The Amnesia of Grace: When God Washes a Villain Ashore

There is a story I encountered recently that struck me with all the force of a theological sledgehammer disguised as entertainment. It concerns, though I shall not name it, for reasons that will become apparent, a villain. Not a villain of the mustache-twirling variety that populates modern comic melodramas, but a genuine monster: a killer, a thief, a man who had made an art form of accumulating power through the systematic destruction of anything resembling human decency. And then, through one of those plot contrivances that would seem preposterous if reality itself did not so frequently employ them, this villain suffers an accident and wakes up on a beach with no memory of who he was.

Confession the beach, you see, is significant. It is one of those liminal spaces where the solid earth meets the restless sea, where what is fixed encounters what is forever changing. It is a threshold, a boundary, the sort of place where transformations happen in myths and fairy tales. And it is here, on this strip of sand between two worlds, that our villain wakes to find himself stripped not just of his memories but of his very identity.

What follows is precisely the sort of thing that ought to be impossible according to the determinist philosophers who insist we are nothing more than the sum of our synapses and circumstances. This man, this murderer and thief, washed up on shore like driftwood, stripped of his memories, becomes good. He finds friends, real friends, the kind who would die for him and whom he would die for in return. He becomes, against all probability, a hero. It is as if someone had taken a wolf, drowned it in the sea, and discovered when it washed ashore that underneath it had always been a loyal sheepdog.

The beach itself becomes a kind of baptism, though surely not one the original villain would have chosen. For baptism, properly understood, is a drowning, a death to the old self and a rising to new life. And here is our villain, having metaphorically drowned in the accident that took his memories, rising from the waves as someone entirely different. The sea has washed away not just the man he was, but the very knowledge of having been that man at all.

Now, the modern mind, trained as it is to find psychological explanations for everything, might suggest that this simply proves we are products of our environment, that memory and circumstance make us what we are. But this explanation, while superficially satisfying, misses the most startling element of the tale entirely. For at the story's climax, our reformed villain is given a choice: he can reclaim his memories, return to his old life of power and wealth, or he can remain as he is, a hero, a friend, a good man living in what amounts to a glorious poverty of the spirit compared to his former riches.

It is worth noting that beaches have always been places of decision in the great stories. It was on a beach that Odysseus was washed ashore and found by Nausicaa. It was on beaches that Viking raiders made their terrible choices between plunder and peace. And it is on beaches, those shifting boundaries between the known and unknown, that we are often forced to confront who we truly are when everything familiar has been stripped away.

It is at this juncture that the story becomes almost unbearably Christian, whether its author intended it or not. For what is being offered here is nothing less than the central question of the Gospel, dressed up in the costume of a fantasy tale: Will you cling to your old life, with all its accumulated power and privilege and sin, or will you die to it truly die to it, as thoroughly as drowning and be reborn into something new?

The world, of course, would tell him to take his memories back. The world is very keen on memory, you see, because memory is how it maintains its stranglehold on us. It is through remembering our past that we remain prisoners of it. "You cannot escape what you are," the world whispers. "You are the sum of your choices, the product of your history. You may have been washed ashore, but you are still the same man who fell into the sea." The world's wisdom is the wisdom of the billiard ball, forever determined by the angle and force of the last collision.

But Christianity, with its characteristic contrariness, suggests something altogether different. It suggests that memory itself might be a kind of prison, that sometimes the most merciful thing God can do is grant us a kind of divine amnesia. Not the pathological kind that comes from trauma or disease, but the supernatural kind that comes from forgiveness, the kind where God Himself declares that He will "remember our sins no more."

Think on that phrase for a moment. God, who knows all things, who exists outside of time and sees every moment simultaneously, promises to not remember our sins. This is either the most absurd statement ever made or the most profound. For what God is offering is not merely a legal pardon, a technicality that keeps us out of hell while leaving us mired in the memory of our guilt. No, He is offering something far more radical: a clean slate so complete that even the divine memory holds no record of our crimes. He is offering us what our villain found when he woke on that beach, the chance to rise from the waters as someone new.

This brings us, by a somewhat winding path, to the matter of New Years. We moderns have made a farce of the New Year, turning it into an occasion for resolutions we know we will not keep and promises we make only to break them. We treat it as a sort of annual pretense, a ritualistic lie we tell ourselves about starting fresh when we know perfectly well that on January 2nd we will wake up as the same people we were on December 31st. We will not wake up on any transformative beach; we will wake up in the same bed, in the same house, with the same memories pressing down upon us like the weight of the ocean.

But what if we took it seriously? What if we allowed the turning of the calendar to be what the Christian year has always intended it to be, a participation in that great cosmic reset that occurred when Christ died and rose again? For the Cross is nothing less than the ultimate memory wipe, the divine shipwreck that allows villains to wash ashore as heroes.

Consider the mathematics of it. According to the world's accounting, sin accumulates. Each wrong action adds to the total, building up like compound interest until the debt becomes unpayable. This is the calculus of karma, of cause and effect, of the inexorable machinery of justice. It is a closed system, and in a closed system, there can be no new beginnings, only the working out of old equations. You may be cast into the sea, but you will sink or swim according to the weight you carry.

