Church Parking Only.The congregation didn’t really mind people parking there through the week – and I’ve always thought that was a clever way to advertise the forgiving nature of the church.
Violaters Will Be Forgiven.
We’ve all been harmed, and we’ve all committed harm. I am mindful of Jean-Paul Sartre’s line that hell is other people, yet I also know that heaven is other people – that existence itself IS relationship. Homo sapiens is not merely a social species, but a hyper-social species, and our identity is formed not merely IN relationship but AS relationship. George Herbert Mead taught us that the self is a generalized other. We ARE our relationships, which is why they sometimes hurt so much.
Even with strangers, an offence is so much more than the physical effect. Imagine this scenario. You’ve been grocery shopping and are carrying three brimming-full paper grocery bags as you cross the street from where you parked to get to your apartment. Your field of vision is now somewhat limited as you cross, and then some clod walking by the other direction bumps into you. Your groceries spill in the middle of the street. Your body floods with that anger reaction. You spin around, clutching the one bag of groceries that didn’t spill, angry, loud words about to come out. In that moment you see . . . the white cane. It was a blind person. The anger drains away as you see the truth of the situation with clarity. It’s not the spilled groceries themselves that bother us so much – it’s another person treating us with disregard, whether negligent or intentional.
As the hyper-social species we are, we constantly monitor relationships – with strangers and especially with those we know well. Those relationships are continually being torn, and continually in need of repair. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, in a passage we used as this morning’s chalice lighting,
“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own. Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”Forgiveness.
This word, “forgiveness,” is used in such a broad range of situations. There’s the casual forgiveness as a social courtesy, like forgiving people for parking on your lot, forgiving them for being a few minutes late. There are also those situations of much deeper emotional hurt, where forgiveness is hard to ask for and hard to give. Then there are horrific atrocities like the Charleston shooting on Jun 17, 2015, when 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a predominantly black church and shot 9 people dead. At the sentencing hearing a year and a half later, Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the slain, told Roof, “I forgive you.” This was not a meaningless thing to say. It meant something. But what? What did it mean for Sanders? For Roof? For the audience of the media who covered it?
Sometimes we are able to unilaterally decide to stop carrying the weight of some resentment. The other person might not have asked for your forgiveness, might not have apologized, might not know that you are releasing your resentment, yet letting go of the anger is something you do for your own sake because the burden of your own resentment has been weighing you down. Do we call that forgiveness?
Other times there’s a bilateral process of two people working together toward reconciliation, intentionally engaged in an extensive process of rebuilding of trust. The forgiveness that might emerge from such a process would be more substantial.
Sometimes there’s something there that’s easy to choose to do. All it takes is saying the words, “I forgive you,” and those words are easy to say, easy to mean, and that’s all it takes.
Other times, in other cases, the heart isn’t ready. The head might compel the mouth to say the words, “I forgive you,” but the heart feels the emptiness of the words because the heart is not ready to forgive. If you say it, and your head means it (or thinks it does), but the heart doesn't, does that constitute forgiveness?
Forgiveness cannot be demanded, cannot be not required – no one has a right to say to you, “you should forgive,” say, an abusive partner or parent. Sometimes, though, victims might feel, unbidden, a forgiving grace descend upon them. No reason they should – but a feeling like that sometimes happens, and that, too, may be called “forgiveness.”
In all of these scenarios, there is some sort of shift in your relationship with another person – or with the memory of another person. It would be handy if we had an agreed-upon vocabulary to distinguish the different kinds of relational shift that may go by the name forgiveness. There are more than two distinguishable experiences that get called forgiveness, but today we’ll just be looking at two: from Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair. The book – which is the Unitarian Universalist Common Read for 2023-24, and which is the subject of our forum after the service – has eight chapters: the next to last one is on forgiveness.
