That was one of the questions at Saddleback, and McCain just flat out answered it – the way he failed in his first marriage. How many of us, I wonder, have the courage to go on television and give that clear a statement? Its on my mind a bit now – of course, the first thing I have to do is go through that mental Rolodex O’ Errors and try to sift down decades of sin into something which is clearly a great moral failure. In the context McCain used, it would have to be something I did which I knew in advance was the wrong thing to do, and yet I went right on and did it, anyways; or something that you know you should of done, but you slunk away from it like a coward. Its one thing to acknowledge in public one is a sinner (heck, from time to time we Catholics even do that in Church – “I confess to you, Almighty God and you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned…”), but there is a gulf between a generalised statement of error and a specific acceptance of responsibility for failure.
Among my errors, I have these two things which weigh upon my mind:
1. Back when I was in the Navy, I stumbled across an attempted racial discrimination against a shipmate, and did nothing about it. Just happened to go into the room just as two very senior white enlisted men were in the process of attempting to screw out of a plumb assignment a black shipmate in favor of a white shipmate. I can take the excuse of youth, but that really doesn’t cut it – I should have done something specific about it, but I didn’t. The screwing failed, probably on account of my interruption of it, but that doesn’t lessen my failure an iota.
2. For very many years, I refused to forgive members of my family for their many failings, as if I were perfect and not in need of forgiveness, too.
As noted, there are many other errors – but my sins of commission pale in comparison, at least in many cases, with my sins of omission. You wish you could go back in time and do it right – but, you can’t; while your sins can be forgiven, they can’t be unmade. Always better to strive to get it right from the start, and forgive those around you who fail, because if you didn’t fail today, then its really more a matter of God’s grace rather than any perfection on your part.
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