Feb 10: Is Redemption Possible? Can Estrangement Be The Highest Love?

Do you think people can be redeemed?

What even is redemption? That, I do not know. When I think of redemption, I usually think of someone who smeared a stain on their own character through some bad action. That their action corrupted their character, or a fall: Lucifer. I suppose the common idea of redemption is that the fallen angel, through personal struggle, ascends upwards beyond that stain.

But consider my father who beat me, kidnapped me, and abused me for a little over 11 years as a child. I am autistic, and, although I learned to be mostly acceptable as an adult, my differences were obvious as a child. He struck me, terrorized me, and threw me into furniture for being quiet. We were swimming at the YMCA, when I was about 6 years old, and I was overwhelmed, so I tried to whisper something to him rather than speak normally. He silently forced me out of the water: without speaking he brought me back to the car, put me in my booster seat, and punched me hard in my stomach.

"You're lucky, I can punch harder than that."

He turned the radio to max volume to drown my sobbing.

Can such a person be redeemed?

I would say no, but I also am the victim of his force. I have a biased frame.

I think I truly believe that a person's actions show you their capacity to harm. Maybe he could apologize for everything, maybe he could walk in detail why he hurt his own son, maybe he could beg for forgiveness and admit his depravity. But there is no redemption.

A fallen angel remains fallen.

At the very least, their corruption only gets a new gloss of paint.

My ex is a dangerous person, and at one point I mentioned this understanding of mine. And he asked me, "You don't think I'm capable of redemption?" To be polite, I lied and said yes.

He later fell back into his depravity.

Maybe a complication with this binary perspective is that some people harm and do terrible things as a reaction to their own struggles. My father was stressed after losing his job in the Global Financial Crisis. But harming another person to pass on your own depraved chasm as a mechanism of relief? Harming a relationship with the other, the same bridge that signals inexplicable creation, is never okay.

Even harming another under duress is abhorrent. You harm someone because you couldn't manage your own emotions? Do you not care?

I am guilty of the above at times. My own stain.

It's so depressing how little people care for the other.

I don't think people ever can be redeemed beyond 'person who is capable of X.'

Maybe in some sense rehabilitation could be possible. People can be trained and educated towards a new direction away from their Fall. But it's not like that changes their fundamental being (ontology)… I think rehabilitation is the highest possible state in the moral realm.

Reconciliation under these premises is tricky, for me at least. It's not like I can ever unsee your capability. I wrote in another writing:

If your love includes atrocity, you can keep your love.

Pure acid.

My friend accidentally implied horrific things about my appearance last year. He didn't mean it in the way it was delivered. He expressed genuine guilt and sorrow. I left the social world for about three days. At least here I could reconcile our relationship, because he seemed to care beyond his own frame. I still remember it, and I won't forget his capability, but in some sense it feels better knowing he truly didn't mean it.

My mother abandoned me twice in my life, despite me only knowing her twice. As a child, she never excercised her legal right to see me, so I was stuck with a monster that terrorized his own child every day. As an adult, I tried to form a meaningful connection and let her see me, my inner world, in an act of vulnerability: and she sent me a message saying "You win." She interpreted my own struggles, including details of the night I rode a bicycle to a local bridge, in the language of games.

There is no reconciliation from that.

Maybe reconciliation, for me, depends on to what extent it feels they desecrated my own humanity. I think I can't reconcile people who reduce me to a thing.

Sounds reasonable. But many people would call me cruel, that I owe her something. I don't owe her anything other than recognition of her own humanity, which is the highest obligation (Weil), for the only difference between her and other women is that of contingency.

I'm sure my love feels cruel.

But to what extent should I care of that if I am only responsible for that highest obligation?

Our consciousness (computational reducer) folds over things like 'David is my brother' (event log), and that creates their own complicated universe. In their universe, they may interpret my silence or my absence as something painful. But I did not create that world. In fact, my own universe may interpret the same 'abandonment' as the highest form of love. See this question in my California writing:

I remember wondering on the drive, "If I place reduction of harm as the foundational premise of my life, but my presence causes my mom pain, then is the loving response to disapear?"

As I wrote in my writing about man's contract with God:

God abandoned this world; God abandoned every human. Love from his perspective, total abandonment from the human perspective.

In this sense, I must accept that my father felt justified in his actions at my expense. This is an impersonal fact devoid of moral judgement. It simply is: it simply happened. Any extended anguish is from my own frame.

In disagreements of what constitutes my obligations to another, I would say I'm not responsible for the collision of our ideals. Such a thing is the root of most interpersonal struggle.

Why should I ever feel subservient to an external obligation if I orient my life towards recognizing human dignity in everyone…

As I wrote in Moral Purity:

Lord, I can only believe that all that is truly good must be impersonal. Grace has the capability to descend and fill the void of any person, at any moment, and it is not contingent. If the church claimed that “Jesus died for our sins”, that would be impersonal. If the church claimed that “Jesus died for our sins, but atheists will perish in hell”, that would be personal. All that is truly good is indivisible.

What can be more good than the highest obligation, free of contingent circumstance?