by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 5, 2003
In the same essay from which I drew our reading this morning, Patrick O'Neill tells a wonderful story from his childhood, which he spent in a crowded urban neighborhood filled with children and immigrants. One of the people he remembers most vividly was an elderly Frenchwoman who lived in his building, Mrs. Boutellon. He remembers her as elegant and stately, quiet in her habits but amazingly tolerant of the seven boisterous O'Neill children wrestling their way through the hallways.
Patrick writes, "I was to have one very important encounter with Mrs. Boutellon. I was very young, first grade maybe, and several older boys…had run by me and pushed me face-first into a snow bank. It was a great indignity, and I sat there on the stoop crying tears of outrage and frustration.
Mrs. Boutellon had witnessed the incident from her upstairs window, and she came down and collected me from the stoop, brushed the snow and tears from my face, brought me into her kitchen for a cup of hot cocoa, and fussed over me in French-accented maternal phrases that seemed to right the universe again. 'You are angry at those boys for what they did to you, Patrick, and it is natural for you to feel that way. But now you must let it go', she said. 'This day has other things to give you.'"
It was only many years later, long after Mrs. Boutellon and her husband had died and Patrick was reminiscing about them with his mother, that he learned that both Boutellons had been survivors of the Nazi death camps. That knowledge brought a whole new level of power to the simple reminder she had given him when he was a boy. Imagine hearing such words from a death camp survivor: "Let it go: this day has other things to give you."
This is the essence of the movement of the heart we know as forgiveness. It is the willingness to turn our gaze away from our wounds and open ourselves up to the other things the day has to give us. Or, using the metaphor of the heart that Patrick evoked in our reading, it's the willingness to clear out some of the baggage we carry in the form of a grudge, the hunger for revenge, a seething hatred, or the nursing of our righteous indignation, in order to make room for better things, like laughter, gratitude, joy.
In our heads, we know this wisdom. We know how much time, attention and sheer soul force can be drained into nursing an anger, remembering the ways we've been wronged, dissed, wounded, shut out. We see it in ourselves, but we see it with even more painful clarity in others.
One man I knew some time ago startled me with the vehemence of an ancient grudge he carried. He was facing his own death, and I had gone to see him with some expectation that he might want to talk about that momentous loss he was inching toward. And instead what he wanted to talk about was a long and complex tale about how his father-in-law had ignored and dismissed him -- almost fifty years prior. The father-in-law had already been dead thirty years, and the wound had been caused a lifetime earlier. Yet this man's anger, his sense of being aggrieved, were as fresh and vivid for him as if it had only just happened.
When we see it with such twisted power in someone else, the purpose of forgiveness is crystal clear. There is no one being punished here but the man who carried the grudge, who had carried it, sheltered it, taken it out and polished it year after painful year. Forgiveness would be his own liberation, his own chance to lay the burden down and be done with its poisonous weight.
It's harder to see when we're the ones clinging to the weight. It's harder yet when the grievance was profound. There's a hierarchy in the wrongs that can visit a human life, after all. The minor indignity of school-boy bullying seems hardly worth notice, held up against the vastness of human cruelty as we've seen it far too often in our lifetimes. And we tend to think in terms of these hierarchies when we consider the question of forgiveness.
Of course we should let go of our resentment or our hurt feelings when it's something small -- the thoughtless friend who gossiped about me, the indifferent brother who can't ever seem to treat me with respect, the incompetent boss who disregards my talents and skills.
Forgiveness is hard enough even in these small areas, where the wrongs are so minor in the overall scheme of things. Even these little wounds seem to bleed all over the place and occupy our minds and hearts sometimes for years. If we have to struggle so much with our resentments in these areas of damage, how can we even approach the large ones? What if the friend didn't gossip about me, but ran off with my husband? What if the brother wasn't indifferent but molested me all through my childhood? What if the boss lied about me and destroyed my entire career?
What if I were imprisoned by the Nazis in a death camp? Where does forgiveness come into the realm of possibility when such enormous damage is done?
"Let it go. This day has other things to give you." The great wisdom that whispers out to us from those souls who have learned to forgive even the huge damage is this: forgiveness is about our own liberation. Whether we are struggling to forgive ourselves or someone else, the gift in this choice, the gold that's hidden in this act of will, is the freedom it brings to our own hearts and our own lives. That gift, that freedom, knows no hierarchy. It's there for us whether we're forgiving a thoughtless slight or a murder.
An observant Jew and prophetic teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, sometimes made use of a rabbinic formula that runs more or less like this: "If it is so in a little thing, how much more in a greater thing." He used this often in his teachings about God, as a way to help people feel themselves beloved and forgiven. If you, despite all your failings, can love and forgive your children as you know you do, taught Jesus, then think how much more God will love and forgive you.
It works just as well as a teaching formula for us today, as we try to stretch ourselves toward the practices that can let us live with more freedom. If we can learn to love ourselves, learn to forgive our own flaws, we can learn better how to forgive the flaws we see around us. If we can learn to forgive the small crimes of heart and mind committed against us, we have a better chance of forgiving the enormous ones as well.
