Daniel's palpable discomfort grows into barely controlled outrage as calculating Eli Sunday lists Daniel's well-known business practices, throwing in a few likely (but invented) sins for good measure as his voice rises and he begins to circle his victim. When the parson begins to harp on Daniel's most gross and personal failing--his decision to send his adopted son off to a boarding school following an oil explosion that eliminated the boy's hearing--the entire tenor of Daniel's confession changes. Up to this point, he has blandly agreed with every indictment cast at him, repeating Eli's leading: "I am a sinner . . . I am sorry, Lord . . . I want the blood." When Eli returns to the words "you have abandoned your son," however, Daniel relives his frustrating inability to comfort and connect with his deaf son and the difficult decision which followed, and begins to shout "I've abandoned my child . . . I've abandoned my boy!"

For the briefest instant, Daniel becomes both totally transparent and incredibly aware of his sinfulness. He feels the error of his behavior, and displays unfeigned grief. Eli quickly follows up with his standard riff on the repentant man's need for the blood of Christ, however, and Daniel snaps out of his epiphany, reverting to mechanical agreement with rhetoric he does not understand.

This missed opportunity is never regained. Of all Parson Sunday's many failures, this is his greatest, that he privileges fleeting spectacle over long-term transformation. He misses the opportunity--with Daniel as with others--to pair the moment of confession with true, lasting repentance that recognizes one's sinfulness and need for redemption. The figurative blood with which Eli douses Daniel covers but does not penetrate him, forcing Daniel to recognize his sin while withholding knowledge of what he should do with the resulting guilt. Stuck in this moment of horrible self-knowledge unsoftened by grace, Daniel Plainview becomes a harder and more violent man, and tragedy ensues.

For many, not only does cognizance of God's love never come, neither does the emotional, crucible-like experience of one's own degeneracy. For the self-assured, facing one's sinfulness constitutes life's single greatest challenge.

* * *

Tracey and I recently watched a streamed episode of Battlestar Galactica in which the recurring problem that is Gaius Baltar decides to preach a celebration of the human to his desperate, gullible disciples. For some odd complex of reasons, Gaius promotes the very ideology he rejected earlier in the episode, and his followers eat it up. He declares that the one true God's love of those He has created presupposes that they are complete and perfect just the way they are. His listeners dissolve into tears of joy and relief.

I have suggested elsewhere that the biggest bone modern society has to pick with Christianity is its odd admixture of celebration and regulation when it comes to human sexuality, but I think the more profound difficulty many modern day non-believers have is recognizing the very notion of sin as anything more than a construct born of fear. It is so much easier to assume, like Gaius' followers, that we are basically fine the way we are. Perhaps the primary obstacle lying between most people and recognition of the Divine is the troubling idea that a God truly interested in our wellbeing could want us to dramatically regulate our thoughts and behavior. The possibility that there is a mystical component to our actions, that our decisions move not only mass but a more spiritual kind of muscle, opens the doorway to all kinds of uncomfortable experiences like guilt, shame, and repressed desire. The Christian, of course, claims that such repulsion is a necessary but provisional state intended to be razed by the absolute pressure of God's grace and love. To many, however, this intervening state of abject humility and conviction constitutes too high a cost to their pride. They would rather risk the possibility of there being no God to beginning the uncomfortable process of self-evaluation required for penitence.

This unwillingness to introspect often accompanies a profound discomfort with the intense emotional display linked with confession in the public imagination. Literary types who have turned their backs on the church like to take aim at this dramatic moment in the traditional evangelical service, that public, post-sermon period when the convicted are invited to confess their sinfulness publicly and call on God for divine grace. The narrator of Langston Hughes's "Salvation" (1940) concludes there is no God after being coerced into confession by a chanting congregation, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) examines the intense but very temporary life change that follows a young man's encounter with a hellfire and brimstone sermon, and the nineteenth-century revival messages of Jonathan Edwards get taught by modern literature instructors more interested in the rhetorical strategy and richly metaphorical language of Edwards' sermons than their moral urgency.

Hardened hearts tend to reject the emotional self-indictment of a spiritual confession as the product of self-induced hysteria or psychological coercion. Presumably, such intense feelings should be reserved for pitiable victims or personal catastrophes: they have no place in an educated adult's rational self-evaluation. As for the behaviors themselves--the "sins" decried by the Bible--they are but the inevitable aromas wafting forth from a stew of genes and circumstance, of instinct and society. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Some of us might even be considered error-prone or morally clumsy. To consider ourselves, however, as not just flawed but profoundly broken and in need of divine repair is to turn our view of the world on its head.

Which is exactly what Christ intended to do.