In the Cool of the Evening
“To sin,” in Greek the word “sin” being hamartia, is “to miss the target.”
In each of the four university classes I teach, there is an average of 30 students. In my first week of school, I was handed a folder of attendance charts with each student’s name written in Korean.
A few weeks earlier I had begun to decipher hangul, the Korean alphabet, by reading the subway stops in Korean alongside their English equivalents. It was a fun game, an archaeological adventure to take part in, and while back in NYC I had picked up a simple workbook for learning Korean as well. So I had begun to learn Korean, but the attendance charts had accelerated the need… the need to read.
So everyday I enter the Danger Zone, flipping through my charts and calling out my students’ names in the best Korean I can muster. It’s not easy for me. One of my deepest fears is your classic run-of-the-mill rejection. Being mocked, being made fun of. The ingrained expectation I have for myself is that I should excel at everything I put my hand to the moment I do. Working grace into this area of my life, I have come to peace with, will be a lifelong task.
In addition, I’ve been moving toward learning all of my students’ names by heart. It’s a great tool in class as well as a way for me to get to know each one of them personally, but my progress or lack thereof also plays into my fear of rejection.
So, I find myself sinning frequently in the first 10 minutes of class.
My voice cowers, I hold back. I’m a-feared to venture a student’s name, so I call on one I already know, or I don’t dare ask them a fourth time to repeat it. I call a name while looking down and rove with my eyes shotgun-style over the area a response comes from. Once locked-on to the responder, I pretend to have known them the whole time. There is a myriad of tricks I use to cover, to hide, to pretend. And this is sin, this is missing the mark.
The difference is very little between this and lying. Sometimes the two blend together. And there is little difference between this lying and my own mockery and pride, for I know that because I have such little grace for myself and my imperfections as a Korean speaker, I will at some point be mocking someone else for the same, taking pride perhaps down the line at my hard-won Korean ability. Of the seven deadly sins, lodged in my heart is the worst– Pride, which of course gives birth to the others, Envy being the quickest out of the gate, hot on his brother’s heels.
In Genesis, we read that our fore-parents were naked and unashamed. We also read of a time when, in the cool of the evening, God walked in the garden with them. This is the intimacy that we have lost in whole, though not in part. I am not fool enough these days to regard my own neurotic fear and pride as insignificant, though it is the stuff of every sit-com and filmic comedy set in Manhattan. Thank God we can laugh at it, but I prefer not to leave it at that. If my relationship to my students, to those around me, to strangers even, is cut off, broken, limited by the false self I feel the need to put forward– and worse yet, if I foster and instill the idea that this is just normal, or true, and this idea catches with my students, my loved ones, the world around me, I have done significant damage. Intimacy cannot grow among the weeds of such pride.
Do you remember when Roberto Begnini clambered over the seats of Hollywood to accept an Oscar for Life Is Beautiful? The joy that flowed from him as he thanked the world around him in his own broken, foolish English, how he made us laugh, and made us feel a little bit closer to something true, to childishness, to love, which he repeated again and again? And the movie behind that Oscar, one that was the gospel if ever one was– a Joy, a Love, a sacrifice, to make life beautiful. Roberto Begnini wanted to kiss everyone that night, he said, to kiss the world, and I believed him. He was recalling what we began as, and what one day, praise God, we will return to. The cool of the evening.
When we do recall it, it may bring tears to our eyes, a crack in our hearts, a lump in the throat. Whenever we recall, we remember, we have a taste again of what that intimacy felt like. A part, though not the whole. “Remember me,” Christ said to the twelve, and to us as well through all time. “Remember me,” for we are forever dis-membering him, forgetting the whole and instead inhabiting our own fractured selves, forever covering the naughty bits, hiding the shame, pretending to be other than what we are—sinners saved by grace, hallelujah, here she comes, sweet grace.
But there is one who came after the garden was closed to us, one who hung naked and ridiculed by those he once walked with in order to bring us back. Beyond any shame I could experience in this life, my God was rejected, and rejected when his Korean was perfect. The more I can re-member him there, hanging, hanging there, alone, perfect, infinitely lodging his love for me in my own quaking heart, by degrees I become less fearful of any rejection I may face in this life, for when I stand one day before him naked in the light of his holiness, I will be confident that by his rejection I am accepted. Clothed in his righteousness I am, broken, beautiful, sin-ridden, perfect.
Until then, I miss the mark, nock the arrow, raise and steady my arm for the next shot.
