Done Becoming A Good Person

This is probably the silliest possible way to start, but it's been a weird day, so I'm going to go ahead with it.

In the finale of a brilliant show that went off the rails at the end, a character tells an old love interest making a guest appearance that maybe they'll get back together somewhere down the road, but she's "cookie dough" and then goes on to extend the metaphor to needing to grow up a bit first.  To which a critic took issue: you're never "done" growing up, becoming a person.

Heck, I may be the adult in the rehearsal room, but ask me to do my considerably overdue expenditure requests and I turn into a sullen teenager avoiding her homework.

I think there's a similar impulse to "finish" becoming a good person.  To have one big gesture or so many years of dedicated service or a strong enough record that if you mess up, you're still overall, in the balance, a good person.

Like the old idea of indulgences that grant pre-forgiveness for crimes yet uncommitted, which I was not terribly surprised to learn was a myth.  Or rather a cunning plot device I never ran through the internal censor to realize the novel was being ridiculous (Phillip Pullman, for the record, not Dan Brown).

And maybe that's natural, especially when you believe in the punishment for tilting in the opposite direction.

But the truth is that the saints didn't have a completely broken sense of their own virtue versus culpability.  The ones on their deathbeds panicking about not doing enough good or castigating themselves figuratively, literally, privately, publicly just understood -- you can't just be good in one big gesture or build up enough of a store of heavenly gestures that no amount of sin could burn it to the ground again.

They understood that you had to keep striving, keep doing good, keep working hard.  That they hadn't finished the hard work of being a good person every day.  The continually raising standard.  Who you are now should never be good enough to you.  I'm not saying you should hate yourself, feel inferior, never be satisfied with your surroundings.

I'm saying that deep in your soul, you have to know that the work is never done.  The Old Testament is blunt about it.  The evil one who repents will fare better than the good person who falls.  Even if they stayed in their first state longer, which may seem unfair on the face of it.  But the truth is that you are judged, each moment, by who you are NOW.

So you can't "finish" becoming a good person.  There's always more to do.  Always someone to reconcile with, as Jesus tells us.  Always some good out in the world that you need to do in order to be ready to offer sacrifice to God.  Always a reason to leave the altar, the public altar where you have come for the offered respect you have earned, to do actual, active good in the world.  Because that's where it's hard to be a good Christian and a good person.

It's easy on retreat or in church or in the midst of prayer.  It's so much harder out the world.  But you can't just be done.  You have to do the work at all times, not only when it comes naturally.