The Heart of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the freedom to make wrong choices.
—Lewis B. Smedes

A raw, wet wind swept up through the open valley, smacking hard against the reaching red rock mesas surrounding the Ghost Ranch.  Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, about an hour north of Santa Fe.  A place where the sun shines 300 days a year.  A place where the light, the natural sunlight, is so pure and seemingly unfiltered, that the very essence of objects, of stones, of trees, of mountains, of humanity, seems unmasked and revealed.  Ghost Ranch, the place in the high desert where the great American painter Georgia O’Keefe lived and honed her craft.  A place of solace and inspiration, of unparalleled natural beauty.  But last Friday morning, a place that the light had deserted.  A Place become harsh.  A place become unforgiving.

Mile after mile of billowing thunderclouds poured across the stretching sky.  Jabs of lightening flashed through shadow.  The dry desert earth, unable to hold the torrents of rain ran rough with flood, water rushing through rock and crevice.  But it was the wind, the raw, wet wind that cut to the heart of matter.  As the temperature dipped down near freezing, each wet blast cut through coats and clothing, leaving a stinging in the skin and in the soul.

The next morning, I awake.  Stillness . . . dare I say . . .  serenity?  The brown desert has seemed to vanish.  The slate has been wiped clean.  Everything is blanketed with light, white snow.  A landscape that had roared now rests quietly, gently, almost lovingly.  Braches sparkle in dawn-light, scrub brush gleams, rock and crevice seem touched with fresh, amazing grace.  Yesterday is done; all seems . . .  forgiven.

I wish I could say that life was as simple as waking up to find a blanket of beauty had replaced the struggle.  I wish I could say that forgiveness was as simple as weathering a storm and waking to an automatically purified perspective.  I wish I could say that the slate is so easily wiped clean.  I wish I could say that I have forgiven everyone who has ever hurt and damaged me.  I wish I could say I wanted to forgive everyone who has ever hurt or damaged me.  But I find forgiveness a much more complex phenomenon, a much more convoluted choice.

What is forgiveness? Can we always offer it? Should we always offer it?

Jeff is a young man in his thirties, although his hyper-kinetic energy and the non-stop rush of words make him seem much younger, much more naive.  He’s telling me about his time in prison, a story he gave me permission to share.  Arrested for drug possession, he is locked up in a Texas penitentiary, a notoriously unforgiving place to find oneself.  Between guards and inmates, you need to watch your back.  Still, working in the laundry room one day early in his incarceration, he was totally unprepared for the fist that smashed into his left ear.  The blow sent him spinning round in a half circle.  A knee jammed into his gut, stopped his spinning, and sent him crashing into the floor.  He doesn’t really remember much about the next few minutes except, as he says, “the crap was beat out of me.”  Apparently, Jeff had inadvertently looked the wrong way at a fellow inmate, “I eye-balled him wrong!” he says, and now Jeff is being put in his place, his unimportant place.  Limping back to his cell, Jeff plots his revenge.  He slips a thick bar of soap into a tube sock.  His plan—to catch his attacker unawares and beat the guy’s head and face over and over again with his makeshift weapon until the guy is knocked senseless.  The next day, he is ready.  He says: “I am in the room with him, I am ready to strike, and then I have this thought: Why?  This isn’t going to change anything.  Holding this hurt, this anger isn’t going to make anything better for either of us.  It is just going to keep me, keep him, locked in a cycle of rage going on and on, inside and outside.”  Jeff pauses, then says, “I needed to do something different.  Forgiveness.  So, I walk up to the guy.  He stands up and looks down at me.  And I hand him a cup of coffee.”

I like to think there is a little bit of Jeff in each one of us.  But is there?

The Buddha taught: “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.  This is the ancient and eternal law.”   The great Jewish Talmudic Rabbi, Rabbi Meir, taught: "It is the action of the person you must condemn, not the person."  Even Jesus, the great Rabbi from Nazareth, when asked if we should forgive over and over, even, say, seven times over, replied: “No, you must not forgive seven times, you must forgive seventy times seven times.”

And to all that there is a part of me that wants to say, “Yea, but…..”

Psychologist and author Dr. Jeanne Safer picks up that “Yea, but” and asks: ““Can forgiving be willed? . . . Is it true . . . that to understand all is to forgive all?”  In her book “Forgiving & Not Forgiving,” Dr. Safer writes: “Many members of the clergy [and] many psychotherapists tend to assume that forgiveness is the only sane solution . . . I believe that, while most people do need to struggle with whether to forgive . . . not everyone has to achieve it.  People need to be told that resolved, thoughtful unforgiveness is as liberating as forgiveness.” (Forgiving & Not Forgiving, p. 4-5)

Resolved, thoughtful, unforgiveness!  Now there’s a thought.  Unforgiveness—it goes against the spiritual grain, it goes against everything we’ve been taught about what it meant to be a compassionate and loving person.  It goes against what I see as the perhaps unattainable yet legitimate and soul saving challenge of a moral, religious, humanistic life.  Unforgiveness—it speaks directly to that part of us that wants to hang on to the hurt, to plot revenge, and to just stay mad.

