Yesterday, at church, we prayed a corporate prayer from The Book of Common Prayer. "Almighty God . . . We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us . . ." 

My typical sins for so long were what some call sins of omission, not commission, detailed in the above prayer. Because of the sins against me as a child, I had shrunk, and resisted becoming responsible. This kind of behavior can be called sin, but it is a different kind of sin than the one we confessed together in our pews. 

I believe it is in a Eucharistic prayer that we sometimes pray, "Forgive us for coming to this thy table for solace only and not for strength . . ." That was my sin. My only strength was tenacity. I was going to survive. But my survival was ugly.

I remember the day that I brought home a phrase from our prayer book, declaring that our home would be characterized by "unity, constancy, and peace." I began making peace that day as I risked loosing everything I thought I had. 

Accurately identifying our sins is a significant first step toward wholeness. Then doing what we wish Jesus would do for us, is a step toward maturity.

In Alone When the Bedbugs Bite, Tess Russell tells us about renting a furnished apartment in San Francisco. One morning Russell woke up with small cluster of insect bites. Later that day a handler of a bedbug-sniffing dog confirmed her fear that the mattress was infested with bedbugs. 

Later, while emptying her bags of clothes into commercial dryers, Russell begins to feel very lonely. "If I were worth loving, wouldn't there be a man standing there with me? Some brave guy who would wear his bites stoically . . .?" 

Then she recalls a loving gestures her father had made years before in Baltimore, at family crab feasts. "When I was too young to pick crabs myself, my father would sit next to me and share his, extracting the flesh from the backfin for me and saving the tougher leg meat for himself. The backfin, as any Marylander can tell you, is the best part of the crab; giving your backfin to someone else is the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate expression of love."

Russell cried, "I caught a glimpse of what it might look like to live a life devoid of that kind of unconditional love . . ." 

I am inspired by Russell's courage as she tells the world about her vulnerabilities: bedbug bites on her body, boyfriendless state of being and, fear of living apart from unconditional love. 

I am also thankful that Russell knows unconditional love. She doesn't just believe in it or hope for it. She has experienced unconditional love and can choose to grow its direction.

In the November/December 2010 issue of Orion magazine, Bill McKibben questions the cogency of "the professional middle" who accuse "the professional left" of being unable to deal with reality. The professional middle would include Barack Obama and the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs. McKibben is understood to be within the professional left. 

McKibben received a "2010 Presidential Survey" on fourteen national issues that avoided any mention of physical realities across the earth, for instance, "that Moscow was shrouded in hot smoke, Pakistan was drowning, and a piece of ice roughly the size of A VERY LARGE THING NEAR YOU had broken off the Greenland ice shelf." Doesn't realistic normally include what is real?

I have begun to read this magazine at the beginning of my day. The authors in Orion speak about the earth. It is no stretch to say that they are grounded in reality. I want to be grounded there, too.