by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

If only things were that easy for us as adults. When we get older something happens that makes it harder to rebound in the same way that we may have from some playground spat. There seems to be more to hang onto, it seems so often that it is harder to let go of something.

In the above interaction with the kids, as their parents are watch this interaction, one father shakes his head and says to the other with a mix of admiration and amazement, “How do kids do that? How can they be at each other’s throat one minute and get along with each other so famously the next?”

“It’s easy,” the other farther explains. “They choose happiness over righteousness.” Something to think about.

Forgiveness could be the subject of at least a dozen sermons. There have been all kinds of books written on the subject. And I know from being a parish minister that there is a reason for this. Forgiveness, I’ve learned, is something that is just about everyone deals with.

In our lives we find ourselves in a complex web of relationships. And it is almost inevitable in the midst of those relationships that we are going to hurt each other. We often don’t say the right things. We often don’t live up to expectations. Sometimes we do great harm to each other.

And we each have our particular way of being in the world. With that we bring our own capacity to hurt as well as to be hurt. Have you ever noticed how some people are just able to go through all kinds of things and still be upbeat, and don’t seem to carry a grudge? Then there are others who, no matter what life presents to them, will be critical and judging, they will carry something around for a long, long time? Have you noticed how two people will have pretty much the same experience and respond to that experience in very different ways?

It happens with parents and children, it happens with friends, all kinds of relationships—there are expectations that are not voiced and shared—and this leads to all kinds of hurt and disappointment. Sometimes there’s a grudge that gets established and we may not even be able to remember just how it started, but once it is in place it is hard to let go. But we do want to be in relationship.

So we have forgiveness, and it seems like it should be easy for the process of saying we’re sorry, accepting it and moving on. But so often it is not. It can be hard to let go and admit we did something wrong. It can be hard to let go and admit how much we were hurt. True forgiveness is not necessarily easy.

And we don’t see good examples from some who should be setting an example for the rest of us. In the public discourse, do you notice how often somebody doesn’t take responsibility for something they have said? They don’t say I’m sorry but instead say, “I’m sorry that you feel the way you do.” That really bugs me. We don’t really take responsibility for fear that we might appear vulnerable and afraid, which, of course, so often we probably are.

So forgiveness is something that we are certainly told to strive for, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily easy. So before talking about what forgiveness might be to us, it is probably important to say what it is not: Forgiveness is not about forgetting. In the act of finding forgiveness we don’t just sweep something under the rug and pretend it never happened. To do that would be to open ourselves to that hurt again. It is not some kind of denial where we forget that anything happened and go merrily along with life. We don’t lose touch with the hurt. And it is not about excusing whatever has happened. That in the act of granting forgiveness we implicitly say, “oh, that’s okay, it really didn’t matter much anyway.”

This might be called cheap forgiveness. On the surface things are okay but underneath are the same old hurts. Maybe we feel like we should be forgiving, but we really aren’t there. We should forgive and move on, we are told, so no matter what we might be feeling, we have to get over it. But there is danger in that, because then we really aren’t able to move forward. We really aren’t able to let go until we are ready to do that.

But there are also ways that we keep ourselves from finding forgiveness, for all kinds of reasons. We hold on to things for way too long and don’t get over them, partly, perhaps, because if we are the ones wronged, we don’t want to give up a certain sense of power that comes with feeling wronged. If we have done something to someone else, it may be that admitting we are wrong is more difficult than just staying estranged from someone.

I have to confess that this is where I most often get into trouble. When I feel I have been wronged I can hang onto it for a long time. Once somebody gets on my list it can be hard to get off that list. There is a kind righteousness that can come with not letting go, but eventually that feeling of power can lose some of its appeal.

And I know if I look deep into my heart that part of what is going on is that I really don’t want to accept that I too can hurt people and fear that they might really not forgive me. And yes, I have plenty of failings. I have learned to step back and ask myself what’s going on with all that righteous anger coming up. I have learned to at least ask the question, even if I am not always able, in the moment, to understand the whole of what is going on.

Writer Anne Lamott tells the story of her difficulties with the mother of the best friend of her son, Sam. In a story Lamott describes a long list of grievances she develops against the woman, including the way she flaunts her son’s ability to read earlier than Sam, the way she is able to wear bike shorts all the time, and the way she insults Lamott’s book. Lamott writes that she knows she should be more forgiving, but really isn’t able to be. Finally she is at the woman’s house one day, they are drinking tea, and she is getting Sam ready to go. Lamott is looking down at the boys’ sneakers and catches herself looking into the sneaker of the other boy. She was actually checking them out to see how her kid compared to the other kid in shoe size. She writes:

“And I finally got it. The veil dropped. I got that I am as mad as a hatter. I saw that I was the one worried that my child wasn’t doing well enough in school. That I was the one who thought I was out of shape. And that I was trying to get her to carry all this for me because it hurt too much to carry it myself.

