal. But then there are the wounds of the heart, the hurts we give and receive that shatter a soul: “The human spirit will endure sickness, but a broken spirit—who can bear?” (Proverbs 18.14). But why are communal acts of repentance part of our spiritual repair kit?

Elizabeth Oldfield, author of The Sacred podcast, says that acts of repentance in church hold us responsible to ourselves and those around us. They tell us that “we are not separable from the damage in the world, we are not separable from the plank in our own eye.”

The lives we ‘scathe’ knowingly or not, in other words, we cannot put off on someone else. Or on circumstances, or say that it is the way of the world. It is us. But in the bigger picture, it is also part of our stumbling journey towards becoming fully human. Let me explain.

Lourenço Providência (2024). Love, Anne. New York Times.

In the Orthodox tradition, being human is an unfinished project, sin is part of the birth pangs in becoming fully human in the stature of Christ’s humanity. This is interesting. For one thing, it means that being human is both individual and something we do in community. It means that, in the journey towards our own humanity, we need others, and we need to be there for others. This is radically opposite to any soloist account of sin and redemption.

Sin is a turning in on ourselves, withdrawing into ourselves, away from others, so that we don’t want people to need us, and even less, we to need them. ‘Curving in on ourselves’, as some have put it. We intend to make ourselves an isolated still point at the centre of a tidy little world. But in reality, we find ourselves alone in a hall of mirrors, receding rows of faces—our own—peering back in accusation. But even from that position, we want to point the finger and say, ‘How did I get here, and who can I blame?’

Francis Bacon (1953). Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Des Moines Art Center, IL.

This is where the public prayer of repentance at the start of the Sunday service is a sudden revelation of a different reality.

This prayer puts us in the company of others and makes each of us someone who is there for others. There is great risk in this, it is a vulnerability we choose week on week. But for that reason, when we join the company of the broken, gone is the temptation to weaponize sin against others in judgement. Jesus was crystal clear on this—when a woman was dragged out on street for target practice in an act of public condemnation, Jesus stopped them cold: “Let any one of you who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8.7).

The point repentance is not to name and shame, but to be with others, to join the human race in a collective act of saying sorry. And to tell each other that we belong to the God who defines us, not by our readiness to repent, by God’s readiness to heal and forgive. That is what the name Christian means: forgiven, raised to life in Christ, and set free.

Sin may not be entirely preventable, though it becomes inevitable only with our doing. But I hope you find it encouraging that, in our Sunday service, we are emboldened by the promise to move beyond our wrongdoing and its crippling guilt. I hope collectively we find our ticket back to our own humanity by exposing these uncomfortable truths in the open—whether quietly or without fear—when we say together, God,

We have not loved you with our whole heart,

We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.

I remember a line, or a sentiment that stayed with me, from the nature book Tarka the Otter: When we die, life will flower from our dust.

The author intends it as brutal realism: nature overtakes all manner of life and drives it to decay into the ground so that even our dreams are turned to dust. Our Sunday worship says that this is not the only story: in God’s reconciling mercy, our collective acts of repentance and forgiveness are feed for a flowering that begins now and is yet to come.

Thomas Struth (1999). Paradise 15. Photograph: Yakushima, Japan.

But far from soothing us with the ‘eat, pray, love’ brand of palliatives—or in my version, “breaking teapots, keeping calm, and moving on”—our collective act of repentance throws us headlong into spiritual upheaval. How? In a prayer that smuggles in a protest against the very world we helped to break:

In your mercy,

forgive what we have been,

help us to amend what we are,

and direct what we shall be…

You see, then, how we become fearless to face ourselves, past, present, and future? How bold we are to wrench from the shadows of sin a truth-telling mirror, one holding up before us this life-changing proposition: that we are made in the image of a merciful God.

The instinct to turn in on ourselves will always throw up deepfakes telling us that we are alone and battling it out in a fight for our souls. The self-importance in this alone is astonishing. And it is simply not true.

In Christ’s kingdom we are tenants on a merciful land, and repentance is a river running through it, a green torrent washing over us week-to-week and day-on-day, smoothing out hearts and hands and feet like rive pebbles

that we may do justly, love mercy,

and walk humbly with our God.

If only we could flash it in lights above the church, or have it burnished across our souls, a triptych in defiance of anything that threatens to tarnish but can never wash away God’s image in us:

Forgiven. Made whole. And free.