Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid.

Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is?

I have heard sin described as all the little selfish things we do each day.  Like when my commuter husband asks me to turn off my iPad because it's after 11pm and he's trying to sleep, and instead of apologising I get grumpy.  Or when a woman snaps at me in the Post Office and the only reason I don't snap back is because I'm wearing a clerical collar, but that doesn't stop me spending the next half an hour thinking about how horrible she is.  (Both these things happened this week).  In a sense, these are trivial little incidents, hardly worthy of the weighty title 'sin' and the threat of eternal damnation.  But in another sense they are small indicators of the selfishness which underlies so many human interactions.  We are each the centre of our own universe and have to be taught to consider others' needs and wishes.

Alan Mann writes about sin in terms of neglect of the other - both other people and God, the divine Other.  He argues that we are cut off from each other, from God, and even from ourselves, in our pursuit of individual goals; in seeking to get all that a consumer society teaches us that we have a right to expect.  (Doubtless this is a particular problem for highly individualistic cultures like the UK).  So sin for us Brits might be not so much a list of petty crimes as a neglect of our interconnectedness.  I am so absorbed in my own world that I forget you, and forget the God who made both of us, and who is waiting quietly for us to lift our eyes and notice him once again.