There are two Hebrew words: Mechila and Slicha. “Mechila,” Ruttenberg suggests
“might be better translated as ‘pardon.’ It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender. The injured party acknowledges “that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation.”Ruttenberg explains:
“You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me. It seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila – pardon – whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.”Pardon requires sincerity, but not a lot of emotional display. Pardon may be undertaken in a matter-of-fact, businesslike way: The debt is considered paid, or, at least, written off. It’s closing the book on the matter – a closing of accounts. There is no further obligation.
Pardoning isn’t quite the same thing as forgiving. The Hebrew word that that would come closest to forgiveness is slicha. With slicha there’s the idea of a step toward eventual reconciliation and restoration of the relationship. As Ruttenberg explains, slicha
“includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability – recognized that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy.”Reinhold Niebuhr called forgiveness the final form of love – and there’s a little of that flavor in the Hebrew slicha. The injured party doesn’t merely close accounts, but beholds the perpetrator with a higher level of compassion and empathy for their vulnerability.
We can say that there might sometimes be an obligation to pardon. There is never an obligation to forgive. “Forgive” is from the Old English word forgyfan – “to give, grant, or bestow.” It’s a gift. It cannot be required. If it is forced or coerced or pressured, then it’s not a gift.
1. Naming and owning harm
2. Starting to change
3. Restitution and accepting consequences
4. Apology
5. Making different choices
An obligation to pardon arises, as Danya Ruttenberg says,
“in the context of a sincere penitent who has come to apologize – to appease, ask, make amends, implore, seek to meet the full human being they have hurt to the best of their ability. And if they didn’t do a good enough job, they came back later with their support people to help them figure out how to do it better. And after doing that, this person came back two more times, trying, and trying again, to truly see and speak to their victim’s pain.”If they have named and owned the harm, they have committed to changing and begun to change, they have provided restitution and have accepted consequences of what they’ve done, then comes the apology. “A true apology” says Ruttenberg,
“is about trying to see the human being in front of you, to connect with them and communicate to them, to make it clear – abundantly, absolutely, profoundly clear – that you get it now, and that their feeling better matters to you. Your apology is a manifestation of genuine remorse. It demands vulnerability, and it is a natural by-product of all the work of repentance and transformation that you’ve been doing up until this point. . . . You don’t apologize at a person. You apologize to them. It’s not, of course, a petulant, 'But I said I was sorry!' It’s also not about crafting the perfectly contrite words of regret and remorse. There’s a difference between saying you’re sorry because you realize that a thing you did had a bad consequence, and doing so because you really understand that you hurt someone – and that person’s feelings, experience of the world, safety, and self all matter profoundly.”Suppose you offer a true apology, but the person who was hurt isn’t able to accept it, cannot pardon, even after the asking and imploring. You might not have done as good a job as you think you did. The harm might be more serious than you thought. Maybe something else. At this point Maimonides says you bring backup with you – three supportive friends whose job is to help you make sure you are doing this right. They aren’t there to gang up on your victim, but as observers for your contrition and your guides to help and ensure that your contrition is clear. Here’s what Maimonides says:
“If the other person does not wish to pardon, they should bring a line of three people who are their friends and they will approach and ask for pardon. If the victim still refuses, the perpetrator must bring people a second and a third time.”So that’s four separate apologies – the first one by yourself, and then three more with friends. At that point, if all has been done sincerely, there is an obligation to pardon – to close the books on the matter. If the victim is still not appeased, she or he has failed at that obligation and is unreasonably holding a grudge. The perpetrator should simply leave them alone at that point.
Maimonides was concerned about the victim and their wholeness. As Ruttenberg says,
“even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason.”So Maimonides injunction of an obligation to pardon is for the victim’s own good.
Granting of pardon – closing the accounts – releasing our grudge -- “can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.”
