The formal term for that undeniable and oftentimes frustrating tendency toward sin is concupiscence. Saint Augustine, in fact, in his Confessions uses the term to refer to sinful lust, and he would know. Before he came to Christ, Augustine lived the life of a prodigal jumping from sexual adventure to sexual adventure. His appetite was large, but soon enough, he learned that being steeped in so much sin was its own punishment. A depraved world begets a depraved mind and soul. Like chewing gum in a child’s hair, it is bugger to remove. A person’s only recourse is to shine a light on it. Name it. Own it. In short, confess it.
This, of course, helps to explain the sacrament of reconciliation. Unconfessed sin is sin that festers and even grows. In my Protestant days, I would confess in prayer; once I became Roman Catholic, I began to confess to a priest, and let me hasten to say, owning one’s sin before another human being who is acting in persona Christi is quite different from offering them up on one’s own, as it were. The accountability is instant but on its heals is the forgiveness. Penance and love go hand in hand.
I mention all of this to angle, in a special way, into Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story, “The Lottery.” This unsettling tale centers on a yearly tradition held in a village of some 300 citizens. Each adult pulls a slip of paper from an old black box in the town square. If the slip of paper is blank, then the person is off the hook. There is one slip of paper, however, that has a black dot on it. The person who chooses this slip of paper will be stoned to death. In the short story, that person is Tessie Hutchison who had shown up late because she had forgotten that this had been the day of the lottery. The last line is haunting: “ ‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchison screamed, and then they were upon her.” A community that, in almost all senses, appeared clean-cut and civilized made barbarism a yearly tradition. If you have seen the movie The Purge, you have seen a variation of Jackson’s short story.
But it is not the annual murder that is troubling so much as it is the fact that the reader is forced to wrestle with his or her own animal nature. Concupiscence. That proclivity that reminds us that we may not be as noble as we would like to be. That appetite we keep under wraps in polite company. We all know what it is, and we all know to keep it unsaid. “The Lottery” is powerful because it points directly toward a blemish in our very constitution. The citizens in the story do not turn a blind eye toward it; they embrace it for what it is and institute a tradition that acts as a safety valve: a mechanism to let off steam and maintain harmony. Their reality is harsh, but it is true. This is really who we are.
While we may not be engaging in a yearly lottery to determine who in our community must be stoned to death, we do find releases in other ways: violent movies, violent video games, violent sports, violent rhetoric on social media. We have built an entire society around these forms of expression, making it very difficult, indeed, to judge the characters in Jackson’s short story; however, the sour aftertaste remains. The issue persists. We cannot escape our nature, yet we find issue with its unsavory part. What is to be done?
Perhaps the dynamic in the confessional holds the answer. We confess the results of our nature, and in the forgiveness that follows, we are called to a higher plane. God sees more in us than we see in ourselves.
When one of my kids does something wrong, I know it is in their nature to do so occasionally. What I delight in is when my child comes to me despite that error. The error does not separate; the error draws us closer together. I see more in them than they see in themselves.
We turn, then, to Jackson’s vision of humanity and, perhaps, our vision of ourselves right now. Jackson’s characters are not called to a higher plane; they are left to indulge their concupiscence. Are we who surround ourselves with violence like them? Or should we aspire to a higher level, a different version of who we could be? Jackson’s story is dystopian without a doubt. What, then, does confession do but remove all black dots.
https://fullreads.com/literature/the-lottery/
