Repainting Our Lives
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Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by the later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. (Lillian Hellman, from Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, 1973)
Like the canvas in this passage, our life canvases carry all of our pictures, all of our story. Sometimes our earlier pictures show through, obvious to us and to the people around us. Our parents remember us as children; as our own children grow, we remember them in all their stages. Spouses remember each other as they were when they first met, when they first fell in love.
Sometimes the early pictures are not transparent to others, but they are there, in our own inner landscapes. Choices, fond memories and regrets mingle to form the final canvas. The child inside the elder is still there, somewhere.
There are so many images sketched on all of our hearts. Layer upon layer of them. One that always stands out for me is of an elderly gentleman I met many years ago during a hospital chaplaincy. He was in for some tests, but was not particularly sick. Bored, mostly. We had not had an opportunity to talk at any length until this one particular afternoon, when he asked me to sit down. I sat in the chair beside his bed, and he sat in his hospital gown on the side of the bed, legs dangling.
“Do you like being a chaplain?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“That’s good,” he said, “It’s good to be happy in your work.”
There was a pause.
“Tell me about your work,” I ventured.
There was a long pause, and then he stared directly into my eyes, his anguish
palpable. “I was a merchant of death,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said quietly.
“I was an engineer. I designed guided missile systems. I was good, too. But…” Another pause, and a deep breath. “I made a good living,” he continued. “Nice house, put my kids through college. They’re all teachers and social workers, you know. Very important work…. I did very well…. But.…” Another long pause; another deep breath.
“I remember toward the end, just before I retired. We had designed a new system, and were running a simulated test. Sure enough, the system worked, just as we planned. The bomb landed within ten feet of its target. And my whole team cheered. They cheered. And…I lost it,” he said. “I screamed at them: Stop it,
just stop it! We just killed people. You don’t cheer when you kill people.”
He swung his legs up on to the bed and lay back, lost in his thoughts.
A few moments later his granddaughter walked into the room, a young adult, recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in social work, and the gentleman transformed right before my eyes. The cloud disappeared, and his face was radiant with joy and pride and love as he introduced us.
I excused myself, but that image has stayed with me all these years—the simultaneous anguish and pride painted on that gentleman’s countenance, his canvas. A personal canvas that held those two pictures—a job that provided a good living, that launched his children and through them his grandchildren into work that will better humanity. And a career that also provides him distress and sorrow as he looks back on his life. The cloud and the glory, simultaneously. Pentimento. Repentance.
Repentance is, after all, a theological word for the deliberate choice to change. To paint a new picture on the canvas of our lives. Isn’t that the way most of our lives work? Layer upon layer as we walk forward making our choices and changing our minds. Repainting…repenting….
We never know how many times we will be given the opportunity to make different choices. All we know is that we can make new and different choices as we journey along. We can repent.
Repent. What a charged word! We don’t hear it much in the secular world, and rarely in Unitarian Universalism. In fact, I grew up thinking it was a joke. I only ever saw it in cartoons, where ratty-looking bearded men in robes carried signs saying, “Repent, ye sinners!” We, after all, were UUs! Sometimes it seemed that there was an underlying assumption that we would never have anything to repent from. Since we didn’t believe in sin, then, hey, we’re set!
But since then I’ve come to think it just might be a useful word. The way repent is used in our culture, its meaning has three distinct aspects:
First, it has to do with feeling remorse. And I mean to really, deeply feel and own regret, humiliation or shame for something you have done. Yes, all of those are very charged words. There is an element of despair in those difficult feelings. How, we might ask, can I ever fix this, make right the wrong that I have done or caused? How can I change what has already been done? When we have these feelings they touch our soul, and they sting. Even years later, when we remember the situation, those feelings come flooding back. They have left their mark on our canvas.
Then there is the second aspect of repentance. The cognitive decision never to do again the action that caused this anguish. There is movement from feeling to reason.
And the third part is action. To actually never again do the action that caused the anguish. In other words, to change, to transform. This includes, of course, recognizing a whole universe or set of actions that count under the umbrella of those from which to refrain. If cheating on a history test was cause for repentance, then the vow should cover cheating on other subjects, or on income taxes, and so on.
All the parts—the feelings right down to your toes, the decision to change and the actual change are equally important. The transformation that we are striving for is inside the deepest reaches of our being, a change in our soul, a link between feelings, will, and action.
It is life work that is never done, and in my opinion is not done in public. Soul work is done in private, although its effects are seen in public. I think some folks get this exactly backwards. Public figures say, “I have repented!” as though their transgression is never to be seen again on the canvas of their lives. Yet, in a way, this form of repentance is like being in recovery from an addiction. You are never fully
recovered; repentance is never completely over and done.
Our mistakes, our bad choices, our errors in judgment, even criminal activities are always with us. We can feel the remorse, and we can move on to make new and different choices, but the results can only be judged over a long time. And never solely by us. We have to do the work, but whether we have really changed will show in our lives—and that is about our relationships with others.
Maybe that is why repentance is such a difficult notion. We don’t want control to be taken away from us. We want to be able to say, “It’s over and done. It’s water under the bridge. I’ve changed.” Especially if we have. Because we do change, all the time. But our actions forever live with us—actions that went before and those from our changed selves as we go forward.
What I like about the pentimento image is that although the word shares a root with repentance, it directs our attention to a different place. It can spring us out of the dark and difficult connotations that I’ve been talking about. It helps us shift into the realm of opportunity to do things differently. It assures us that there is always an opportunity to paint a different picture. That there is always an opportunity to wake up and be transformed so that others will notice the difference, even though the old image is still with us.
Our awakenings happen over the course of our lifetimes. As years go by we change, sometimes just by virtue of having more experience, wider and deeper observations of the effects of our actions, a closer relationship to our deepest, most ultimate values.
That gentleman, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, so anguished about his career, also held a beautiful painting of his life through the values he passed on to his children and grandchildren. Perhaps even telling his story to me helped him come to terms with his life. His pentimento life.
We all have pentimento lives.
May we paint with care.
Previous research has included The Poetry, Politics, and Prophecy of Abby Hills Price (1998) a study of the Poet Lauriat of the Hopedale Community (1841-1856) founded by Adin Ballou; and Unitarian Universalist Ordination – a Search for Meaning, 2007. Her present research focuses on the Unitarian-Roman Catholic relationship in the early national period of American history. In this regard she delivered the 2016 Union Sunday sermon at First Unitarian in Baltimore, entitled Above the Harbor – Religious Freedom Rings in which she explored the connection between the Reverend Dr. William Ellery Channing and Bishop Jean Cheverus, First Bishop of Boston.
Before entering ministry, Rev. LaMar worked in the fields of human services and social justice (employment and training, anti-domestic violence, and health care) where she held management positions. She presently resides in Uxbridge, MA, where she reads, studies, writes, walks and awaits a call to another layer of paint on her canvas.
- Repainting Our Lives - January 1, 2017
