Best Homeschool Lessons: Repentance Tenses

Last week, I needed to run an errand. Loathe to lose homeschool time, I put Eric and Sammy in the car and taught a grammar lesson en route.

Before you remonstrate against my cruelty, let me point out that grammar lessons in our family are not tortuous. My children are spoiled by having a creative mom who invents interesting sentences to diagram. Of course, I am also spoiled by having superlatively intelligent children.

(When Ronald was in seventh grade, I recall explaining independent and dependent clauses to him by using Star Trek examples. Know your audience, I say. Ronald might now deny ever having liked Star Trek, but it worked at the time. Ah, nostalgia.)

In this case, I invented stories about Bear repenting. (He does that a lot, I note. I fear that, in a few months, both Daniel and Bear will need separate baptismal interviews with the Bishop. I also worry that Bear is so naughty, he might not get a recommend.)

Present, past, and future tenses were easy review. Eric also quickly caught on to the idea of "progressive," or "ongoing" tenses, as when Bear stole Danny's screwdriver with the intention of replacing it later. "I will start repenting next week," Bear justified to himself. ("Future progressive!" said Eric. Smart lad.)

(Though tempted, I refrained from a discursive lecture about how that attitude made a mockery of the atonement, deeming it more important to stay focused on the lesson. This required great willpower on my part, as I am rather prone to digressive tangents.)

Eric, further, did fine with past, present, and future perfect, once I had explained them to him.

"Perfect" implies the action has been completed. For instance, ' "I had just repented for the candy when I fell to the fish's blandishments!" wailed Bear.'

With minimal practice, Eric could correctly identify examples such as the one above. (Past perfect, by the way.)

Once we hit the perfect progressives, though, we had a problem.

It had never struck me before that there is a potential conflict between the perfect (i.e., completed) and progressive (i.e., ongoing) tenses. "But by the time I hit college," protested Bear, "I will have already been repenting for a decade! I SAID I was sorry for wrecking the van!!!" The previous sentence is an admirable example of the future perfect progressive, or an action which 1) begins in the future, 2) takes place over time and, 3) finishes in the future.

The problem came when we hit the present perfect progressive. With most actions, the "end" is easy to define. "We have been swimming for an hour," argued Char (who, as a fire-breathing dragon, naturally preferred non-water-based activities), "Now let's do something else." Even if the group consensus is to remain in the water another hour before breaking for lunch, you can argue that the swimming before Char's protest and after are two separate actions. Perhaps the poor dragon, bedraggled and disgruntled, leaves the pool early even if his friends remain. If nothing else, his sentence references the past and brings us up to the present moment.

The difficulty arose when Bear appeared before the Bishop, tearful and penitent, and gave a full confession of all his misdeeds over the past week. "I have been repenting for days," he sobbed, "But I'm not certain whether or not I'm done!"

Now, grammatically, this qualifies as the present perfect progressive. But the uncertainty of the situation struck me at once. "What if," I wondered, "Bishop Loderup counseled him to refrain from taking the Sacrament for two more weeks, read his scriptures, and then report for a follow-up interview?"

--(Of course, I doubt that an unbaptized child under the age of eight is even eligible to be disciplined in that way. Let alone a talking stuffed animal of indeterminate spiritual status. Yet another problem to consider. Or punt to my own mom. But I digress, again.)--

Repentance is a long process, and it can be a bit ambiguous. Sometimes people honestly think they're done, but a wise bishop says "I don't think you have fully forgiven your partner in crime yet." Or, sometimes people continue to beat themselves up unnecessarily, only to be told "You are fully forgiven. Let it go now."

I understand the Protestant reluctance to have a priest intercede between the individual and God. I also know that people are frequently not objective and do, sometimes, need an outside perspective in figuring out exactly how much is enough.

But philosophical questions of clergy aside, some actions really are vague in their completion. "I'm in love?" she asked herself. "But...when did that happen? I don't even remember starting to fall for him..."

To solve this dilemma, I have decided to invent, not a new creative sentence, but a brand-new tense. Thus, Bear's despondent cry, "I have been repenting for days" is an example of the Present Probably-Perfect Progressive.

In situations of more ambiguity, you could have the Past Possibly-Perfect Progressive. As in Bear's confession at a recent Addicts Anonymous meeting, "I had been repenting for weeks and thought I had conquered my problem, but then I almost succumbed to the temptation of a Studebaker..."

"Ambiguous Perfect Progressive" is more pronounceable, but not as much fun.

(In another random aside -- I've got to stop doing that -- this reminds me of my eighth-grade masterpiece "A Pathetically Perfect Parody of Pointless Perverse Poetry." Ah, those were the days...)

Now, you may claim this exercise was silly, or pointless, or was tortuous after all, either to Eric or to the hapless English language.

Any or all of those may be true.

Nothing I do could possibly be worse than Douglas Adams' "Future semi-conditionally modified sub-inverted plagal past subjunctive."

Still, I will-on have been likely starts repenting sometime by next Tuesday ago.