Reading
Reading Adapted from a CLF Quest article by Rev. Ken Sawyer, January '04

[I once came across a marvelous, two sentence retraction of an error in a newspaper] which read: "Just to keep the record straight, it was the famous Whistler's Mother, not Hitler's, that was exhibited. There is nothing to be gained in trying to explain how this error occurred."

Nothing to be gained.

That two sentence retraction suggests a whole story about the hour the writer spent between his or her realization of the error, which was easy enough to describe in the first sentence, and when he or she wrote that second sentence, giving up on what I imagine was a fervent search for some other way of concluding the notice.

I picture the writer trying to get across that it was only because the cell phone reception was faulty, and a deadline had arrived inconveniently, and the usual person was out with the flu, and this, and that, and not that anyone at the paper thought that the famous painting was really of the mother of Adolph Hitler, nor that the staff had anything but revulsion for Hitler, although maybe it shouldn't be held against his mother…

I picture the writer, at just that point, realizing that the only thing to say, after acknowledging the error, is that "There is nothing to be gained in trying to explain how this error occurred." What can the writer do but throw herself or himself on the mercy and good sense of the readers, who at their most wise understand that they are fellow members of the human community of the fallible?

We live in a world where ridiculous errors abound. We try to contribute as few as we can to the total, but we make some, too….What can we say but we're sorry? What can we do but move on? So much of religion, so many of our deepest personal issues, reside in this area of responsibility, blame, acceptance and forgiveness.

Spilled Milk
by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 26, 2004

"There is nothing to be gained trying to explain how this error occurred." I'm with Ken Sawyer on this one: I don't think I've ever come across a retraction I like better, and probably for the same reason Sawyer cited it in the first place. How amazing and refreshing it would be, at least every once in a while, if we could give and receive apologies that were free from the effort to excuse our mistakes. And how common it is, how human, to go to the opposite extreme: to try to explain in exhausting detail just how we came to make this mistake, how complicated the circumstances actually were, how many threads to unravel, how ultimately innocent we would be found to be, if only you could know all the facts.

Nothing to be gained. Sometimes, of course, it doesn't work that way. Sometimes there's a lot to be gained by mapping the path we walk to our errors, and even sharing that map with the one we've wronged. One of my relatives who is a recovering alcoholic has found that a part of his healing is to trace his own choices back to the early ones, when he was a teenager and found sufficient motive and means for binge drinking. Explaining what happened and what he understands about it now, to those he hurt along the way, was part of his work of making amends.

In situations like that, elaborating on our apologies might be the best way to go. But so often our explanations really amount to excuses. They seem to give us a way to soften the blow to our own egos and avoid the clean, hard words of apology: "I was wrong. I made a bad choice. I'll do what I can to make it right. I'm sorry."

Yesterday our Jewish neighbors gathered into their communities of faith in celebration of the ancient and solemn holy day of Yom Kippur. Together they recited familiar scriptures and words of wisdom, they prayed and heard 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 was something very old and very familiar to all of us, no matter what our faith.

That theme is the human yearning to feel ourselves forgiven. 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 hundred 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.

The old language is utterly free of excuses. It doesn't try to explain why we've let ourselves and each other down. It doesn't digress onto a tempting tangent to list the series of unfortunate circumstances that led us to break the most basic rules of dignity or kindness or right living. It is clear and clean and unambiguous, utterly true to what Ken Sawyer calls our "human community of the fallible". We have sinned.

"May we be forgiven", the ancient litany goes on to pray. May we be forgiven all of the ways we have not quite been the human beings we expect ourselves to be. May we be released from this burden of guilt, may we let go our hard-heartedness toward each other. May we move a little closer to who we try to be. "May we be forgiven": May we have another chance, another day to try to get it right.

Sometime this summer I came across a review of several books that represent a recently popular stance against all the usual teachings that point toward forgiveness. The theme common to all of these books is that revenge has been grossly underrated. Revenge, say these authors, feels a lot better than forgiveness, so it must be better for us when you come right down to it. After all, those extraordinarily irksome people out there in the world who annoy us so relentlessly - and sometimes cause grievous damage -- deserve to be paid back. "Pay-back" in its many forms is what these authors recommend. The implication is that forgiveness somehow amounts to passive acceptance of harm done; clearly, it is only for wimps.

I'm grateful that in my life so far, I can't count myself among those who have been grievously wounded. I am one who has suffered fewer than what probably amounts to a fair share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But my work, and my interests, have put me in a position to listen to and learn from those who have suffered much more than I, both at the hands of cruel or ignorant individuals and from the indifferent and devastating policies of governments.

From the wounded people I have accompanied, I have learned that forgiveness is more powerful, more liberating and all-around better for us than revenge or getting even. This isn't because forgiveness is more "moral" in an abstract sense, or somehow "nicer". It certainly isn't because forgiveness means we passively accept harm done, or refuse to impose consequences - that isn't what forgiveness means at all. And it is most emphatically not because forgiveness is easier; as most of us know too well, it simply isn't.

