absolution

© Carlyle Labuschagne 2014" As I watched her run down the path and melt with the shadows, I wasn't sure how to feel about her, or the fact that I may just have aided in her escape and doomed us all. I wanted to believe that anyone given a second chance would use it wisely. But wisdom I guess is hard to obtain when destiny stands in its way.

The sum of a person's life is not determined by one action. It is what you do with the time you are given that matters.

Only through Absolution will you reach the Absolute.

Absolution is the most powerful form of forgiveness. A full pardon from suspicion and accountability. It's the liberation of a stolen future. A future my father never lived to see. Absolution is a mercy the people who killed him will never know.

Someone's forgiveness will not heal you; condemnation or absolution is their test, not yours.

You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your faith? From one end of this life to the other, you carry with you all that you have done. Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past. The man you were still lives within you, repressed by the man you have struggled to become.

Absolution exists, call it Christian or whatever. It__ far older than any creed, and one of our blessings.

Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you__e setting free is yourself.

Absolution is the washing away of sin. The promise of rebirth. And the chance to escape the transgressions of those who came before us. The best among us will learn from the mistakes of the past, while the rest seem doomed to repeat them. And then there are those who operate on the fringes of society, unburdened by the confines of morality and conscience. A ruthless breed of monsters whose deadliest weapon is their ability to hide in plain sight. If the people I've come to bring justice to cannot be bound by the quest for absolution, then neither will I.

The idea that sins can be forgiven is at the root of mankind's problems. Everyone pays...sooner or later.

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

How can one absolve intelligent men for engaging in arrogant and demented folly?

I hold my finger up to his lips. He flicks his eyes down to look at it."You're absolved," I tell him.He brings his eyes back up to mine. There's no fucking way he knows what that word means. That's a word I dream someone will say to me.So I put it in his language. "You're free.

Redemption was asking too much, but he could hope. Something told him he__ still be seeking absolution when he took his last breath on some distant day.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...