memorandum 6 by Katja Institute

The Lenten season is devoted especially to what theologians call contrition…. Contrite, as you know, is a word translated from Latin, meaning crushed or pulverized. Now modern people complain that there is too much of that note in our Prayer Book. They do not wish their hearts to be pulverized, and they do not feel that they can sincerely say that they are ‘miserable offenders’. I once knew a regular churchgoer who never repeated the words, ‘the burden of them [i.e. his sins] is intolerable’, because he did not feel that they were intolerable. But he was not understanding the words. I think the Prayer Book is very seldom talking primarily about our feelings; that is (I think) the first mistake we’re apt to make about these words ‘we are miserable offenders’. I do not think whether we are feeling miserable or not matters. I think it is using the word miserable in the old sense – meaning an object of pity. That a person can be a proper object of pity when he is not feeling miserable, you can easily understand if you imagine yourself looking down from a height on two crowded express trains that are travelling towards one another along the same line at sixty miles an hour. You can see that in forty seconds there will be a head-on collision. I think it would be very natural to say about the passengers of these trains, that they were objects of pity. This would not mean that they felt miserable themselves; but they would certainly be proper objects of pity.

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