A book I’m reading about confession touched on the need to help others and do good works, and the author included this quote without telling its source:

“Lord, you can see that my hands are clean of sin,” said a soul to the Lord.

“Clean, but empty,” replied the Lord.

In the many ripples of thought that came from these short sentences, I was surprised that the end of a computer game came to mind. That may seem just too silly of a thing to recollect at that time, but when I thought about it, I could see why I did.

The game is the second Myst game called Riven. In Riven you wander in a broken world that is — as computer game worlds tend to be — complex, breathtakingly beautiful but essentially sterile. As you begin, you have only an inkling of what it is you’re supposed to do. You become familiar with the world, which is having struggles on several levels. Eventually you know what the nature is of the interlinking problems, and so you have a sense of the solution. But since clear information is hard to come by, you have to guess (or cheat, of course — and I do both when I play). At the end, you have either trapped the evil dictator of that world or he has trapped you. If it’s the former, you make your way back to where you began and solve the last puzzle.

At that point, the man named Atrus who sent you into Riven returns, comes up to you with joy and — if ALL you’ve done is neutralize the evil in that world — his face falls. Because you were also the only one who could free his wife, and she in turn is the only one who could free the many other prisoners in that world and allow them to escape. The poignancy of that moment is more acute because unlike more recent games, this sequence isn’t done with digital imagery, but with live action. It’s a real person who was filmed for the sequence, and perhaps because he’s not an actor by trade (he’s Rand Miller — one of the game’s creators, and a Christian, for what it’s worth), there’s something really genuine and heart-breaking about the second in which he looks at you and asks where his wife is. When Atrus realizes that you failed him, he goes on with a terrible calmness to give you the promised reward — with Riven collapsing all around you, you’re sent away from its demolition to a place where you’ll be safe. But you know that you failed.

That moment when he looks at you and you know that you were thinking too small — that’s what the quote above made me think of. The world can seem like such a dark place sometimes, and when you wander it as a Christian, you’re constantly aware that the Truth that you know to be life, light and our only real hope is deemed dangerous nonsense by many. And so you can think small sometimes — how do I save myself?

It’s for certain that salvation has to begin there, and it takes no end of constant vigilance to attend to it. But it seems to me that if our thoughts end there, we may win some kind of safety from the destruction around us, but we won’t have won anything, we won’t have done the truly needful thing. Our hands will be clean, but empty. And the moment in which we meet the Lord will be a terrible one.