In the Responsory for the Office of the Third Friday of Advent, we read: “For if one hopes, even though his tongue is still, he is still singing always in his heart. But the man who has no hope, no matter what clamors and shouts he makes to be heard by men, is speechless in the presence of God.” The virtue of hope requires that there be an object of hope, supplied by faith; otherwise we are locked into ourselves. The distance between singing in our hearts and empty, clamorous shouts is indeed infinite.
This response was based on a discourse on Psalm 37 by St. Augustine, whose whole life almost was an effort to articulate what was in his restless soul. Augustine observed poignantly:
There is a hidden anguish which is inaudible to men. Yet when a man’s heart is so taken up with some particular concern that the hurt inside finds vocal expression, one looks for the reason. And one will say to oneself: perhaps this is what causes his anguish, or perhaps such and such has happened to him. But who can be certain of the cause except God, who hears and sees his anguish?
We are almost incapable of imagining that our real anguish is not heard by someone. Indeed, St. Thomas in a way posited this realization as one of the needs we have for revelation itself — our incapacity to believe that our inner thoughts do not have a listener. On the other hand, if we lack hope, we exclude even this possibility, not from God’s side but from ours.
Not too long ago, I was at a Noon Mass at a university town in Virginia. It was in fact the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In his homily the priest explained, referring to the Confession at the beginning of Mass and relating it to the Feast, that we should be sorry for our “sinfulness.” I said to a friend later that this seemed wrong. We do not confess our “sinfulness” but our sins. If we think that what we actually confess is our state, original sin, then we make implicitly some sort of divine claim to redeem ourselves when we think our confession makes a difference. We acknowledge our sinfulness, our condition, no doubt, as an intellectual proposition, as a truth of the faith. But we do not substitute this doctrine for the confession of our sins as such, as if somehow our existence in the world were merely some sort of theological problem.
Boswell tells us that in 1779 he was not at all diligent in keeping his journals of Samuel Johnson. All that he had were scattered notes. Among these he found the following passage for Wednesday, March 31:
When I [Boswell] visited him [Johnson] I confessed an excess of which I had very seldom been guilty; that I had spent a whole night in playing at cards, and that I could not look back on it with satisfaction; instead of a harsh animadversion, he mildly said, “Alas, Sir, on how few things can we look back with satisfaction.”
Presumably the “excessive” playing of cards might have something to do with original sin. But insofar as confessing the situation to Johnson, what was important was Boswell’s own sense of disorder. Johnson’s response was one of strict orthodoxy. We look back with little satisfaction on things we actually did, not on abstract truths or theoretical propositions. This realization need not deprive us “singing in our hearts” when we hope, however, because hope does reach to the fact that sins can be forgiven but acknowledges that our “condition” will continue as long as we do.
Perhaps Jimmy Durante had it right. In his book Good Night, Mrs. Calabash, William Cahn recounted this incident:
In 1938 when Jimmy heard of a campaign to clean up his beloved Broadway, he protested: “Whata dey wanna go messin’ around for? Whatta dey wanna scrape up da choon gum offa da sidewalks for? Maybe dey wanna have a Park Avenoo over here instead of Broadway?
Leave it alone or it won’t be Broadway no more…. Don’t put no constrictions on da people.”
The other side of all of this sinful condition is that it is the condition we are in. If we put too many constrictions on the people, they will not be people. The effort to impose some sort of perfect order on us because few of us are satisfied with our actions is the real temptation. The “choon gum” will, alas, remain on lots of “da sidewalks.” The Christian answer is and always remains, not to remove sinfulness by ourselves, but to forgive sin in Christ.
St. Augustine was right: “there is a hidden anguish which is inaudible to men.” We will be “speechless in the presence of God” if we do not hope in Him. We are to be forgiven our sins even in our sinfulness. “Alas, Sir, on how few things can we look back with satisfaction.” “But who can be certain of the cause except God, who hears and sees our anguish?” “For if one hopes, even though his tongue is still, he is still singing always in his heart.” Between the playing cards and the “choon gum” there remains hope, provided we don’t want to move Park Avenue over to Broadway or confuse our sinfulness for our sins.