But even when we believe this, we have to struggle with how to get there. We've all heard the old cliché, first articulated by Alexander Pope: "To err is human, to forgive divine." But what does it mean? That our clumsy mistakes come thick and fast, but our ability to forgive them is a lot more of a stretch? That would hardly be worth saying, it's so perfectly obvious. So maybe the saying is just an easy cop-out: it means we're all so completely messed up that forgiveness has to be God's department. It's pretty well out of our reach unless we're saints.
Or maybe the cliché is nonsense, a clever phrase that caught on but shouldn't have. The truth is that to err is human, and so is the possibility of getting things right. All of it is human: to err, and to forgive from time to time. And to muddle along unable to forgive, unable to let go, is unfortunately the most human of all.
But maybe there's some other little light of truth shining out from Pope's statement, even for those of us who aren't at all sure of what we mean by words like 'divine'. Maybe when we say that to forgive is divine, what we mean is simply this: forgiveness is not altogether in our hands or in our control. To let it grow and blossom in our hearts takes an act of will, but also a little bit of what is sometimes called grace.
Those of us who have found it an uphill battle to forgive someone -- by which I think I safely include all of us -- know perfectly well that we can want to forgive, and yet still find our hearts locked up. It feels as though there's nothing we can do to relinquish the bitterness. Our pain can dig in deeply, and however much we think we ought to forgive, however badly we want to manage it, sometimes it's out of our reach. The very best we can do is hold to the intention, turn our faces in the right direction -- and wait for a little grace.
If the notion makes you uncomfortable because you're pretty sure you don't believe in grace, then you can think instead of the everyday miracle we call ripening. That's a word that points to something tangible, smack in the middle of our daily experience. Ripening is a lot like grace: it's a gift, a transformation, that we can turn toward and prepare ourselves to receive, but we cannot rush it before its time and it is not in our control.
I think it's when we forget this element of grace, or ripening, that we give ourselves so much grief in our struggles to forgive. In my years as a minister, when I have listened to people share their wounds with me, I often also hear them say, as though it's a confession, "I still haven't forgiven him", or, "I know I need to forgive her and let it go, but I just can't seem to do it." And they struggle with it, doing what a teacher of mine once called "oughting" themselves: I ought to do it, but I just can't.
But "oughting" ourselves doesn't get us there. If we haven't ripened to it, if the grace of forgiveness has not yet arrived, then our task is not to beat ourselves up about it. Our task is to keep our intention fresh and clear, turning ourselves toward the freedom we know is possible. The change will arrive; but it will come on a timeline that's not in our hands.
Tomorrow, in celebration of the ancient and solemn holy day of Yom Kippur, our Jewish neighbors will gather into their communities of faith. They will recite together old scripture and words of wisdom, they will pray together and hear the singing of texts that have been sung in this way for thousands of years. Woven through all of those songs and words and prayers, so very old and so very familiar to us, is the human hunger for transformation. It has been sung and spoken and prayed for much longer than the existence of a Jewish tribe, but it's in the rituals of Yom Kippur that we hear it in one of its most poignant and best-articulated forms.
"We have sinned", says the old language, but it's a truth we could speak in a million different ways. We have missed the mark. We have let ourselves down and betrayed one another, faltered in our efforts, made grievous mistakes. We have let ourselves be seduced and distracted, we have wandered away from our chosen path. We have lingered too long on trivia and ignored the high purpose that was calling our names. We have forgotten our promises, spoken untruths, loved too little, judged too harshly, fled from voices in need.
"May we be forgiven", says the ancient language: may we be forgiven all of this and more, the long litany of ways we have not quite been the human beings we expect ourselves to be. But what the old language is really praying for is transformation. It isn't praying that we might turn into saints, into some sort of ethereal beings who never get it wrong. It's praying only that we could be a little closer to who we believe ourselves to be -- that we could ripen into our better selves. "May we be forgiven": May we have another crack at it, may we have another chance, another day to try to get it right.
The two-fold wisdom of the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur is that these prayers of confession and forgiveness are cyclical, and that they are prayed in community. The cycle, the fact that it comes around every year, holds us close to the cycle of our earth and the pattern of our lives. That pattern teaches us there is such a thing as ripening, and there is such a thing as transformation. We carry scars with us, but we get to keep moving along the path of our lives as long as we have breath. We do have another day to try to get it right.
And the community in prayer around us reminds us that we're all in this muddle together. We all stand in need of forgiveness; we all need to learn better how to relinquish our anger and turn our faces toward healing.
At their best, all of our houses of prayer of every religion are houses of transformation. They are the places where we're supposed to learn what it really means to ripen into our vision of ourselves, what it means live by the pledges we make, what it means to tether our lives to the things we most believe in. They are the places where a community of faith helps us remember who we want to be, and heals us of the terrible fear that we are all alone. They are the places where we practice, together, letting go of vengeance, and widening our hearts in compassion.
Poet Marilyn Robertson writes of it this way, in a poem called "Possibilities":
A teacher sits down at the feet of her students.
Singing is heard in an abandoned village.
Food is brought to a prisoner on a white plate.
A soldier rests beside a pool of water lilies.
An abyss becomes a table.
The loaf and fish re-create their famous miracle.
The white-haired hero reads a poem.
The grieving mother prays for her son's killer.
One person does not seek revenge.
The next day, another person does the same.
May it be so. Amen.