I have done wrong, and I have tried to forget it. To play it down, to hush it up, to put it out of my mind. I secretly justified myself before my own conscience: This is nothing big after all; they all do it anyway; I was helpless, and what else could I have done? Let us forget it, and the memory of it will pass away, the sooner the better.

But the memory did not pass away. I felt sad and disturbed. The more time passed, the sharper the pang in my conscience became. My attempt at hiding from myself my own wrongdoing succeeded only in making me feel unhappy and miserable.

“While I refused to speak my body wasted away...;
the sap in me dried up
as in summer drought.”

I felt dissatisfied with myself and angry at my own weakness. There was something hanging in my past, an unhealed wound, an unfinished chapter, an unalloyed guilt. I had swallowed poison and it was still in me spreading its baleful influence to my whole organism in despondency and frustration. I could bear it no longer.

“Then I declared my sin,
I did not conceal my guilt.
I said: With sorrow I will confess
my disobedience to the Lord.”

I made a clean breast of it before myself and before you, Lord, I accepted my responsibility, I owned up, I confessed. And at once I felt on me the favour of your countenance, the touch of your healing, the relief of your pardon. And I exclaimed in my new joy:

“Happy the man whose disobedience is forgiven,
whose sin is put away!
Happy is a man when the Lord lays no guilt to his account,
and in his spirit there is no deceit.”

I want for me from you, Lord, the grace of transparency. To be transparent to myself and to you, and so to all men and women with whom I deal. To have nothing to hide, nothing to disguise, nothing to gloss over in my behaviour and in my thoughts. I want to put an end to the shadows in my soul, or rather to accept them as shadows, to own them, to take myself as I am, dark spots and all, and as such to appear before my own gaze and that of all men and that of your own majesty, my Judge and my Lord.

Let me know myself, and let others know me as I am. Let me be honest, sincere and candid. Let me be transparent in my lights and in my shadows. And the blessing of reality will offset in me the stain of fallibility.

“Happy is the man in whose spirit there is no deceit!”