Sunday Morning Meds--Hidden Faults

St. Mark's Church, Rome

“. . .clear thou me from hidden faults” 

Psalm 19:12

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass in my backyard, thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me that some lingering memory in me will not let die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there is something of shock, anger, envy, and pain. And the incident happened two decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was quite unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. She cried for an entire day, nearly refused to go back to school, and wouldn’t eat. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did—she’d once a middle school girl.

Why that incident rises specter-like from my mowing a certain section of backyard is Hitchcockian, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable—it’s anger, rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid and her parents, and that hate apparently found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to high school, college, marriage, a career, and mother of three
beautiful kids. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do our friends, themselves just as proud grandparents as we are. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father by a memory I don’t even control. Makes no sense.

Not long ago I was visiting a classroom where students were required to read some fiction I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned, as fully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories were like turning back the pages in an emotional journal I don’t actually keep but is nonetheless mysteriously kept for me by something in my mind or my heart or my soul—I don’t know which.

Maybe I’m going too far here. Maybe what David intends in this prayerful petition is simply that the Lord clean out those sins he’s not aware of, those sins of omission. We all have those too, at least I do.

But when I become captive of some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit, and of the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, even in our own minds and hearts.

Whatever’s there, David begs, clean it up. Whatever I’m forgetting or missing or not acknowledging, make it shine, Lord. Forgive me. That’s what’s he’s saying.