Blameless Life

Blameless Life

Once, I thought I should never have pain, and that the so-called “life properly lived” should be devoid of grief.

There is a Christian prayer about dying blameless. To me that meant never doing anything wrong, so this was my goal: to live blamelessly, perfectly, acclaimed as worthy by self and others.

Never mind that only the truly saintly or the incurably dishonest could ever boast of accomplishing such a feat. Most people progress through ever escalating levels of self-deception until finally reaching a condition of desperate resignation, when the futility of achieving the euphoric, happy life of sinless perfection becomes patently obvious.

In my own story such a dismal day eventually dawned. The burden of an un-integrated, inauthentic existence became too great.


Then grief opened its flood gates and flowed like a river – or rather like a storm sewer. But still I mistook the benefit of pain and conceived its purpose as being to slap me upside the head with condemnations about being a schmuck and failure.

It was a wakeup call, like pricking one’s finger accidentally on a humongous blackberry thorn. An excruciating - but transient - phenomenon intended to make absolutely clear how screwed up and blameful one’s life really was.

I believed that if what was wrong could be turned around and made right, grief would have served its baleful but necessary purpose and could reasonably be expected to disappear forever into the wastebasket of time.

Therefore I was constantly trying to fix things – myself most of all, but other people as well. I strove to rectify past mistakes, atone for sins, plead forgiveness . . . in short, to find that theoretically possible blameless life so as to feel better.

But the pain didn’t abate. Instead it grew deeper and more constant. Like acid, it kept eating into my beliefs.

Until at last I could no longer visualize a blameless life as proceeding from correct moral conduct. It arose instead from a pure heart, emptied through agony of its selfness and selfishness.

Then grief became my friend, a comforting presence for which my heart longed as lungs thirst for a breath of air. Pain was experienced as life itself, life rising from death, proof of the vibrancy of existence.

It was not something to be endured, escaped or ended, but rather embraced and welcomed.

Even loved.