“I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.” – Romans 8:17-23, The Message

I started thinking about this tension not long ago while I was on the golf course, after hitting two golf balls into a marsh in the exact same spot. Feeling defeated and like the lessons I have paid for as a new golfer over the last six months were for naught, I dejectedly said to my husband, “if I know what to do, and I know I can do it right, why can’t I do it right every time?” And I realized I was not just talking about golf, but that golf was going to teach me some valuable lessons about God.

There are a lot of things that are not binary, there is a lot of gray in the world, but I do believe that there are moral rights and wrongs that are knowable. It isn’t always so easy to do them in our complicated human world, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and it doesn’t mean that just because it can be hard to navigate we must not be meant to try at all. It is hard, we are meant to try, we will fail, grace tells us that we can try again, and again, and again. Eventually God says, come home, you can take a little rest now.

In Buddhism the Eight Fold Path tells us about what “right” looks like, in Abrahamic scripture the Ten Commandments tell us the wrongs to avoid. They are teaching similar methodologies for how to behave in different ways, and I find them useful held together. There are other wisdom traditions that provide this guidance, and they all boil it down to the same basic principles: don’t do harm to the people around you, they too are precious beings that are beloved, treat yourself and others like you know that to be true.

There are a lot of lessons we can pull out of this, indeed this is the work of a lifetime. God does not want us to be daunted by the work, we are called to just do a little when and where we can, notice when we are not, and try again. If we don’t believe that the goal is just to try again when we get it wrong it can be hard to make that effort. Greater and better theologians than myself have tried to explain away the error in believing that ‘sin’ is a conclusion and a judgment, but here is my perspective: the word we use comes from translations of a Hebrew word which means to ‘turn back’. You’ve gone the wrong direction, don’t be so stubborn or egotistical that you can’t acknowledge it and turn back to the direction you are supposed to go, the direction that is encouraging, soul-filling, generous, toward loving God and loving neighbor. That’s it, that’s all a sin is, the things you do and the ways you turn away from God, turn away from that ineffable belovedness. And when you have turned away from that love life can feel like hell. That’s all there is to it, it’s a choice, it’s not a conclusion.

Now I’m not going to pretend there aren’t consequences for our actions and we don’t have to deal with those consequences. Turning back to God doesn’t mean we go back in time or have a magic eraser that wipes away the impacts of where we have been and what we have done. If you smash a plate against the wall in an argument you are going to have a smashed plate, but if you turn back from anger and toward patience maybe you won’t have more smashed plates. I stood in the same spot and hit two golf balls into a marsh, I’m down two golf balls. I knew enough to stop trying at that point because stubborn determination was not going to help me think through the problem clearly and I would have ended up with more lost golf balls.

The pause I took by walking away, by sharing my frustration, that happens with our soul too when we sit in meditation or prayer, when we say to God, “help me do right, help me be good.” It’s spiritual walking away from the problem and back toward where we need to be, or at least back to a place where we can make a different choice about how we want to engage in the situation. We won’t just get it right, but at least by wanting to get it right we take that time to think about what right is, about how we are behaving, what we might be doing wrong, and what we could try to do just a little differently.