Innocent hands?

I was raised among a reverence for innocence. Later, in women's studies courses I discovered the damage done to women by this reverence for innocence. I encountered lives destroyed by the assumption that losing one's innocence automatically made one a whore. When there are only Madonnas and Whores, there is no room for the sexual woman who can be proud of all she is.

The theology I learned in my religious studies courses taught that sin equalled a loss of innocence. Carnal knowledge, gambling, drinking, lying, cheating, stealing... All these classic sins are also classic antonyms of innocence. If it is stifling to put woman in a cage of innocence or fallen sinfulness, it is equally soul killing to do so with any human being.

There is a middle path. A path that acknowledges that no one among us is without sin. The truth that theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and former UUA President Bill Schulz both warn of: that there is an intrinsic cruelty, intrinsic sinfulness, within each and every one of us suggests that we need to stop seeking to restore an innocence that never existed, and certainly stop seeking to preserve the innocence that does not now exist. If we 'get over ourselves', and stop fruitless striving, then we can start from a realistic place of exploring what we CAN do. No-one is exempt from trying because they have "soiled hands." That stops us from throwing stones and stops us from paralyzing ourselves, hating ourselves, or giving up.

I'm thinking of sin lately in a non-traditional sense, the idea that sinning is anything that works against the good of the whole, the life-force, the impulse to greater complexity and uniqueness and connectedness. Sin as Racism. Sin as oppression. Sin as internalized homophobia. Sin as systemic processes that harm.

I am reminded of the Buddhist monks who refuse to drive over 10 miles per hour. They do not refuse, like the Jains, to drive at all, just not to go so fast that the number of bug lives ended on their watch goes over some threshold they can bear. They have found the middle path. They have not abdicated their responsibility to avoid sin. But they also are not trying to live entirely sin-free.

There is something wonderful about accepting each person's frailty, complicity, and humanness, without rejecting our responsibility. How many voices will be in our choir, how many bodies will be on the front lines working against injustice, how many arms will be open to love if we can accept that none of us is innocent, but all of us matter.

This same note sounds in the Alcoholics Anonymous process, where people admit that they are helpless, and therefore are able to do something about their disease. I am not perfect, but I am able to do something, one day at a time.

And again, we come round to the idea that there are no clean hands. There are idle hands or there are hands that are soiled but willing to do the work. (I think I heard that in the context of Desmond Tutu talking about the truth and reconciliation process.)

Perhaps if we could stop wringing our hands, and stop throwing them up in the air in despair, we'd be able to get to work building what needs to be built, undoing what needs to be undone, and repairing what can be repaired.

Our hurting world needs a theology without innocence, a new theology that loves us as we are while demanding that we heal ourselves and our world.

Though you have broken your vows a thousand times... Come, yet again, come.