Just Like Me

Why “Forgiveness”

My, ummmm, colleagues at Yale were quite supportive of my interest in poking around at this forgiveness thing—except that they kept questioning whether what I was pursuing really was forgiveness in the first place. “Maybe it’s more like reconciliation,” they suggested. “It seems to me that what you’re describing is something more along the lines of compassion,” another said. One spoke of her mother’s belief that you shouldn’t grant forgiveness until someone asks for it—which causes quite the quandary when someone is offended by something someone else did and doesn’t think was wrong.

I’m sticking to my guns, though—mostly because I like the sound of the word. There is this certain giveness in forgiveness that I fear we’re losing sight of. In carpentry, for example, you can speak of the give in different kinds of wood—pine, for example, has more give in it than oak. Materials can even be “forgiving”—a certain type of grout is more forgiving than another, because it sets more slowly, allowing you more time to clean up your mistakes. I tend to believe these uses of the words reflect an understanding of the human act of forgiveness, an understanding that must have been widely shared at one point in our English-language past.

So, at least at some point, we can presume forgiving persons had a bit of flexibility to them, and provided time for all the rest of us to clean up our mistakes.

I’d like to have a lot of those folks all around.

There’s another way to listen to forgiving. Break it up, and think about the quality of being For Giving. As in, “in favor of a certain generosity”. For me, there is a resonance to this, that I recognize in people I would describe as generally forgiving. They have, and seem to support in others, a certain generosity of spirit—a reaching out, a bit a bend, a willingness to understand another point of view.

That’s what I want to understand a little better, that’s what I’d like to remind us of, about forgiveness.

I’m not sure where the rigidity about forgiveness comes from—that someone has to ask for it, has to be really sorry, may need to make amends. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples (twice) that what they bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what they loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. I wonder if that’s some root of it—if some approach this power of forgiveness as if it were a test, as if, should they be too forgiving, they’ll have to answer for that at the pearly gates.

But really—Jesus forgave the men who drove nails through his hands and feet. We don’t know that they were sorry, if they felt they were just doing their job, or even if they enjoyed it just a little—putting this guy in his place. We just know Jesus asked that these men be forgiven.

A friend of mine works as a prosecutor. Her voice takes on a certain quality when she talks about the victims, or the families of victims who did not survive horrific crimes, would sometimes make their way into her office or a courtroom, to forgive. I think that quality of voice is awe—the right response to holiness.

That’s why I’m sticking to “forgiveness” at the moment. I may come to understand this part of life that interests me as something with a different name. But right now, forgiveness seems to fit.