In praying it over and over, I noticed how strange and transformative it is to repeatedly identify myself as a sinner. I am not identified primarily as a mother, a writer, a woman or a priest. I am not primarily a Democrat or a Republican or a Christian. I am also not primarily an upstanding citizen or right or reasonable or talented or “on the right side of history.” Instead, again and again, in these received words, I call myself a sinner.This recognizes that I will get much wrong. That as a writer, I’ll say things, however unintentionally, that are untrue and unhelpful. As a mother, I will harm my children — the people I love and want to do right by most in the world. And it tells me that I will harm them in real ways, not just dismissible “well, shucks, we all make mistakes” kind of ways. As a priest, I will lead people astray. I will not live up to what I proclaim. I will fail. I will hurt people, not just in theory or abstraction. I will cause true harm.This humbles me.I need this humility. Our broader culture does too. The Lutheran theologian Martin Marty wrote that we live in a culture where “everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven.” He meant that we tend to reject the idea of sin and judgment in favor of a “you do you” moral individualism. We try to convince ourselves that there is only personal appetites and preferences, but we cannot quite shake a sense of good and evil because most of us retain a sense of justice, a sense that what we do matters. But when someone violates our often unspoken sense of justice or righteousness, there is no way of atonement. There is no absolution or restoration.An understanding of universal sinfulness, in contrast, is the verdant soil from which grace can spring. The British author Tom Holland called the Christian doctrine of sin a “very democratic doctrine,” because it has a leveling quality. To paraphrase Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it draws the line separating good and evil not between political parties, cliques, classes, religious groups or ideological tribes, but instead through every human heart.But we’re not left to stew in guilt or shame. We aren’t just sinners; we are sinners who can ask for mercy and believe that we can receive it. Living in this posture is what makes forgiveness possible, which is the only thing that makes lasting peace possible.Without a clear sense of right and wrong, we will end up endorsing injustice, cruelty and evil. But without an equally profound vision of grace, we will end up only with condemnation and an endless self-righteous war of “us versus them.”After I kneel with my church each week, confessing that I have blown it, I am invited to stand and receive absolution and forgiveness. I’m then invited to “pass the peace” to those around me and extend to them the same mercy and forgiveness that I’ve received.