Holding People Close Despite Their Sins

Dear Friends,

Summertime is traditionally a time to dip into novels. Beach reading. Backyard, hammock reading.

I admit it. I do. One of the historical crime novelists I have been reading for years is Anne Perry. Many more years will pass before I locate and read currently unavailable selections from the more than one hundred books she wrote before her death in April of this year. Anne Perry created finely drawn characters in her crime solving stories set in Victorian Britain and during World War I. She dealt compassionately with ethical issues, the social, intellectual upheavals of the times in which her books are set. “Many of my fictional crimes are committed by characters who find themselves caught in a situation beyond their comprehension or control,” said Perry as quoted in Time magazine, April 24, 2023. “I know only too well how that can happen.”

The reason she knows the pathos of life’s critical involvements is because, as a teenager growing up in New Zealand, she was involved in the death of a friend’s mother. Anne Perry spent time in prison for her part in the death of Pauline Parker’s mother. By her thirties, Anne Perry was living in Scotland and had begun to write.

What do we do when we hear about this awful part of Anne Perry’s life? Do we figuratively burn her books? Do we condemn her whole life because she had done evil as a youth?

What would Jesus have us do? In His travels, Jesus met people who had done wrong or alienated those close to them. Yet, He had a way of holding people close despite what they had done. He looked into their hearts, saw their sorrow and forgave them. He invited them to build their lives anew. Jesus told stories about people who did wrong and showed how they were reconciled with those whom they hurt. Jesus’ one outstanding failure in His ministry of reconciliation was Judas, who refused to believe that God’s love was greater than his sin.

Reflecting on her own life as it evolved after her release from prison, Anne Perry says, “I hope I have profited from the whole experience…to seek redemption, to devote the rest of one’s life to becoming a more compassionate, more just, less judgmental person. To atone.” (Time magazine, April 24, 2023)

Those wounded by their own sin cannot come to be able to speak this way about their life without help.

I think of the solace shown in the prophet Ezekiel:
            I will take you away from among the nations…
            And bring you back to your own land.
            I will sprinkle clean water upon you…
            I will give you a new heart
            And place a new spirit within you…
            I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36.24-28 selected)

Did anyone read this passage for Anne Perry? She doesn’t say. But her works speak for her.

When you and I meet someone after they have “paid their dues,” do we gentle them into new life and encourage them to release their talent as a gift for the world?

~ Sister Joan Sobala