But according to Jeanne Safer, resolved, thoughtful, unforgiveness isn’t about anger and vengeance.  It is about emotional and spiritual authenticity.  She writes:

“Americans demonize ‘not forgiving’ as much as they idealize forgiving.  False forgiveness, the quick fix of easy peace, and the emotional inauthenticity that springs from them have proliferated as a result . . . Forgiveness has become spiritually correct . . . With all the contemporary emphasis on diversity, there is curiously little tolerance for multiple perspectives or divergence from this agenda.  The culture of Forgiveness Lite, which now extends far beyond the rigors of the traditional religious position, inhibits analysis and offers little comfort to dissenters . . . Some of the most admirable people I know have not forgiven on occasion.  Part of what makes them exceptional is precisely this—that they think for themselves, understand the complexity of emotional life, and know the difference between love and its imposters.” (p. 143-44)

Julie Nicholson might be such a person.  Ordained in the Church of England, she recently resigned her post as parish priest of St. Aidan’s in Bristol, located in western England.  As reported in yesterday’s New York Times, she has not officiated a church service since her twenty-four year old daughter Jenny was killed last July in the London subway bombings.  “Confronted with an event that shook her world to its foundations, she found she could no longer reconcile her priestly function with her refusal to forgive the killers.  ‘I did not feel there was any integrity in standing in front of a group of people week by week leading them through words of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness when I felt so distanced from those things myself,’ she said.”   She continues: “In terms of forgiveness for this act, I don’t think it’s incumbent on me to offer it  …I think forgiveness is a cheap grace” . . . She continued, arguing that easy forgiveness may simply hide the underlying cause of conflict and pain.  “We have to be careful that we are not continually putting layer after layer [of false forgiveness] on a deep and festering wound.” (NYT, May 6, 2006, p. A4)

Some of us here today may have lost a loved one to violence.  Some of us here today have known betrayal.  Some of us here today have known abuse.  Some of us have had aspects of our lives shattered or rearranged by hurtful choices made by others. And some of us here today may not have forgiven the perpetrators of these wrongs.  Some of us here today have been the perpetrators of hurt and wrong.  And some of us have not been forgiven by those we hurt.

Dr. Safer writes: “Sometimes what people really need is permission not to forgive, to feel what they feel . . . “Not forgiving” needs to be reconceived.  It is not an avoidance of forgiveness or a retreat into paranoia, but a legitimate action in itself, with its own progression, motivation, and justification.  To withhold forgiveness for the right reasons is a decision as hard-won as to grant it.  For ‘moral unforgivers,’ refusing means telling the truth, asserting fundamental rights, and opposing injustice . . . When it is genuine, forgiveness is a capacity not a compulsion; this is why the same person can grant it or withhold it, depending on the circumstances.  The ability to discriminate signifies maturity and freedom.” (p. 144, 183)

Dr. Safer continues:

“We need a more forgiving definition of forgiveness—one more attuned to human limitation, more flexible, and more compassionate.” (p. 203)  “Not everything can be repaired, even with the best will in the world; it is not just a matter of trying harder or having a positive attitude or finding the right affirmation.  Limitations, born of history and character, make us who we are.  To know that some damage can only be contained, never undone, is both tragic and true.”  (p. 169)

Dr Safer goes on to quote pioneering feminist writer Lydia Parker, who says: “I struggle with irreconcilable contradictions on this issue.  The inability to forgive is linked to disbelief in personal change and transformation.  I believe we can change things; if I refuse to forgive, it means you are what you did, and thinking that is reprehensible . . .  [And yet] I find cruelty and lying in ways that ruin someone’s life unacceptable.  To do these things, repent, and be forgiven cancels out another’s suffering.  I can’t pardon or retract my condemnation.  I care about moral boundaries.” (p. 170)
And yet the Buddha proclaimed: “Only by love is the human being healed.  This is the ancient and eternal law.”  Jesus taught: “Love your enemies.”  The Bhagavad Gita says: “If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can love, look for those who can forgive.”  The Jewish prophet Jeremiah announced: “I will put a new covenant into your inner beings and write it on your hearts."  And these religions teach ways to cultivate the heart’s capacity for loving-kindness and forgiveness, if we are willing to do the hard work. 

And our own faith, our ancient Unitarian Universalist faith, preaches the promise that comes only through love.  Our Universalist forebears believed in universal forgiveness.  While other churches preached a gospel that included eternal hell and damnation, the Universalists proclaimed a loving God that would welcome all people—no matter what their offense—back into his arms.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith teaches that universal forgiveness is available to all people.  That is why our faith has taken strong stands in favor of prison reform, against the death penalty, and against the use of deadly military force.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith teaches that universal love is the challenge and the goal for each one of us who consider ourselves a member of this religion.  Our faith teaches that forgiveness “means never putting another person out of our heart.” (Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, p. 31)

To this, Dr. Safer replies: “The doctrine of universal forgiveness is one-size-fits all absolutism.  Encouraging people to strive for this unrealistic goal—even when the motive is salvaging their psyches or saving their souls—instills needless feeling of inadequacy in anyone who fails to achieve it.  Worse, it encourages false forgiveness, which threatens to inundate our public as well as our private lives.” (p. 203)

How do we live between these two tensions?  How do we live between our religious ideal that say “never put another person out of your heart” and the earthly reality that says “forgiveness is the rebirth of positive emotions, not the wholesale obliteration of negative ones?” (p. 203)

What is the heart of the matter?  What is the heart of forgiveness?

© Copyright 2006 Rev. Tim Kutzmark