FORGIVENESS….AGAIN

It may be an exaggeration, but I think only a slight one, to assert that forgiveness is the most difficult concept to accept or understand. Yet it is the basis for living in this world and a basic of our faith. We cannot live in this world unless we forgive and accept forgiveness and we cannot be fully Christian unless both are part of our daily lives. Forgiveness is simply that basic to life as we know and live it.

Forgiveness comes after the pain, often in the midst of the suffering. Someone has done something, said something, to hurt us and to hurt us deeply. The pain is real, is ongoing, begs for redress. The hurt was deliberate which makes the pain even more difficult to bear and the thought of forgiveness almost impossible to conceive. Yet, unless we can forgive, we cannot move on in life.

In fact, not only are we not moving on in life, we are not even living in the present. The hurt that was inflicted in the past is keeping us living in the past. It is there and it is preventing us from moving on, so consuming is our pain, our hurt and our anger. This did not have to happen. The hurt may have been fully deliberate or have been caused because the other lost control which may lessen that person’s guilt but does nothing to alleviate our pain.

Is it any wonder, then, that being asked to forgive the one who hurt us is not only so difficult, it almost seems foolish. Why should we have to forgive someone who has hurt us? Won’t that make him even more likely to hurt us again and again? How will she learn from what she did if we so readily forgive? Will she learn? After all, are we not supposed to learn from our mistakes, especially deliberate ones? What kind of learning is that, being forgiven with no punishment or redress involved?

The wound inflicted is not something that will heal all on its own. It is not a surface cut but a wound so deep that it demands surgery or else it will eventually kill us, literally and figuratively, if it is not treated. And the only one who can treat our wound is we ourselves. We have to be our own surgeon. God will give us the grace and strength to begin the process and see us through as will those who love us.

The late Lewis Smedes has written much on forgiveness. He said this: “The only way to heal the pain that will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. Forgiving stops the reruns of pain. Forgiving heals your memory as you change your memory’s vision. When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was your­self. Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us to forgive each other.”

Forgiveness is never demanded nor deserved. It is simply granted and must just as simply be accepted when we are the one who is to be forgiven. Neither is ever, ever easy. But to live either unforgiving or unforgiven is to die while still breathing and that is not living.

OUR LIFE IS A MYSTERY STORY

The great (only a personal opinion, or course) mystery story writer Mickey Spillaine, in talking about how he read mystery stories, admitted that he read the end of the story first to see who did it and then went back to the beginning. He said that he read mysteries in this way so that he could better follow the plot. That would be a great way to follow the plot but it would also take all of the fun out of reading mystery stories.

Life, our life, is truly a mystery story that is still being written. It is a mystery not in the sense that we have to figure out who is going to do what to us or who truly was to blame for something that happened to us. Rather life is a mystery because we have no idea what the rest of our life will bring. We do not know how that story will end. That’s the real mystery, isn’t it?

Yes, we have plans for the future, near and very distant. We plan the day. We plan for our vacation. We plan for retirement. We all have plans, some more definite than others, to be sure, but we have them. However, we have no idea of knowing whether any of these plans will materialize. We may die before any one of them takes place. We may live to see most of them fulfilled. But we simply do not know.

Our life is not predetermined. No one, including God, knows how our life we till turn out, even how tomorrow will turn out. Our free will and God’s giving us that free will to do as we please help determine how our life will proceed and even end. What is more, the free will of every other human being also helps determine what happens next in our life. How often have we had to change our plans because someone or something else – a boss, a sick child, an accident – forced us to do so?

That may be unsettling when we think about it, but it is also a fact. In fact, instead of the mysteriousness of life being at times so much a cause of worry and concern, it can be a cause for some peace of mind. Much of our life is truly out of our hands and is in the hands of others, even at the whim of their free will. We cannot control what others do. We only have control over our own lives and even that control is limited by our own human limitations.

If Mickey Spillaine were alive today, and if he took a look at our life as it is right now, he would have no idea how it might evolve let alone end. Neither do we. Would we want to know? Do we have any desire to be like Mickey Spillaine and know how the end of our life will take place – all the details – and then watch as our present life unfolds that will eventually lead to that pre-determined end even if that were possible? I doubt it.

Just as the joy of reading a good mystery story is in paying attention to all the details, so the joy of life is living in the moment. It’s not that we are not concerned how our life will turn out; we are, we most certainly are and we moist certainly well should be. Rather it is the fact that the rest of our life has not been written. It is written moment to moment, day to day. We are called to live each moment as faithfully and as fully as we can and watch as the mystery of our life unfolds.

