First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, October 5, 2008
One of the side effects of aging is that I sometimes have trouble going to sleep. One night – or I should say, one early morning – when I couldn’t get my mind to turn off, and I flipped endlessly through the television channels, trying to find something boring enough to put me to sleep. By chance I caught a reality show called “Forgive or Forget,” in which contestants brought their family feuds and relationship battles to a television studio with a host and a live audience. At the end of the show, after a vote by the audience, each participant was given the opportunity to either forgive or forget the person they had the conflict with.
Although I can’t say I actually enjoyed the show, it gave me a lot to think about. Everyone alive has suffered in some way, big or small, from the actions of others; everyone alive has committed offenses, knowing or unkowing, against others. Forgiveness is thus not an academic exercise or a rhetorical question. Unless we live as hermits, removed from other people in our safe caves (and if you were doing that, you wouldn’t be in church this morning), from time to time we all need to be forgiven and we all are offered opportunities to extend forgiveness to others. This is a part of being human and being in relationship.
Forgiveness brings up a lot of questions, not all of which I’ve been able to answer. Does forgiveness have to mean forgetting the original offense? How does refusing to forgive affect a person? Once we’re forgiven, are we supposed to forget the offenses that we committed? Is continuing to remember what we did just a guilt trip? The old adage says “forgive AND forget,” but the television program offered it instead as a choice, forgive OR forget. What else is there? I wonder if there is perhaps an alternative, a third way.
As we saw in our ritual this morning, Jewish law and tradition provides for a 5-step process for forgiveness, that includes awareness, resolution to do better, reparation for the offense, acknowledgement of the wrong done, and a return to right behavior despite temptation to repeat the offense. This tradition influenced the process of reconciliation that was developed by Marie Fortune, a Presbyterian minister who has done extensive counselling with survivors of domestic violence and congregations that have been harmed by clergy sexual abuse. Fortune asserts that forgiveness can occur only when the following 4 elements are present: recognition of the wrong done, a willingness to take full responsibility, an effort to make restitution, and finally, repentance, or a return to a right way of living.
However, neither Jewish law nor Rev. Fortune addresses the issue of forgetting after forgiveness. In “Meditation on Forgiveness,” my colleague Kathleen McTigue writes,
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. To forgive means to anchor a wrong in its own time, letting it recede into the past as we live and move toward the future.
What has happened, happened, and forgiveness cannot change that. Keeping the offense in the context of the past is not the same thing as forgetting. If we truly extend forgiveness to a person who hurt us, then it is not necessary for the old offense to be brought back up. Many relationship counselors say that in arguments within healthy relationships, the partners keep their disagreements in the present, and do not dredge up past wrongs.
Everett Worthington, executive director of A Campaign for Forgiveness Research in Virginia, whose interest in forgiveness began when his mother was murdered, points out that those who refuse to forgive also refuse to forget, thus carrying the negative feelings and the pain and stress engendered by the hurtful action like a burden of stones, bringing about both physical and psychological harm to themselves. So here is the paradox: when you refuse to forgive someone, no matter what they did, YOU are the one adversely affected. As a wise person has said, “Refusing to forgive someone is like taking poison and hoping the other guy will get sick.”
And yet, as Worthington himself admits, forgiveness takes strength and courage that many of us are afraid we do not have. After Apartheid, the people of South Africa decided on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as opposed to long drawn-out trials for the many crimes and abuses committed. Watching video of the hearings (which you can still do on the Internet), seeing Bishop Tutu with tears streaming down his face as witnesses testified, one cannot help being moved by the forgiveness offered by people who survived unbelievable suffering.
Another example is The Journey of Hope, a group of family members of both murder victims and murderers, who travel the country demonstrating against the death penalty. Some tell of visiting their loved one’s murderer in prison and offering them not only forgiveness, but help and resources. A few years ago, the parents of Matthew Shepard and the relatives of James Byrd, 2 men killed in horrible hate crimes, testified in the trials of those who had committed the murders, asking the juries not to impose the death sentence. Whenever I am inclined to hold onto anger, when I am yearning for revenge even of only the cosmic variety, I try to remember these people, reeling from offenses greater than anything that I have had to endure, recalling these examples of regular people, no stronger or better than you or me, filled with compassion and courage and the strength to forgive.
I believe passionately that if more modern people knew how fervently our Universalist ancestors believed in God’s complete forgiveness, and how that is still part of Unitarian Universalism today (if often unspoken), we would experience a surge in membership comparable to the days of the great Universalist circuit riders. Hosea Ballou and John Murray, among many others, taught that God could and would forgive any sin and that the real hell was the alienation and estrangement that human beings create for themselves on earth. Universalists preached that all were forgiven, and urged people to live in just that way. They believed that when we realized the full extent of divine love and forgiveness, we would naturally alter our behavior toward the right and the good.
The poem that served as this morning’s Chalice Lighting agrees that when you know you have been truly forgiven and feel truly loved, your actions change for the better. Written in the voice of a misbehaving child, the poem shows a universal human trait: that when we are faced with anger after committing an offense, we react with a kind of reciprocal anger, with an almost paradoxical desire to repeat the wrong action. “But when you love me,” the poem goes on to say, “i feel such a warmth in me/and for you/that i really don’t ever want to do it again.” [by Ulrich Schaffer, in For the Love of Children] Forgiving and being forgiven makes us quite literally feel better; it is not too much to believe that we act better too.
Think not that we have ended something here today in our ritual of casting away stones. In the tradition of Yom Kippur, it is said by the rabbis that God can only forgive wrongs committed against God, but that the only one who forgive a wrong against another person is that person. If any of you cast away stones this morning because of something you did toward someone else, I urge you to go to that person and say the hardest word and try to make things right. It is the only way to repair what was broken – the relationship, the trust, the mutual care and concern.
In life there are no shortcuts, and that is certainly true of forgiveness. It is not a one-time event, then finished and done. It is instead a difficult, even arduous on-going process, that requires time and effort and a depth of commitment and love. There is no cheap and easy forgiveness, just as there is no cheap and easy grace. With forgiveness, as with most worthwhile human endeavors, practice makes perfect.
May we practice forgiveness in our everyday lives, remembering our own wrongs, not to carry a burden of guilt, but in order to remind us of what we promise not to do again. Let us strive, with the strength of love and compassion, to leave in the past the wrongs committed against us by others. And may this practice of forgiveness bring us, as individuals and as a religious community, to full restoration and reconciliation, and the joy that is found there. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
