Fallen hero of mine.

I used to love Eliot Spitzer. I loved his passionate, sustained attack on corporate greed and malfeasance. Eliot Spitzer was a rare thing: a smart, righteous, kick-ass Democrat. He was one of very few politicians that I risked liking.

Now?

Aside from the initial shock and fascination of watching a "car crash"--of seeing a smart person in a public position doing something truly dumb... I'd say I'm neither surprised nor disheartened.

What's the surprise, really? Human beings are flawed. Deeply so. We are brilliant concealers, deceivers, manipulators, self-servers. I am more shocked to discover that a person doesn't have skeletons in the back of their closet than to find out that they do. I am disappointed that Spitzer lived such a harshly divided life, honorably working for justice while dishonorably betraying his wife and children... but I can't say I'm surprised to hear it.

But I'm not disheartened, either. Human failures--even those of our heroes--are not cause for cynicism. Eliot Spitzer embodied ideals that I strongly believe in: justice, fairness, equal accountability under the law. But the value of those ideals is in no way diminished by the inability of any individual to live those ideals with full integrity.

I am a religious person precisely because of paradoxes like the one the Spitzer scandal lays bare: flawed and ugly people are capable of pursuing and, at times, even achieving, the highest human virtues. Sin and beauty come bundled in the same fleshy package, and they are always at war for the allegiance of the body.

If there is one thing about Eliot Spitzer's story that does trouble my soul, it's that he couldn't--or didn't--see earlier the danger in walking the path of righteousness. It is, in fact, impossible. There is no one who is righteous. To believe that we are righteous is to confuse the lovely virtues we adore with the unlovely people we are. To believe that we embody what is good is also to invite the kind of double life that Spitzer maintained. If we establish an identity that depends on the perpetuation of the illusion of our goodness, we have to find a way to deny, cover up, or otherwise rationalize our own unrighteous qualities.

There seems to me no other way to wholeness than to confront, regularly and with honesty, our sins and our deepest flaws, and to ask with earnestness for their forgiveness. I confess every day. I keep my sins ever before me... so that their denial does not one day consume me.

Through all this, I keep thinking about the wisdom of the George Jones song, Sinners and Saints. "The only difference between sinners and saints," Jones sings, "is that one is forgiven and the other one ain't." Falling from the pedestal of righteousness, to me, is a good thing. It is first step toward understanding oneself as a sinner who can be forgiven. And that, I've come to think, is the only real righteousness there is.