“I wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, apologize for all the self contempt I’d been spewing out into the world, all the bad juju I’d been putting on her by thinking she was the one doing the harm. I felt like J. Edgar Hoover, peeking into the shoes of his nephew’s seven-year-old friend to see how the Hoover feet measured up, idly wondering how the kid’s parents would like to have a bug on their phone. This was me. She was the one pouring me more tea, she was the one who’d been taking care of my son. She was the one who seemed to have already forgiven me for writing a book in which I trashed her political beliefs; like God and certain parents do, forgiven me almost before I’d even done anything that I needed to be forgiven for. It’s like the faucets are already flowing before you even hold out your cup to be filled.”

In the festival of Yom Kippur, which was Friday evening and yesterday, Jews are called to fast, to look back at the year, to atone for wrongs committed upon others, to forgive others when they have been wronged.  It is a time of taking stock and asking whether we are in right relationship with the world and with other people in the world. Too often we don’t take stock and we end up sitting on all kinds of stuff and in the end hurting our relationships with the very people we love.

There are so many ways that we can find ourselves out of relationship with someone else, and so often there are little things that keep us from reconciling with someone else. Our pride gets in the way, time passes and we don’t know how to bring it up. The hurt is there and we don’t know what to do with it. We keep putting it off and then those old hurts just seem to settle in deeper and deeper. And so often it is the need to forgive ourselves that we can’t bring ourselves to do. As one writer puts it, we rent too much space in our minds to those old grievances.

Sound familiar? In the process we cut ourselves off from life and from others. From holding on too long, for living in our world that really keep us from others.

But forgiveness does call us to let go of the hold something or someone has on us. Finding acceptance and forgiveness sometimes calls on us to look deep within and it calls us to have the courage to move beyond the hurt and the broken relationship we live with.  Forgiveness may or may not involve the person who has wronged us. They may or may not be around. They may or may not be willing or able to take responsibility. And the same goes for someone we have hurt who we want to make amends to. They may not be open and willing. So it may be that we have to come to accept the situation and move on. Not forgetting, but deciding to let go and look to the future. We take stock, we try to see with all the clarity we can see with and then try to accept it.

It is a kind of attitude that we are open to what might come. It is not just an attitude that everything will be okay, but more of an attitude that we want to get to a place that is right and not live in a place where we are out of relationship with others. It is finding the courage to live our truths and to move on with life. This is at the heart of what it means to find forgiveness. It is an invitation to look to the future with hope.

A number of years ago, when Oregon was about to carry out the first execution in the state in many years, I attended a rally in Pioneer Square and heard a woman speak and her story has stayed with me. Her daughter, who I believe was 7 or 8, had been brutally murdered some years before. She was a person who was not particularly comfortable in front of a microphone but she clearly was called to be there.  She said that she was against capital punishment because it would only perpetuate the violence that took her daughter’s life to kill another person. Her way of honoring her daughter’s memory was to speak out and call for an end to violence.

I’m not sure what I would do in such a situation. I can only imagine the rage that would be present in such a situation. And I can only imagine how difficult it would be to move forward with my life. But there was a way that her love for her daughter had somehow been put through some fire and that it came out with an awareness that she needed to speak out against another life being taken, whatever that person might have done, that the taking of one life did not justify taking another.

Somehow, I think, that may get at what forgiveness is really about. It is keeping sight on what is good, what is right and living by that. It is not forgetting, but taking what has been learned and living from that place of knowing. Forgiveness is an invitation to be in the world as we are. To be accepted for all that we are—our gifts but also for our failures. To accept that we can harm as well as be harmed. And to accept that whatever we have done or experienced is over and we can begin again. And it is an invitation to not forget the past, but to move to a place beyond it. To not be held by the past but to live past it. It is an invitation to accept ourselves for who we are.

The theologian Reinhold Niehbur calls forgiveness the final form of love. That eventually, no matter what might be between us, there is a way to live past differences, to live past hurt, to be together in love, to look to the future with love.

It takes courage to live openly in the world. It takes courage to call ourselves beyond the hurts that others may bring us, to take responsibility for the ways that we let others down, for the ways that we let ourselves down. It takes courage to know our truths and to live them.

Forgiveness isn’t a one-time event that happens and then we move on, it is something that is happening all the time. Forgiveness is critical to our own process of becoming whole. It is not cheap and it doesn’t always come easy, either in giving it to others, receiving it or giving it to ourselves. But in accepting who we are, with all of our flaws, and all of the possibility within us, we live in the world in a different way.

Come, come, whoever you are, says the mystic Rumi,
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

We are asked, in all of our days, to have the courage to begin again in love. And in that beginning we are asked to be fully in the world, to fully give ourselves to love.  So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Let us pray. Great spirit of life, bless us this day. Call us towards right relationship with others and with our world. Give is courage to speak when we see violence in our lives and in our world. Call us, always to work for justice, to stand on the side of love.  Amen.

Benediction

Always, always say yes—to yourself and to your world. Go now in love and go in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.