Forgiveness

YOUR FORGIVENESS

Yesterday's boy is gone

Driving through darkness searching for

Your forgiveness

In sorrow a beautiful song

Lives in the heart and sings for all

Your forgiveness

Inside the digital mind

A homeless soul ponders the code

Of forgiveness

And I, the last in the line

Hoping the gates won't be closed

Before your forgiveness

— “Your Forgiveness” from Seven Psalms by Paul Simon

Forgiveness is not something we do well culturally in the United States.   Perhaps it’s not something we do well as human beings.   In the US, our moral currency was printed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and so forgiveness is a part of our thought world.  It is a word that is often used, and which is featured quite prominently in religious settings, generally.   It is an idea that most people embrace, but a practice that we seldom engage deeply.

And even when we do practice it, we don’t always allow ourselves to be converted to it within our hearts.   One of the hardest things someone said to me, speaking for herself and another, in the aftermath of my undoing was, “We are Christians, so of course we forgive you.”   What was hard about it was that it was a statement of duty, of obligation.   It translated into “We are required to forgive you because our religion requires it.   And so we will fulfill our duty.  But we don’t necessarily want to forgive you, we don’t necessarily feel a movement of forgiveness within ourselves.   This is not a matter of the heart or soul, but an obligation of religious law.”   I’m not saying that this is how the statement was intended — I cannot know the intention behind it.  Yet, it is how the statement settled in me.   

I think what makes forgiveness so hard is that, in the popular imagination, it has come to mean that what the person did no longer matters.   Culturally, forgiveness feels like we are letting a person off the hook, forgetting about what happened and the damage it caused.  It is saying, “It’s okay, let’s just move on.”   If this is our understanding of forgiveness, then it is no wonder that we are so loath to practice it deeply.   Because when people do something that causes us to consider forgiveness as a response, it is seldom if ever acceptable to let them off the hook and pretend that nothing happened and all is well.   Because all is not well — not for us considering forgiveness and not for people who stand in hope of it.

We get some insight into the right way to understand forgiveness from a story in chapter 8 of John’s gospel, in which a group of people bring before Jesus a woman who was guilty of adultery and ask him to condemn her and to pass judgment upon her (the legal penalty for adultery committed by a woman in that time and place was death by stoning).   Jesus famously says simply that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone.   When everyone in the group wanders away, recognizing that none of them are completely innocent of wrong-doing, Jesus asks the woman if no one remains to condemn her.  When she says, “No”, Jesus declines to condemn her and says to her, “Go and sin no more”.   

This story makes a couple of things clear about forgiveness.   First of all, the foundation of forgiveness is a recognition of the way in which each and all of us, in some way, shape, or form stand in need of it.   It is impossible to pass through this life without doing any number of things that hurt or damage others, and for which we should rightly seek forgiveness.   We have a tendency to hide this from ourselves, and one of the ways we do that is by focusing on people whose wrong-doing is so notorious that ours pales by comparison.   This is surely what was happening among the people who brought the woman to Jesus, who responded by re-focusing them on the way in which all of us have wronged others.

Second, the story makes clear that the result of extending forgiveness authentically and deeply is not to forget the wrong that was done or to pretend that everything is now ok.   In that simple instruction — “Go and sin no more” — Jesus forgives her and releases her but also points out that she has work to do.  That is, she cannot continue on in the way she has been living.  She needs to find healing, she needs to grow, she needs to evolve into a more authentic version of herself.     In other words, what happened was not okay — but it is also not the thing that should define her for the rest of her life.   The one who receives forgiveness does not simply walk away.  Rather, he or she walks into the hard work of growth and transformation.  Someone who is forgiven and does not begin doing that work has not truly allowed that forgiveness to enter their soul.

Forgiveness, then, rather than excusing a wrong and moving on as if nothing happened, recognizes the wrong and the damage it caused, while at the same time giving the person being forgiven space.  Space to evolve into a better version of themselves.   

I am convinced that most people who stand in need of forgiveness do not seek to be let off the hook.   Rather, they seek an opportunity to overcome what happened, integrate that into their lives, to learn and grow from the experience, and become someone new, more authentic.  They seek to find healing, a healing that will allow them to act in their lives and in the world from a more genuine place that does not hurt or damage others or themselves.   And so thaey seek space — a gracious space in which others are willing to allow them to evolve, and not forever see them through the lens of their wrongdoing.   

As a society, however, we do not really get this.   We are all about condemnation and punishment, which is why we incarcerate more people than any other “developed” nation in the world.   And in the course of that incarceration, we do nothing to give people space and opportunity to evolve and grow.  In fact, the general message is that they are not expected to grow, even that they are incapable of it.   Which is one reason why so many incarcerated people end up back in jail, often multiple times.   Because there is no forgiveness, there is no space given, and so they continue living and acting from their unhealed places, and in the process, continue to do damage to others.

We who fancy ourselves to be a “Christian nation” would do well to consider the unwillingness of Jesus to condemn or punish.   We would do well to recognize the much deeper work he was doing:  holding people accountable, calling them to change, giving space to them to grow into more authentic versions of themselves.   Such work not only saved those people, but it also saved the communities of which they were a part.