I am coming to believe that no one can truly be a good person if they have not at first been exposed to their own capacity for wrongdoing. I hope someday to head in that direction, when I can say that I used to be a bad person. When I was, so to speak, “untainted,” or rather, “untested,” I would carry a quiet superiority regarding my own “near perfection” when it came to morality. I believed that I was good because I had not yet been forced to see how easily I would fail. To quote John Steinbeck, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” I think I am having a much easier time being good upon finding out that not only am I not perfect, if I don’t hold myself back actively at all times, I’m actually a rather horrible person.
Yet, despite knowing how wretched I can be, I persist in my infamy. My most oft-quoted Bible verse is Romans 7:15, “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” Even knowing that what I do hurts other people and myself, I continue to do it. In spite of desperately wanting to do the right thing, I cannot escape my own nature.
As Paul’s conundrum in Romans resolves through faith, mine has unfortunately not done so. The redeemer refuses to communicate his existence to me, and therefore I remain a wretched soul. I cannot abandon my own rationality, but Lord knows I am in need of a savior. How may I redeem myself, then, of my own wicked nature? For everything I do appears to me evil in retrospect, and I recognize the evil that I may cause, and yet I cannot avoid causing that evil. But am I condemned only because I cannot bring myself to see what others see? Am I not what I was made to be? If I am made this way, how does the fault lie in me? If I should create a bird without wings, do I really have the right to condemn it for its inability to fly?
I do not really understand myself. Why do I engage with this, if I do not really believe a savior really exists? Why do I feel as though he has betrayed me? I suppose I am angry at him. It seems to me the greatest offense ever committed against me, that I was made to need something that does not exist at all.