Still a Shadow in the Bottom

Cherry has washed that pot every day for eleven days.

It is the big one. The one that comes out for rice and peas on a Sunday and for soup when somebody is sick and for the whole of Christmas, and it has been in the family longer than she has, which is the reason she cannot let it alone.

There is a shadow in the bottom of it. A soft gray bloom, roughly the shape of Ireland, and she can see it in the daylight when she tips the pot toward the window.

She has used the green side of the sponge. She has used bicarb and a lemon half, which is what her mother says. She has used a thing she bought specially and then felt guilty about buying. Eleven days, and every evening she gets it out from under the sink and takes it to the window and tips it, and there it is.

Her mother comes on the Saturday, sits down at the table without being asked, and watches her do the whole ritual: the tipping, the peering, the little exhale.

Then she says, "Cherry. Bring it here."

She takes it. She holds it up and turns it. And she puts it down on the table and says:

"That is not dirt."

"Mummy, it is right there. Look at it."

"I am looking at it. That is not dirt, darling. That is where the pot is worn. Thirty-eight years of somebody stirring in the same place with a wooden spoon. You are not scrubbing a stain. You are scrubbing a scar, and you can scrub it till the aluminum goes and it will still be there, because it is not something on the pot. It is something that happened to the pot."

Then she picked up her cup and said, over the rim, "And it was mostly your grandmother that did it."

Now, listen to me carefully, because this is the exact shape of what you are doing.

You confessed the thing. You did. And then somewhere along the way you decided that the reason you still feel it must be that you only got the surface, and that underneath the thing you named there is a deeper thing, a root, a real cause, and that God is standing back with His arms folded waiting for you to locate it.

So you have been digging. Eleven days, or eleven years. And every time you go down there you find something, because a human interior always yields something to a person determined to find it, and the finding never once ends the searching.

Let me show you where the cleaning actually reached, because it went further than you have been told.

The blood was aimed at the conscience

The writer of Hebrews is comparing two systems, and when he names what the better one accomplishes, he does not say what you would expect.

How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?Hebrews 9:14

Read the object of that sentence. Not cleanse your record, though it does. Not cleanse your standing, though it does that too.

Cleanse your conscience.

The conscience itself was on the list. God did not deal with your file and leave you holding a permanently accusing interior as an unfortunate side effect. The accusing interior was named as part of the problem and included in the work, which means the thing you are experiencing tonight is not a gap in the cleaning. It is a place the cleaning is still arriving.

So hear it over you. You are cleansed in the very place you are worried about, and the blood of Christ was aimed precisely there, at the part of you that will not stop reporting. I am not softening that for you; it is written, and notice who the verse says did the offering. Through the eternal Spirit. The Holy Spirit was in that offering, and He is the one who carries its effect down into a conscience, and He is not standing back with His arms folded waiting for you to find anything.

Now let me teach you something, because you are a person who thinks, and a person who thinks deserves the mechanics and not just a hug.

There is a difference between guilt and shame, and your teachers may never have separated them for you.

Guilt says: I did a thing. It is specific, it names an act, and it can be answered, and it goes quiet when it is answered, because it was only ever asking for the act to be dealt with.

Shame says: I am a thing. It names no act, because it is not about an act. And that is why it cannot be answered by confession, however many times you go round, and why every trip down looking for the deeper root comes back with the same shapeless report.

You have been treating a shame that needs healing as a guilt that needs a better confession. And so you keep applying the one tool that cannot possibly work on it, and then reading the failure as evidence that the tool would work if only you dug harder.

Scripture says He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Binding is not scrubbing. A wound is not dirt. What is in the bottom of you may well be a mark of something that happened to you, and God does not treat a scar as a stain, and neither should the person carrying it.

So put the wire wool down.

You are not being asked to find a root. You are being asked to receive a cleansing that has already reached further in than you have. That is written and it is finished, and the eternal Spirit who was in the offering is the one applying it to the very interior you keep inspecting.

There was a man five hundred years ago who dug for the root for years, and confessed and confessed and could not find the bottom, and his own confessor eventually told him he was inventing sins. What ended it was not a deeper excavation. It was a sentence about a righteousness God gives, received rather than dug up, and the man spent the rest of his life telling terrified people that the bottom is Christ and not themselves.