But the Cross shatters this mathematics entirely. It introduces a factor that makes no sense according to the world's ledgers: the possibility of absolute forgiveness, of debts not merely paid but erased, of a past not just atoned for but actually canceled. When Christ took our sins upon Himself, He did not merely pay them off; He obliterated them from the cosmic record. This is not accounting; this is alchemy. This is the transformation of drowning into baptism, of shipwreck into salvation, of a villain washing ashore into a hero rising from the waves.

And so our villain, standing at his crossroads, faces the same choice we all face every time we come before the LORD to confess, every time we acknowledge our sin and reach for grace. He can reclaim his memories, his power, his wealth, his impressive curriculum vitae of atrocities or he can embrace this strange new life where he is no longer the sum of his past actions but something altogether different: a beloved child of God, a man reborn on the shores of mercy.

The world cannot understand why anyone would choose the latter. Power and wealth are the world's gods, and to reject them seems like madness. But then, Christianity has always been a form of holy madness, the kind that looks at the accumulated treasures of empire and declares them worthless compared to the pearl of great price. The kind that sees a man washed up on a beach, stripped of everything, and calls him blessed.

Here is where the story intersects most powerfully with the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. For what is forgiveness, really, but a kind of amnesia granted by grace? When we forgive someone, we are not merely agreeing to not punish them; we are agreeing, insofar as we are able, to not remember their sins against them. We are choosing to see them not as the sum of their wrongdoings but as who they might become if freed from the weight of their past. We are seeing them as they appear when washed clean by the waves of mercy.

And when God forgives us, He does this perfectly and completely. He looks at us not as we are, burdened by the accumulated weight of our failures and cruelties, but as we shall be when the work of redemption is complete. He sees the hero underneath the villain, the saint hiding beneath the sinner. And He offers us the chance to live into that vision, to become who we are in His eyes rather than who we have been in our own. He offers us our own beach, our own baptismal drowning and rising.

This is why the New Year matters, or should matter, to Christians. It is not about self-improvement or vague aspirations to "be better." It is about accepting the invitation to participate in the great divine amnesia, to let God forget our sins so completely that we can begin to forget them too. It is about choosing, like our fictional villain, to leave behind the false riches of our old life and embrace the strange poverty of grace. It is about walking away from the beach as a different person than the one who washed ashore.

The choice is terrifying, of course. There is something oddly comforting about our sins, about our established patterns of failure and familiar roads of transgression. They are, at least, known quantities. We have traveled them so often we could navigate them blindfolded. To abandon them for an uncertain future of holiness feels like stepping off a cliff, or rather, like allowing ourselves to be swept out to sea with no guarantee we will ever find shore again.

But this, too, is the genius of the Gospel. For Christianity does not promise us certainty or safety in the worldly sense. It promises us something far better: adventure. The life of holiness is not a boring trudge through a wasteland of denied pleasures; it is a hero's journey, complete with dragons to slay and princesses to rescue and dark forests to navigate. It is the very adventure our souls were made for, the quest we were always meant to undertake. It is the life that begins when we wash ashore on grace's beach and choose to walk inland toward whatever God has prepared for us.

And so, as we stand on the threshold of a new year, we face the same choice our amnesiac villain faced on his beach. Will we reach back for the comfortable weight of our old memories, our established patterns of sin and failure? Will we reclaim the power and wealth of our former selves, impressive though that self-made kingdom might appear?

Or will we, with fear and trembling and a joy we can barely contain, choose to remain in this strange new life of grace? Will we embrace the divine amnesia that allows God to forget our sins and, in forgetting them, to make us forget them too? Will we dare to believe that we might actually become the heroes He has always seen lurking beneath our villainous exteriors? Will we walk away from the beach of our baptism as new creations, leaving our old selves drowned in the waves behind us?

The answer, I suspect, will determine not just how we approach the coming year, but how we approach eternity. For in the end, heaven itself is nothing more and nothing less than the permanent state of having chosen, again and again, to be who God says we are rather than who we have been. It is the villain who woke without memories on a beach and chose never to reclaim them, who chose instead to live forever in the blessed forgetfulness of grace, forever walking inland toward the kingdom prepared for him.

This is the mathematics of mercy: that our sins, however numerous and terrible, can be utterly erased; that our past, however dark, need not determine our future; that we can, by the mysterious alchemy of the Cross, become new creatures entirely. Not improved versions of our old selves, but genuinely new creations, as different from what we were as a hero is from a villain, as different as a man walking into a new life is from a corpse washing up on shore.

So let us approach this New Year not with the world's cynicism about broken resolutions and failed promises, but with the Christian's holy confidence in the possibility of genuine transformation. Let us dare to believe that when God offers to remember our sins no more, He means it literally and completely. And let us choose, with every sunrise of every new day, to live as the forgiven villains-turned-heroes that grace has made us, as men and women who have washed ashore on the beach of divine mercy and chosen to walk inland toward holiness.

For that, in the end, is what God wants us to be: not perfect, which we cannot achieve this side of heaven, but redeemed, which is His gift to offer and ours to accept. Not the sum of our memories, but the recipients of His mercy. Not prisoners of our past, but pilgrims toward our future. Not villains clinging to fading power, but heroes embracing an eternal adventure. Not the ones who drowned, but the ones who rose from the waters new.

The choice, as always, is ours. But thanks be to God, so is the grace to choose rightly. And thanks be to God for every beach where mercy washes sinners ashore and calls them saints.

-The Seeker’s Quill