COMMENTARY: Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here.

(RNS) If there had been a way to power-wash my brain, I would have done it. The words, images and emotions that lingered after I watched actress Mackenzie Phillips’ interview with Oprah Winfrey are something I wish I’d never had in my imagination. I regretted watching. I regretted knowing. I longed for a spiritual bubble […]

(RNS) If there had been a way to power-wash my brain, I would have done it.

The words, images and emotions that lingered after I watched actress Mackenzie Phillips’ interview with Oprah Winfrey are something I wish I’d never had in my imagination.

I regretted watching. I regretted knowing. I longed for a spiritual bubble bath.


If you don’t know the Phillips’ story, please, I beg you, don’t go Google it. You don’t want to know.

But if you, like me, were foolish enough to be a voyeur in the Phillips’ family’s nightmare, well, we deserve what we got. We shouldn’t have been able to know something that deeply personal and broken and awful.

Still trying to regain my sea legs after the Phillips’ ickiness, here comes Roman Polanski and his decades-old creepiness. I can say, unequivocally, that I never needed to know exactly what he did to that poor 13-year-old girl back in 1974.

So, now that some of us do know, where do we put it? What do we do in the future when a train wreck of human suffering presents itself for our entertainment?

And for those of us who fancy ourselves people of faith, what do we do with what Rabbi Irwin Kula calls “apology porn”?

“If we took a spiritual MRI of the American soul, we’d probably see an incredible yearning for being forgiven and granting forgiveness,” Kula told me. “That’s expressing itself in this incredibly voyeuristic and confessional culture of ours.”

“What we have to do is keep ratcheting it up so that we actually are titillated; otherwise we become bored,” he said. “And the tragedy of that is, of course, that it doesn’t do anything for us.”


“The higher the extreme apology is necessary, the more it’s an indication that the culture itself is losing a genuine forgiveness. It’s that kind of karmic imbalance.”

Like any kind of pornography, apology porn only increases our appetite for more dramatic and, frankly, icky public confessions. After learning the Phillips family’s terrible secret, what’s next? The mind reels.

But what should we do now? Kula had some instruction, both kind and deeply practical.

“Look, there’s a natural predisposition to be attracted to this. It’s no different than the car accident on the road. We all have that inside of us. The real question is, `What are we going to do about it since we feel dirty about it?”

Kula, the founder of the New York-based Center for Learning and Leadership, suggests the following:

“We really can turn it off and make a decision not to look. And if we didn’t look, the traffic would flow better and … it wouldn’t be reported the same way because that’s the way the market works. That’s what real freedom is. And with real freedom comes real responsibility.”


But what if we can’t help ourselves?

“Then we can make a decision not to talk about it the next day and make it the major topic of conversation … at the water cooler or at the Starbucks, because that creates a toxicity in the culture.”

And if we do end up talking about it?

“At the very least,” he says, “we should recognize that even in something toxic, what a deeply spiritual person does is try to redeem it. What we could do is make the decision to watch it and realize we can’t help talking about it, but we’re also going to look in our own lives for where there is someone I need to ask forgiveness from or where there is someone I need to forgive.”

Unfortunately, I’ve already done the first two, and so now, I’m trying to implement the third.

Kula said something else that rang powerfully true. While most of us have not, and will not, ever cross the kind of lines that were crossed in the Phillips’ family, part of what we find compelling about such a horror story is that we have — all of us — crossed some line that we shouldn’t have.

In this season of repentance, atoning and, hopefully, forgiveness, taking that kind of stock of our own stories may be the first step in creating a culture where real forgiveness can happen.

It’s time to tune out and turn inward.

(Cathleen Falsani is the author of “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace” and the new book, “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.”)


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