Forgive me Father, for I have sinned

I look at the past few weeks, as parallel to a place I learned about in my religious upbringing. I have been in purgatory. In this place between heaven and hell I have been pushing, not to accomplish what I wanted, but rather, to get past things I didn’t. I set timetables for “achievements” that are meaningless to where I want to be in my life. What some would think was work well done was a penance that I was paying….

Being raised Catholic, I grew up learning the sacraments and the basis of Catholicism. As a “good Catholic” I practiced the sacrament of confession, although my sins were always the same because we never went too deep into what exactly a sin could or should be except for murder and adultery, and at the age of 10 I could not be accused of those acts. So, I always stuck with the same basic sins that were never too outrageous.

May be my upbringing took hold on a very deep level, because even though I tested my boundaries and I strayed beyond someone’s definition of good and proper, I never strayed too far. (I say someone’s because that invisible judge and jury has long lived inside me.)

So, how have I sinned? I have sinned by abandoning my intentions, by putting them aside because of the obligations I felt to other tasks and outcomes. Instead of making the time to do this type of writing, I set it aside to write conference papers that I did not feel connected to. Instead of giving myself time to think and relax, I pushed it aside by worrying about new deadlines and assignments that were out of my immediate control.

I sinned, because I abandoned what I feel called to do. As a result, my sins also served as their own form of penance and the time I spent there was not living, but was keeping me in purgatory, keeping me from living. In Daring Greatly Brene’ Brown says that in an uncertain world, we look for absolutes, and we disengage to protect ourselves. I disengaged from something I valued, by seeking the “absolute” of putting my value aside in the name of doing my job. Unfortunately, the only absolute that gave me was to be disconnected from my goals, disconnected from myself.