EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

The Question, Answered Without Being Resolved

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I told you at the beginning what frightened me: that the deeper I went into understanding my own sin, the more I risked arriving not at repentance but at its counterfeit.

I have not, across the length of this book, solved that fear. I want to be honest about that, because a book that claimed to solve it would be lying in exactly the way this entire inquiry has been built to detect — a suspiciously tidy synthesis, arriving too easily, holding too well.

What I have instead is a set of instruments. The grammar test: whether I say because of what I did or I needed to do what I did. The trade test: whether I would accept the act again, once, in exchange for what it made of me. The restitution test: whether anything I have done is visible to the world, to the person harmed, or only to myself. None of these instruments produce a final verdict. All of them, used honestly and repeatedly, make it harder to lie without noticing that I am lying.

Perhaps this is what repentance actually is, stripped of the comfortable stories we tell about it: not a destination but a set of instruments, checked against regularly, that keep the self from settling too easily into either its own defense or its own destruction. The checking never ends. I no longer think it is supposed to.

I do not know if I have repented of what I have done. I know I have built, across these pages, the most honest set of tools I currently have for finding out — and that the finding out is not a single event but a practice, resumed daily, for as long as the sin remains part of who I am, which is to say, for as long as I remain myself at all.