SIN AS DEBT

When you and I say The Lord’s Prayer, we ask the Father to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, or in the newer form: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” My Presbyterians friends, however, are accustomed to say “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In fact, one of the more famous musical versions of The Lord’s Prayer uses the Presbyterian form.

Not to argue what is correct or, perhaps, what is more correct – trespasses, sins, debts – but a good case could be made that debt is the better term, or at least gets to an issue about trespasses and sins that we hardly ever think about. Both trespass and sin are words that indicate that something wrong has been done. The trespasser, the sinner, has hurt another and asks for forgiveness just as s/he asks for the same when s/he is the one who has been done wrong.

We all know that we are sinners, that we have hurt others, and deliberately so, with our words and actions. We make no bones about it and are never hesitant to say The Lord’s Prayer. We’ll even make a public confession of that fact during the Eucharist. We do not shy away from such admissions because we know we cannot and because we also know that everyone around us, everyone period, is in the same boat as we are. We are all sinners, no questions asked.

That is all well and good as far as it goes. But does it go far enough? Does simply admitting our sinfulness suffice? The Presbyterians, at least as far as their version of the prayer goes, do not seem to think so. We should not think so either. Think about it: whenever we hurt another, we owe them something. We are in debt to them. What we certainly owe is an apology. We might be in even more debt as well. We may have to make amends, repay, somehow in some way, what we have damaged. There may be occasions when we are in debt big time.

Too often, I think, we do not think about the consequences of our sinfulness, do not even consider that we are indebted to the one we have hurt just as the other is indebted to us whom he or she has hurt. We owe and are owed as a result of our sins and trespasses but we often think little or nothing about this truth – or, even worse, how we are going to pay off the debt that we owe.

Years ago a prominent psychologist asked the question, “Whatever happened to sin?” because he believed we human beings were simply taking our sinfulness for granted and were satisfied that that was sufficient. “We’re all sinners, so what’s the big deal?” we said and asked and went on with our lives. In doing so all the debts we built up because of our sinfulness and selfishness only got higher and higher and we became more and more alienated one from another.

The only way to remedy such alienation is to take responsibility for our sins and somehow begin to repay the debts we owe. Perhaps if we were more cognizant of the fact that our sins require debt payment, we would sin less and love more. Perhaps.

THAT EXPLAINS IT ALL

Ever wonder why we human beings can sometimes be so smart, do so much, be so intelligent that it often staggers the imagination? Every time I look around, it almost seems that there is another newer and better and faster technological gadget on the market. My first cell phone years ago had more computer stuff than the Apollo astronauts had. My new phone is a less than a year old and it is behind the times.

That is only for starters. One only wonders what will be next so smart are we. And then, at the same time, we have to wonder why we same human beings can do some of the dumbest and most foolish things. We make serious decisions often on the spur of the moment and live to regret what we’ve done, regret it for a long, long time. We all have skeletons in our closets we had to hide there out of sight and out of mind because we did not want to be continually faced with our foolish past actions.

So why do we very smart human beings often do what is quite foolish, what we would not do had we given some thought ahead of time? Mark Twain had the answer. “Man was made at then end of the week, when God was tired,” he opined. Sounds like a plausible explanation to me given that I know I make foolish and rash decisions when I am tired, when I should have waited, that I do not do my best when I am exhausted.

Tongue in cheek or not, Twain was on to something there. Of course, no matter when we were created, we would still do what is unwise and foolish, free will being what it is. That being a given, something else Twain observed goes hand-in-hand with our ability and proclivity to do the foolish after which we often grieve over our mistakes. We grieve alone because we are not going to find a sympathetic ear. We made our bed freely even if foolishly. No one is going to join us in it just to ease our guilt. That is how we learn.

Grief can take care of itself, says Twain. And it should. But, he says, “to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” We can and do – must – grieve over our foolishness alone. We do not rush out and tell everyone, tell anyone, about the fool we have been. But we do not rejoice over our good deeds all alone. We need someone else, many others, to share our joy. When something good has happened to us, we can’t wait to share our good news.

God may have created us on the last day when God was worn out, exhausted, and did not give us his best shot. I can live with that. We all can because we must. What God also did, as the creation parable makes very, very clear is that God created us for one another. It is not good for us to be alone, especially in our joy and even in our grief and sorrow.

Yes, we need to grieve alone in order to personally deal with whatever it is we are grieving about – a foolish action, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a failure of some kind. We need that time alone, but we need others to be close at hand.

We are who we are: each of is wise and foolish, weak and strong, sad and joyful all rolled into one human being. We are God’s creation. That explains everything even if we can’t understand the half of it.