THE THREE MOST UNBELIEVABLE WORDS

If, as I maintain, the three most difficult words to utter and truly mean are “I forgive you”, then one of the ways to say those words is to remember that God always forgives us for what we have done. The lover always forgives the beloved as difficult as that is to do if the beloved is truly sorry for what has been said or done that needs forgiveness. God, who is the Ultimate Lover, if you will, always forgives us even when we do not ask for forgiveness, such is God’s ultimate and unconditional love for us.

God’s love, of course, does not give us carte blanche to do whatever we want simply because God will always forgive us in the same way that the lover does not give the beloved the same freedom. Love may mean that we never have to say we are sorry but it also means that we do not do anything that might require us to say we are such. It is our love for the other and God’s love for us that reminds us to never do anything that will require confession of things done or left undone.

The problem, of course, is that because we know how difficult it is to forgive another, we tend to assume that it is just as difficult for God to forgive us. And just as we innately want the one who has hurt us to somehow be hurt in return as a punishment for hurting us, so we have come to believe that God thinks and acts in the same way: God is going to make us pay for our sins somehow in some way either in this life or in the life to come. We don’t get off scot free.

Believe it or not, we do. Not only does God always forgive us, God even forgets. Back in the day when I was hearing confessions on a regular basis and granting forgiveness in the name of God and the church, even if I knew who the penitent was and the penitent knew I knew, once outside the confession box, whatever that penitent confessed was forgotten. If the penitent brought up the subject of the confession, s/he would have to tell me what the issue was as I had “forgotten” the confession. The sin had been forgiven and forgotten and it was time to move on.

What was left to the penitent was to have learned from the sin and move on and not wallow in it worried that God was going to make him pay for it sooner or later. The same is true for any one of us whether we make a formal confession to a priest or even to the one we have hurt. Sometimes, of course, making a confession to our beloved would be foolish. We did things in the past before our relationship began. We learned from those mistakes. We have grown. Time to move on.

The fact that as humans we cannot forget the past because it is stored in our brains forever does not mean we cannot live as if the past has been forgiven and forgotten. We can and we must. Yet the most important reason why we can is that we somehow have to come to believe, if we are not there already, that God also forgives and forgets. Our way of giving thanks for such love is to have learned from our sins and grown.

THE THREE MOST POWERFUL WORDS

When we think of power, we tend to think in terms of the ability to control something or someone. We are a powerful nation because we have more weapons than the rest of the world combined. A person has power over me if he has a loaded gun pointed at my head. The boss has power over subordinates, the teacher over students, the law over disorder.

Power is exerted in a multitude of ways and sometimes it is simply the threat of using one’s power that power is exerted. We slow down at the sight of a police car even if we are not exceeding the speed limit. Power or the threat of using power is good in that it tends to keep order when chaos could easily result or keeps us focused on the task at hand when we would rather be doing something else rather than what we should be doing at the present time.

While all that is true, even the physically weakest person (or nation, perhaps) in the world can be very, very powerful because of the ability to utter three little words: I forgive you. Think about it: how easy is it for any one of us to forgive someone who has deliberately hurt us? Forgive, really forgive; not just utter the words but to actually mean what we say? Anyone who says that he or she has no problem in forgiving is simply not telling the truth. Not at all.

It is easier to love than it is to forgive. In fact, the need to forgive someone we love makes forgiveness all the more difficult because to love someone means that we will never do anything that would require both our asking for forgiveness and for the one we have hurt to forgive us. But it happens. Loving relationships often dissolve because the lover deliberately hurts the beloved and forgiveness is either not asked or not given, or worse, both.

Why? Because forgiveness is not easy, not at all. It is intrinsically meant to be difficult because of how precious and important loving relationships are. The lack of love for the other makes it easier for us to hurt the other. But the demands of a true and loving relationship remind us that we never want to put ourselves in a position where we have to ask the one we love to forgive us. Never. And if we do something to damage that love and are discovered because we have nor owned up to our failure, it makes the giving of forgiveness all the more difficult.

We know all that because we have all been there. All of us have hurt the ones we love and know how difficult it was to ask for forgiveness. We also have been the one who has been hurt and know how even more difficult it is to forgive, especially forgive the ones we love the most and who love us the most. It takes a very powerful person to say “I forgive you” and mean it. It is not through will power that we utter those words but only through the power of the grace of God that is always offered. However, it is up to us to accept that grace and, as difficult as it still will be, to say, “I forgive you.”

THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD, WE HOPE

With retirement comes downsizing, thankfully. Over the years, if you are like me, we tend to gather more than we needed back then and even more than we need at the present moment in our lives. Retirement brings a slower pace to life – or so I am told, as I have not found it to be so to this point in time – and thus allows one to sort through what one has accumulated and to dispose of the non-essentials.

In doing so, in going though old sermons, I found a clipping I had taken from a Sunday comic section probably twenty years ago. What is interesting, to me at least, and sadly so, is that both sides were relevant back then still are today. The one strip was a Doonesbury panel in which a television interviewer is questioning a citizen about the latest election for governor. Thus:

“Excuse me, sir. Are you a man in the street?” “Why, yes, yes, I am!” was the reply. (Then) “We’re doing a follow-up on last month’s elections. How did you feel about the candidates for governor?” “The candidates for governor? I didn’t feel anything at first…I just didn’t know very much about either man. But then I started watching their commercials. It turns out one of the guys was a tax cheat who abused his wife and favored giving crack to furloughed sex offenders.” “And the other?” “He was a corrupt alcoholic who favored murdering babies and burning the flag.” “So who’d you vote for?” “The wife-beater. I thought he had better denials.”

Has anything changed? And we are in for more of the same for almost the next year. As I said: sadly so. And yet, change is possible: to wit, the other side of the comic page. This one from Johnny Hart in B.C. His peg-legged character is sitting under a tree and penning a poem: “Often times I wonder what the world is all about/ It can’t be just a place for coming in and going out/ It surely can’t be just a place for terrorists and crooks…and dirty, rotten scoundrels that sell pornographic books/ It wasn’t made for wallowing in sickness, death and sin,/ or people who give drugs to kids, or beat-up on their kin./ Our world was once a perfect place, a gift of love, not war/ and we still have the power, through grace, to make it like before!”

Absolutely! We still have the power, through the grace of God and our willingness to do what needs to be done, to change the world. These two, old comics remind that nothing has changed because we who have it in our power to make changes have done little or nothing to do so. It has almost gotten a bit worse, perhaps a whole lot worse.

So how do we change this world “to make it like before”? One step at a time and beginning with ourselves, that’s how. Advent approaches, a time for new beginnings, a time to make changes for the betterment of our own lives and, in the process, to make the lives of those around us better as well. Not easy to do; but with God’s grace we can do our part so that twenty years from now “better denials” will be a relic of the past.

NAÏVE INNOCENCE

A couple of weeks ago while on a return trip from visiting Arlena’s Mom, we were listening to public radio and a rerun of The Moth Report, a program I had never even knew existed. At any rate, the segment was a talk by Ishmael Beah who came to this country as a teenager after having lost his entire family in the civil war is Sierra Leone and after having been conscripted into being a child soldier in that war.

It was a fascinating account of those first years in this country, in New York City specifically, and about the group of young friends he made while living there. He told about going with them to a big estate in upstate New York and playing a game of paint ball with them. Paint ball is a war game where paint balls are used instead of bullets.

Because he had been a real soldier, he won the game. They never asked him back to play the game again. It was only later on that he felt he could tell them why he was such an expert in war and war games. But at that moment after the “battle”, he could not reveal himself to them. He allowed them to live in what he called their “naïve innocence”.

Those words set me back. Whether we believe it or not, whether we understand it or not, we all live in a world of naïve innocence – our own little world. If we’ve never been to war, real war, we cannot understand what war is like. If we have never had cancer or lost a child or lost a job – the list is endless – we are naively innocent of the realty of each one of these.

Oh, we think we understand, but we do not. We cannot until we have been there, walked that road, felt that pain. What is worse is that we make statements as if we do understand when all we are doing is making fools of ourselves. What we should do is be thankful that we have not had to walk that painful road and pray for those who are walking it at that moment.

Allow me to be a little political: at this moment in time when local elections are upon us and the presidential campaign is in full swing, we are bombarded with advertisements and interviews where the candidates tell us in so many words that they feel our pain. No, they don’t. They’re too rich. I remember years ago when the first President Bush told on himself about going to a grocery store after he was out of office and was shocked by the price of a loaf of bread. Naïve innocence.

I’m picking on politicians because they are so up front in there attestations that they know what we are going through as if they are going through it themselves. But I am also looking into a mirror because I know I am often guilty of doing the same: thinking I understand when I really do not when I should be thankful for my own naïve innocence. The sad part in all of this is that painful issues are only addressed politically and personally when naïve innocence is replaced by reality itself.