AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD

To the Reader Who Recognized Themselves

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If you skipped the exercises — the moments where I asked you to stop and sit with your own sin rather than continue reading — I understand. They were designed to be skippable, because a book cannot force an interior act, it can only make the invitation and note, honestly, that the invitation was there.

If you did the exercises, and something in you resisted, or ached, or recognized a justification you had been quietly living inside for years without naming it as one — I am sorry for the discomfort and I do not regret producing it. The subject did not deserve a gentler treatment. Gentleness, on this particular subject, is usually just acquittal wearing softer language.

I want to say one more thing, because I think it is the most important sentence in the entire book and I have saved it for the place a reader is most likely to actually absorb it, at the end, when the argument has done its work and the defenses are, perhaps, slightly lower than they were at the start.

You are allowed to have grown from what you did. You are not allowed to need it to have happened. The line between these two is thin, is crossed constantly, is nearly invisible from the inside — and finding it, again and again, for as long as you live, is not a curse. It may be the closest thing to genuine moral seriousness that a creature like us, formed the way we are formed, is actually capable of.

Go do something, today, for someone who is not you.

That is the only ending this book is entitled to offer.

— Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri

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To repent, you must have sinned.

To sin honestly, you must one day explain it to yourself.

The explaining is where the real crime might begin.

Go and do not commit it again.

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