Indeed, even without a true apology, or any apology at all, or any of the steps of repentance, I believe that if there isn’t actual trauma, then you have some responsibility for your hurt. You can’t decide what will be traumatic for you, and you can't decide to make trauma go away, though you can decide to seek therapy and treatment. Injuries that are less than traumatic afford you some room to decide how offended you want to be. We all learned as children that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” We know, of course, that names do sting, and that in extreme circumstances the hurt might even rise to the level of traumatic -- but what that little jingle taught us as children is that at least some part of how we respond to a hurt is in our own hands. We can decide whether to focus on vengeance, or to, as Ruttenberg put it, turn “our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent,” or to dwell, brooding, in the narrative of our own hurt.
And we can decide not to – decide simply to let go of the burden of our resentment. It helps if the perpetrator is penitent, but this sort of letting go of nontraumatic injuries is possible even if the perpetrator is not penitent. Lutheran minister Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber described this letting go as “actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us.” It’s freeing – and Bolz-Weber goes on to say:
“Free people aren’t controlled by the past. Free people laugh more than others. Free people see beauty where others do not. Free people are not easily offended. Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid. Free people are not chained to resentment.”So this obligation to pardon is an obligation to ourselves to be free of chains that may be dragging us down. Close those books so you can move on for your own good.
For forgiveness, as opposed to pardon – in Hebrew, slicha as opposed to mechila, there is an orientation toward a reconciliation. Forgiveness can happen without reconciliation, but forgiveness is pointed in the direction of getting to reconciliation. Even where reconciliation might not be a good idea, might not be appropriate, might not be desirable to one or the other or both parties, forgiveness can happen.
It can happen – though it is often not easy. We might say the words “I forgive you,” – and say them sincerely – yet our limbic system may still be attached to rehearsing the narrative of its hurts – in which case forgiveness hasn’t really happened and the path to reconciliation remains blocked.
Another way that forgiveness may fail is the forgiver coming off as superior. Saying, “I forgive you,” may cast me as the magnanimous one, all superior. Rather than return the parties to equality, it maintains a reversed inequality.
Forgiveness may also fail due to forces outside of the ostensive forgiver. If there’s a context of the forgiveness being expected or demanded, then the mouth may say, “I forgive you,” yet the path to reconciliation and wholeness remains blocked.
Situations of abuse require an intentional and extended process if the relationship is to be repaired at all. Yet a certain concept of "forgiveness" -- as if it were easy and instantaneous -- short-circuits the process that is needed. We also have to consider the possibility that no plan or process for repairing the relationship may have enough chance of success to be worth pursuing, and that getting out of the relationship needs to be the priority.
Something Ruttenberg doesn’t mention, but that Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Rebecca Parker does, is that grieving for the injury is part of the process. Parker writes:
“The capacity to grieve unlocks the psycho-magic of passing the pain on to someone else. Grief allows the pain to pass through one with its full power. The ability to mourn is the foundation of the capacity to forgive, and it is strengthened by those operations of grace which mediate comfort and consolation to us.”Both pardon and forgiveness release the violator from the obligation to suffer – or suffer any further -- for their violation. This is not a release from accountability. Forgiveness involves, Rebecca Parker says, "calling another to accountability, but relinquishing the desire for retribution.”
When I say accountability, I mean accounting for ourselves to one another – a relation in which we accept the task of trying to make our selves make sense to another human being – who has seen our past behavior as making no sense. The harmdoer must accept the call to accountability if forgiveness is to be genuine.
Forgiveness is a form of love – the final form, per Niebuhr -- and like love generally, it is a need. We need it in both directions. We need to love; and, in general, we need to forgive. We don't need to forgive everything -- some injuries are unforgivable -- but in general we need a capacity to forgive and to sometimes exercise that capacity. We need to be loved; and we need to be forgiven.
Sometimes, though, we may fail to do the work required to earn a meaningful forgiveness. For the fabric of relationship is all we have and all we are. Reweaving that fabric from all the ways it is rent and torn requires ongoing attention to effect accountability, and repentance, and repair. Let us attend skillfully to that work. May it be so. Amen.
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