The day I met the devil in a dime store

I mean you no disrespect, and I say this with all gentleness, but this story contains something that’s an example of why I’m not Catholic. I agree that when God is abandoned, that brings emptiness, and that this is what the Devil wants for people.

But like others have said here, this woman’s view of her act of restitution troubles me. And specifically, this:

“I had confessed regret to my God and made a generous, if anonymous, restitution, and the gaping mouth of emptiness so eager to swallow me had been resolutely snapped shut.”

I just cannot see, in a Christian sense, someone saying that their monetary restitution for a theft was “generous.” I believe that’s self-praise and self-deceptive. That theft was quite a chunk of change in 1965, and who knows if someone else suffered for that theft, for example. Maybe someone else got blamed for that fan’s loss - perhaps the shopkeeper’s child.

I was just looking at how Bruce Jenner settled a lawsuit in the death he caused on a California freeway. It was probably a “generous” settlement, but that doesn’t restore the life lost.

And that’s an important point about sin that God forced us to see through Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden (which God foreknew): sin breaks something irrevocably, and it causes death ultimately. In a spiritual sense, there is no restitution for it that people can perform, which is why for disobeying God’s express command (the essence of ALL sin), Adam and Eve were given a death sentence, and we’ve received that sentence through them as well, in that we have their same nature, to disobey God. The only restitution, eternity-wise, is through God’s sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Not that attempts at some restitution shouldn’t be done, but they can not unbreak what someone’s sin has broken. And it is not just that our sin always injures other people somehow, but that it is always against God.

When we still had a k-mart in town, one of my daughters lifted one of the monopoly pieces from a box.

We discovered it in the van going home, and my husband turned around and escorted her back into the k-mart to return the piece to the manager.

I think she was 6 or 7 at the time, too.

I just cannot see, in a Christian sense, someone saying that their monetary restitution for a theft was “generous.” I believe that’s self-praise and self-deceptive. That theft was quite a chunk of change in 1965, and who knows if someone else suffered for that theft, for example. Maybe someone else got blamed for that fan’s loss - perhaps the shopkeeper’s child.

You're overthinking this. The adult author is reflecting on a moment in childhood. From that perspective, leaving 25 cents for a 10 cent item is most generous, in the mind of a child. To compare the mindset of a 7 year old with that of Bruce Jenner is quite a stretch. However, had the child not responded to her sense of guilt, she might well have gone in the opposite direction and justified it by thinking it was openly displayed and ripe for picking. Once that process begins, it escalates over time.

Well, again, I mean you, a Catholic, no disrespect. Over the time I’ve been participating here on the Religion Forum, I’ve come to think that we Protestants, myself included, haven’t shown enough of God’s grace in our discussions and debates with Catholics. I’m not speaking for all the other Protestants, but for myself, and making that observation. Again, with myself included, I don’t think we’ve often been representing Christ well in that most important regard, and discussing things as we should, with all the love and patience we should have towards you Catholics here.

To get back to this essay, I’m just going to try to explain what I’m pointing out. This still illustrates to me a critical difference between Catholic and Protestant belief like few things I’ve come across have. It’s not usually very easy to really separate the two since in so many ways the two are very similar. Even on the so-called matter of “faith versus works,” Catholic belief has a manner of faith, and Protestant belief has a manner of works.

So now that you’ve given me your opinion and perspective on this author’s remarks, I’ll give you mine in response.

While it’s true the author is discussing a childhood experience, it is, as you say, the adult author, someone in their fifties, who is doing the reflecting. God has given us the capacity to reflect on our past, and to either still agree, or to disagree, with how we saw something in the past. For many situations, we might agree with some things we thought, and disagree with others.

It’s clearly, too, her analysis, according to her present idea of Catholic theology. Mature adults of all different beliefs - Catholic, Protestant of different sects, as well as Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and atheist, to name some - might have a similar story to tell, in a similar way, relating this tale in order to illustrate their belief system in action. But each one, despite the similarity of the story, would provide different lessons about it, according to his belief system.

And this essay is primarily for adults (those who have reached the point of adult responsibility) as well.

It’s apparent to me, then, that this author, now fifty years removed from the incident, believes today that she “overpaid” the shopkeeper by leaving a quarter for a ten-cent item.

Check the paragraph in question, in which she says that what she did was generous. There are four possibilities for who believes she was being generous to have left that quarter: herself the child in 1965, herself the adult today, BOTH, or NEITHER. Right off the bat we know the answer clearly isn’t neither. And from what she’s written, it’s not even clear that she thought she was being generous when she left the quarter in 1965. She says she didn’t consider things like “fairness” then. And she talks a lot about being distressed over the theft. She doesn’t seem to include a memory of her thinking in 1965 something like, “this is a generous thing to do.” What is clear, however, is that the adult writing today, and looking back, thinks that she was being generous in 1965 to have left a quarter and to have “overpaid” the shopkeeper. She suggests that if she had known then what she later learned about “fairness,” she would have realized that she was short-changing herself by leaving that much:

“It was not a perfectly balanced redemption; it left me cleansed, but out 15 cents. But I had not yet explored the vagaries of fairness.”

Translation: Her restitution wasn’t an equal transaction. She believes it did cleanse her - because she paid the ten cents, the cost of the stolen item - but in the course of doing so, she paid 15 cents more than she should have. But, alas, she didn’t know about “fairness” then - so after “short-changing” the shopkeeper by stealing from him, she “short-changed” herself in trying to make things right.

The Bible, though, even talks of restitution in some cases being more than the value of the item stolen or wrongfully destroyed. And what about the matter of punishment? This wasn’t an issue of the value of the item, but of sinning, of stealing, and of receiving the proper punishment for that.

A parent, the shopkeeper, or the authorities might have demanded punishments far in excess of ten cents, in monetary terms, for stealing a ten-cent item. Perhaps she might have been required to do some work for the shopkeeper for a week, or even a month - as punishment for stealing the ten-cent fan, and few just people would have thought such punishment “unfair.”

Punishment-wise, she got off quite easy with only paying an extra 15 cents, and not having to suffer any other likely consequences, such as might have happened if she’d been caught or had confessed to anyone outside of her priest.

And in her thinking here, I do see Catholic theology at work. There are 660 words in this essay, but Jesus, Christ and Lord aren’t among them. There are plenty of religious words that have an association to Jesus, Christ and Lord, such as God, “First Holy Communion,” church, priest, Rosary, the Ten Commandments, bless, Father, but association isn’t the same thing as Jesus Christ Himself being mentioned.

The most profound simplicity is another part of God’s divine genius, and the simplicity that is missing here is the simplicity of the Gospel:

Our wretchedness as sinners -> our need for Jesus Christ, God’s plan of love and mercy for our salvation.

There is simply no mention of that most simple but most profound truth. Again, it is there indirectly in some associations, but there’s no denying that it’s not there directly and simply. And for me, the absence of any mention of Jesus Christ and the Good News is most telling.