Repent at Leisure

With neither joy nor penitence

In these lethargic times, the one

And only laugh that still makes sense

Comes from a grinning skeleton.

—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro

❦

Taylor Swift released an album last month, Midnights, her tenth (not counting the two rerecorded versions of earlier albums that she has made as part of an intellectual property battle). Taylor Swift album releases are major events in popular culture and have become major events in my own life as well, since I’m only liking her work more and more as she, like me, slowly passes out of early adulthood. The 2020 Folklore/Evermore diptych solidified me as a superfan for life—which can’t be said for everyone who loved those albums, because they hadn’t necessarily liked her earlier albums too, whereas I had—and I was excited about Midnights because I heard it was going to be in a confessional register and confession, penitence, regret, and admission are concepts that I think about a great deal. Sure enough, the album is packed full of lyrics dealing in shockingly overt terms with things Swift, or Swift’s narratorial voice, has done wrong in her life, ranging from emotionally manipulating her listening public, to infidelity in an intimate relationship, to liking money. (Strict theology would reverse the order of the first two in an ascending ranking of severity, although all three would be very bad.) Much of the album’s sound exists mostly as a distracting smokescreen to disguise the jaw-dropping candidness of what she is actually saying, as do some of the specific lyrical flourishes; at one point she cops to what I suspect is a dead-serious Baudelairean conviction that she is going to hell when she dies, but she frames it as part of a tongue-in-cheek du Maurier-esque narrative about an imaginary inheritance dispute.

This brief essay isn’t intended as an essay about Taylor Swift, although I could write about her for several pages at a time if I wanted to—as, I suspect, could most competent living writers who follow popular music. It’s intended as an essay about the public aspect of penitence, the part of a process of making amends where we actually tell other people what we did wrong. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—nobody needs to know about that one time you masturbated to dodgy early-2000s hentai, other than arguably a confessor or spiritual director, and even then the details are probably a bit too much. Oftentimes, however, a public and communal dimension to penitence should or even must exist, either because the immoral acts harmed a community or because the penitent needs some kind of green light from other people before accepting that the moral crisis that she precipitated has been resolved. I’ve often thought that the medieval Church’s transition from Mediterranean-style large public airings of grievances to Celtic-style private confessions was at best a mixed blessing. Part of the reason for this is probably cultural (as a product of a mixed Italian-American and American Jewish family background myself, I recognize my extended family very readily in Seinfeld’s famous Festivus episode), but I think there is a serious sociological and theological argument to be made for confession as a more public and collective act as well. God judges nations as well as people; surely the intermediate formations of human life—the parish, the town, the diocese, the county—should have some means of putting wrongs aright as well.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know the difference between publicly admitting wrongdoing and oversharing about things in which nobody is interested. This can be true even when it comes to wrongdoing that did hurt other people in obvious and publicly noticeable ways. As an example I’ll share something about myself that does not make me look very good, just as “scheming….to make them love me” does not make Taylor Swift very good and running a company that “stinks” because he is someone who “couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if [he] had a hot date with a babe” did not make George Costanza’s boss look very good. I, in my teens and into my early twenties, had an exceptionally poor understanding of conversational boundaries, especially around subjects like sexual desire. While this at no point went beyond words, my struggles with verbal boundaries and understanding when I was testing them cost me several close friendships over the years. I finally realized and amended my behavior when this had happened enough unrelated times that it was no longer reasonable to deny that I was the person at fault. (“I’m the problem! It’s me!” Swift sings in one of the songs on the new album.) The reason I’m bringing this up is, again, by way of example—it’s been several years, thankfully, since this problem arose in my life, and I’ve either managed to repair or accepted the loss of my relationships with the friends with whom I had it in the past. That being the case, is my bringing it up out of nowhere in an essay like this an admirable spontaneous admission of wrongdoing and desire to reform, or is it unsettling oversharing and dredging up old news to fish for sympathy and attention? At least in my mind it’s clearly the former, which is why I am writing about it, but the reader does not have access to my innermost thoughts and thus can only take my word for that.

A higher-stakes public example might be the French Catholic prelate Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who earlier this month came forward as a sexual abuser without anybody having publicly accused him. Did Ricard have a genuine case of conscience, or was he trying to position himself as having a perverse sort of moral authority? Not even all of Ricard’s colleagues within the Catholic hierarchy seem confident that they can tell the difference, and Catholic bishops are not generally credited with a habit of second-guessing other Catholic bishops’ morals. At the very least Ricard’s approach leaves a somewhat better taste in my mouth than the retired Bishop of Albany Howard Hubbard asking to be laicized as a general application of a rule despite vociferously denying the allegations against him, even though Hubbard is probably setting a better precedent for the Catholic Church. Then again, might this itself be because I used to admire Hubbard very much and thus feel more betrayed and disillusioned by the strong possibility that he’s a sex criminal? It often happens that our motives for how we receive an attempt to atone for wrongdoing are as mysterious to ourselves as our motives for attempting to atone in the first place are to our fellows.

I don’t think that going back to collectively and communally “acknowledging and bewailing our manifold sins and wickednesses,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer, himself someone who did many horrible things in his life and had many horrible things done to him in turn, would actually solve those mysteries. It might diffuse them somewhat and make them easier to bear, in the same way that I am able to think about Cardinal Ricard and Bishop Hubbard more or less at my leisure but would feel much more call to dwell on and perseverate on equivalent conversations if people were having them with me in private. Even so, taking the process of working through wrongdoing and making it the public’s or the community’s business is not something to do or to advocate lightly. For long years rural areas in several Western European countries had a custom called rough music or charivari, in which people guilty of crimes against social and familial order, such as adultery or domestic violence, were shamed in loud public processions rather than being turned over to the courts. (The title of this essay comes from a proverb about bad marriages.) Even though the aesthetic of this practice appeals to me and even though there is a lot to recommend public shaming over against (say) sending people to prison for years, rough music was a form of lynch law at its core.

Yet not every public confession of wrongdoing or public airing of grievances must involve as stark and extreme an intervention in someone’s life as charivari. If a society does make penitence and atonement everybody’s business, it provides paths to actual reintegration in a web of moral actors that simply letting guilt gnaw at individuals in private does not. It is worth applying a renewed emphasis to this at least in liturgical penitential contexts, and I would argue in secular contexts as well. For that renewed emphasis to be workable in secular settings the practice of whipping up ideologized online hate mobs would probably need to have a stake driven through its heart first, but that is itself what people used to call a win-win.

This is where I would like to, by way of a pithy and topical envoi, say “if you’ve never told anyone to commit suicide for disagreeing with you about what fictional characters should have sex with each other, you’ve nothing to fear.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true—there is always a great deal to fear in this world, and especially a great deal to fear when it comes to confiding and being vulnerable around other people in their multitudes. I would submit, however, that letting that fear rule us, letting it induce constant defensiveness to the point of privatization of sin, has led us places that are even worse by far.