“Thou shalt offer a sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in righteousness, even that of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” (D&C 59:8). For every misstep, error, mistake, transgression, sin, or rebellion that we commit, a compelling case can be made either that we brought this on ourselves through our own prideful or foolish or malevolent choices and actions, or that we were merely trying to do the best that we could and circumstances beyond our control impeded our ability to make wise and righteous choices. If we had known better, we would have done better, we might say, and I believe that in many cases this is correct. Hurt people often hurt people. Broken people often break things. So many of us are staggering from one tragedy to the next, trying and often failing to just keep our head above water. All of that being said, sometimes hurt people don’t hurt people. Sometimes broken people do their best to fix things. Sometimes we have some excuse for why we acted in stupid or spiteful ways, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes there are people who are crawling along laden down with a burden just as heavy or heavier than the one we struggle with, but they choose to do the right thing and exercise humility and patience and gratitude in spite of their suffering. How do we reconcile the fact that, for any choice we make, both our own personal agency and all of the extenuating circumstances that were weighing on us need to be taken into account? This is why the repentance process requires both a broken heart and a contrite spirit. We must offer up the sacrifice of a contrite spirit and acknowledge that, setting aside all of our baggage and trauma, we nevertheless did in fact make a choice of our own free will and that choice did have consequences for our own lives and perhaps the lives of others as well. To courageously own our responsibility for our actions and meekly submit to the consequences is to have a contrite spirit. But this is only half. We also must offer up the sacrifice of a broken heart. This sacrifice embraces the fact that at the end of the day we are small and simple and through no fault of our own we get ground down by forces that are outside of our control. By offering up our broken heart, we admit to ourselves and to God that we were confused and scared and put our trust more in our own imperfect grasp of the situation rather than leaning on the Lord’s understanding. To try to repent without a contrite spirit is to deny both our agency and our responsibility and to condemn us to a life subject to cruel and random fate and which we are powerless to change for the better. To try to repent without a broken heart is to deny the tender mercies of the Lord and to assume that every bad thing that befalls us must be our own fault. True repentance acknowledges both the unfairness of the world through our broken heart and our own culpability and responsibility for our actions through our contrite spirit. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, our broken heart satisfies the demands of Mercy and our contrite spirit satisfies the demands of Justice. Thanks to the infinite sacrifice of our Savior, we can be forgiven for the evil that we chose to perpetuate, and we can be healed from the evil that fell upon us. To offer the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit is to boldly declare that we will learn from our mistakes and do better, and that we will rise above our misfortunes and the malevolence of others. When we can’t take it anymore, when our heart is broken, we can offer it to our Savior and He will give us a new heart and new courage and new strength to take up our cross once more. And when we are harrowed up by the memory of our sins and a lively sense of our guilt, we can offer up to our Savior our contrite Spirit and He will give us in its place His Spirit to be with us always, constantly inviting and enticing us to make better choices. In order to become truly one through Christ’s Atonement, we need the broken heart and the contrite spirit, we need to acknowledge that some of it wasn’t our fault and some of it was, we need both justice and mercy, grace and works, forgiveness and healing.