What it comes down to is that the urge for payback keeps us focused on another person, or a group of people, and on the damage that's been done. Forgiveness draws our attention to forward motion and freedom: how a wound can be healed and how we might shed the weight of bitterness to live more abundantly. Revenge is focused on some painful or shameful thing we wish would happen to someone else, as punishment for the painful or shameful thing they caused. Forgiveness is focused on what we want to have happen to us - on what kind of people we want to be, and what we want to bring forward into the world we share.

The reason that's more liberating is because it's actually in our hands: we have a say in who we will be, and in how we will behave; in what we'll let go, and in the generosity of spirit we're willing to extend. It's in our hands, how willing we are to see our own flaws and limits, and the ways in which we too need to be greeted in this life by the generous spirit of forgiveness.

The rituals of Yom Kippur are designed to help us toward this liberation, and the lessons held in this ancient practice are available to us all. Drawing on its wisdom, UU poet Nancy Shaffer wrote a poem called, "Because We Spill Not Only Milk", from which I took my title for this morning:

Because we spill not only milk
Knocking it over with an elbow
When we reach to wipe a small face
But also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,
And also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
How much is gone and we hadn't intended it

Because we tear not only cloth
Thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
But also tear friendships when we grow
And whole mountainsides because we are so many
And we want to live right where black oaks lived,
Once very quietly and still

Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
And have to go back to the room we were in before,
Remember why it was we left
But also forget entire lexicons of joy
And how we lost ourselves for hours
Yet all that time were clearly found and held
And also forget the hungry not at our table

Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
And precious papers left in rain
But also at legs that no longer walk
Or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
And also weep at words said once as though
They might be rearranged but which
Once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless

Because we are imperfect and love so
Deeply we will never have enough days…
We need the gift of starting over, beginning
Again: just this constant good, this
Saving hope.

We need the gift of starting over: this constant good, this saving hope. We need the gift of clear sight, so we can see not only the harm that others do, but the ways each one of us is linked into error, into false starts, into self-centeredness that in its turn wounds someone else.

American Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells a wonderful story about a young man she met when leading a retreat in North Carolina. He was unusual in that he had been engaged in serious spiritual seeking since the age of twelve, and at the time of their meeting he was in his early twenties. He came to talk privately with Chodron because he found himself deeply frustrated with his girlfriend, and he wanted some advice on what to do. He was a bit full of himself, a little arrogant about his own spiritual practice and achievements because he had started so precociously and been at it for so long. And he was frustrated with his girlfriend because she just couldn't seem to devote herself to the path with the same kind of attention.

He reported to Chodron that he'd fallen in love with this young woman, but had been distressed by the fact that she was a smoker. He'd finally gotten her to quit smoking, but then she'd begun some self-harming eating habits, including some periodic 'binge and purge' practices. He kept at it with her because he loved her, but his frustration was growing. "She keeps telling me she's doing her best", he reported to Pema Chodron, "but it's not true. She's not trying as hard as she can and she's not doing her best."

And then he went on to say, "I know I shouldn't be so angry with her, I keep telling myself that. And I'm trying not to get so angry, but I just can't help it, I'm doing my best…." And then suddenly he really heard himself. In a flash, he saw the connections, how she was struggling, how he was struggling, both of them doing truly what they could, both of them falling short, disappointing each other, disappointing themselves.

Surely there are people out there in the world, or even right up close to you in your lives, right here in this sanctuary today, who are not doing their best, who are cavalier about their failures or the damage they cause around them. But it's not most of us: not most of the stumbling human race of which we're all members. Most of us are doing our best, and yet we're still spilling things, still spilling milk and much worse. We knock over what we love, run into one another, crash into what we most want to avoid, fall down on our most important jobs -- despite all our best intentions. And that's why those of us not Jewish, who don't have the old, powerful ritual of Yom Kippur woven into our lives, must nevertheless learn from its wisdom. We need a time for acknowledgement, repentance and forgiveness.

And we don't need these things only for our small and intimate failings. We need them even more for the terrible wrongs and the grievous wounds. The process of liberation is the same even when the damage is something infinitely worse.

Author Kent Nerburn wrote some years ago about a murder trial he witnessed, the trial of a young man who had killed a girl for no reason at all except that she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nerburn wrote of how the father of the dead girl sat impassively through the trial, all the awful details, the impersonal and yet terribly personal violence.

And then when the trial was over and the boy was found guilty and sentenced to prison, the father announced that he was going to visit that boy in jail and get to know him. People around him were appalled: why would he do that to himself? Why would he ever again choose to see the face of the one who had killed his daughter? And the man said, "That boy and I are forever bound. We need to know each other. I do not think I can forgive him. But perhaps if I know him I won't hate him. This is about healing."

Nerburn goes on to write, "This is a hard issue. Most of us would not have the power to make such an effort…But in my heart of hearts, I know the grieving father was making the right choice. He was trying to move the world forward from a pivot point of horror, and to turn a circumstance so dark that few can imagine it into a moment of healing and growth….This is how we free ourselves from a frozen scream in time and fulfill ourselves as co-creators of meaning in this universe."

This is how we free ourselves. This is how we fulfill ourselves as co-creators of meaning. May we seek the ways in our own lives to step into that circle of freedom and meaning, walking the path of forgiveness. Amen.