Maybe It Isn't Forgiveness

Maybe It Isn’t Forgiveness, After All

Is it ever not okay to simply do your job? This is the question that began my exploration of forgiveness.

Some years ago, I helped a landlord to evict a man—elderly and in a wheelchair, and we didn’t know of any family or friends. Two friends and I—because we thought we needed money—entered his apartment just behind the deputy, opened up his drawers, and emptied his belongings into cardboard boxes that we carried to the curb.

I wish I had not done that, now.

More recently, more often, I write up notes for meetings of the government, including meetings of a program that I know is causing harm. I know a man who will not take this project on, who will not make a profit from this waste of money and this risk of lives.

I admire his decision more than mine.

Our government has tried and then convicted Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s chaffeur. The jury sentenced him to half a dozen years; the prosecution wanted 30.

Israel arrested, tried, convicted, and then executed Adolph Eichmann, for making the trains run on time. He might still be alive today if he’d been shipping fuel or ammunition to the front. But he was taking people, by the tens of thousands, to their death. We seem to think this should have made a difference to him.

What is the difference, though? And does it differ in degree or kind, if you ship people off to concentration camps, or taxi round a murderer, or move a man onto the street not knowing—and pretending not to care—what happens to him next?

And does bureaucracy provide us any absolution? It didn’t shelter Eichmann, though he seemed not to hold any animosity, not to take any perverse kind of pleasure, not even to be impolite to the Jews with whom he carefully negotiated and arranged the genocide.

Research shows that young Americans receiving abstinence-only sex education postpone sexual activity for a few months longer than their peers. But they don’t wait until they’re married, and when they do have sex, they are more likely not to use protection, and so increase their risk of pregnancy and HIV. I knew this as I typed the notes that helped to keep the program clacking on its tracks.

When I first started fretting on forgiveness, mostly I was worrying about somebody else. Several someone else’s actually: friends and family members who go to work these days, and in so doing push this global war on terror forward.

Is this a war? And is it one we can, or even want to, win—given its great costs and consequences?

And when it’s over, win or lose, what of the people in it? What of the ones who kill the innocent—because we know that innocents are always killed in wartime? What of the ones that arm the ones the kill the innocents, the one who tell them where to aim, the ones that give them better armor so they might live to kill again, the ones designing weapons that are deadlier, the one designing radios that keep them all on track? What of the ones who vote for leaders who will keep the war alive, the ones that do not lay down on the tracks, to keep the train from rolling?

Is forgiveness what is needed here—and can there ever be enough?

When I began this summer of forgiveness—these weeks of groping through what I believed or thought or possibly could learn through prayer—I began imagining forgiveness as less an act than atmosphere. Is it possible, I wondered, that we might fall into forgiveness, in the way we fall in love: unbidden often, unawares, sometimes against our better judgment.

Can we be in forgiveness in the way we are in love?

The other day, I drove past the Richmond Women’s Clinic. I used to live around the corner, it’s on a route I’ve travelled often, ever since I was a child. The clinic provides abortions, and so it is a place where people gather to protest the procedure and the policies that make it legal in our country.

The other day, two men were out. One wore a sandwich board proclaiming: “Abortion is murder” and “Murder is a sin.”

Something in me rose up, added: “And our sins may be forgiven.”

The gospels make it pretty clear: we will be judged as we judge others. Jesus is recorded as providing us a strong, consistent strategy for dealing with this consequence: judge not.

What would it be—who would I be—if I joined the men there on the corner, with a sandwich board about forgiveness? Would that be judging? Could that be something else, maybe even something more?

Is it possible to pray or hope or talk about forgiveness of our sins, and leave the details of the sinfulness to someone else? Jesus was a profligate forgiver, and he never really bothered with a list. Must I decide, must I declare, my current and best guesses about the people working in our war on terror, the women entering the clinic, the men standing on the corner with their signs, and all the people driving by?

I started with this nervy, edgy, hackles-raising questions: Could I—is it possible and right that I—forgive my friends and family for going off to work?

Rumi says our task is “not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within [ourselves] that we have built against it.” I tried this with forgiveness: ducking underneath the question of just who the hell was I, instead I bumped into my barriers, and found that each gave shelter to a sin: an old man’s boxes on the curb, a tidy stack of papers risking adolescents’ lives.

The gospels say that after we’ve addressed the logs within our eyes, we are supposed to help each other with the specks. And here’s where things get tricky. I wonder what it would have been to me, to have the man I moved outside forgive me. To have the man who wouldn’t take the work that I so willingly took on tell me I’m forgiven for it. Not understood or shrugged away or brushed aside. Forgiven.

I think it might have made me angry. I think it would have puzzled me, and stuck with me, and troubled me somehow. I think I never would forget. I think I might be grateful, now.

Who do I think I am, who would we think we are, to dare forgive each other for these facets of our lives? To dare to think our jobs or your abortions or our protests or your thousand other actions need forgiveness in the first place, and that we’re the ones to offer it?

In the gospels, people raise these questions about Jesus—until the paralytic walks. In Luke, the question rises once again, when a woman who has sinned a lot anoints his feet. Jesus says that those who are forgiven much love much, and those who are forgiven little love a little less.

Which brings us back to Rumi, doesn’t it?

These months of conversation have exposed a stinginess to me. We wrestle over who forgives, and who and what can be forgiven, and on what occasions, and what’s required first, and ever afterwards.

Maybe we are stingy with forgiveness because we do not understand our full capacity for love. Maybe we have given up our hope that we could ever rise and walk.