Forgiveness

The readings at the Eucharist today, regarding anger and forgiveness (seventy times seven - surely a feat for the volatile Peter), impressed me deeply. I have no notion of how one truly goes about granting forgiveness, but perhaps one can begin by adapting Thomas Aquinas's definition of love: willing the best for the other.

Just this week, I was reading Papa Benedict's brilliant work, "Eschatology." (I'm sure you'll be hearing more about that from me soon.) For now, I'll mention one lovely sentence - he mentioned how "forgiveness turns guilt into love." I would say, with people that I love, that nothing reminds me of Christ more than forgiveness. But the definition there is sadly limited. Indeed, being granted forgiveness from another is one of life's greatest graces, and I believe strongly that the love we mortals have for one another is sacramental in a powerful sense. Yet the only time we tend to want or to grant forgiveness is if the incident which requires this involves a relationship we genuinely value.

I am of both working class and southern Italian background. I cherish many of the qualities which one gets from both - but sadly have to comment that neither fosters a forgiving attitude. Perhaps because the labouring classes are so often treated with contempt and injustice, the sort of vulnerability that comes with forgiveness is not a high priority. In fact, it often is taken to extremes. Even in cases where a problem may have resulted from a misunderstanding and could be resolved, acquaintances or even good friends can be 'shelved' for any slight. (My dad used to say, regarding those by whom one was wronged - even if they were not fully aware of having done the 'wronging' - 'bag'm!' How one 'bags' people is beyond me - but his years in the grocery business must have led to this term, much as I just found myself saying 'shelved.')

I am immensely proud of my Italian background - as certainly a musician, poet, artist, writer, and fervent Catholic would be. (Don't be put off by my leanings to the English Church - Italian Catholicism is very much like the C of E, as I'll develop in later posts. A land which had that many popes has no illusions about perfection at the top. We're anarchists, anyway.) Overall, I would say that it is a culture with a degree of responsibility (for family in particular - but close friends are also in that category), politeness, generosity, hospitality, and devotion to those in need (witness the societies formed to care for the poor and ill during the Counter Reformation) which is extraordinary. Yet honesty compels me to admit that forgiveness is not a strong point. (Some, here and there, are quite vindictive. For several millennia, the defence for murder was 'he had it coming to him.')

What family has not seen arguments or disagreements tear an extended family apart as everyone takes sides? What parish, or other religious institution, has not had times when the sense of community was torn to pieces in much the same fashion? And half the time no one even remembers how it all started. I am tempted to use the cliché "that is how wars start," but shall refrain because I just noticed the date of this post, and to do so would be quite tacky.

Forgive my playfulness, please. Yet I see a common thread. Forgiveness means vulnerability in cases that are not horrifying. (In those that are, it can mean horrid victimhood.) As I learnt (it takes nuns a while, but they normally catch on after being badly burnt), seeking to practise humility, charity, and acceptance often can make one known for weakness.

I hesitated to write this post, because so many nuts on the Internet spend too much time on the 'self help aisle,' and my ire is stirred when I receive e-mails from those who have 'guessed my secret.' (There are no secrets here - my life has no colourful traumas. But the readers of the self help crap take everything to mean what... it well might not.) On one occasion, I mentioned how my own 'principal defect' is anger (I'll not get into how this came up, but it was quite innocent, when I was reassuring someone who was terrified by her own weaknesses.) The ridiculous e-mail I received in response, where the assumption was that all anger comes from sexual abuse, made me hit the delete button quickly before I answered with excessive sarcasm. (It was the biggest online annoyance since I posted a silly comment about the reserve at Anglican coffee hours, by contrast with my Italian Franciscan days, and some self centred fool wrote me scads about her 'journey with Prozac,' and her conclusion that this drug could relieve me of the idea of 'imagined slights.' Get a life!)

With those who have hated us, or who have been cruel, it is very hard to think of how they never gave a care for the effect their actions would have. We do not value them personally - but we've suffered immensely from how they have used us. It's hard not to wish they'd burn in some version of Dante's Inferno. (And Lord did he target those who wronged him in mentioning who was in Hell...) Yet a betrayal from a trusted friend is perhaps ten times as painful.

We are aching for love - but, of course, cannot admit this today lest the self-help crowd think we are trying to manipulate them or indulge their lectures on how people hate 'the needy.' How much of my own rage is centred on my desire for love, acceptance, encouragement! Before my brain fizzled out in middle age, I spoke four modern languages (plus Latin), yet, for all of my verbal ability, I could never seem to get through to people whose love I dearly wanted, but who would not 'hear' me because they already had preconceived ideas of what I 'really' meant. (The line from Ecclesiasticus about forgiving ignorance was a balm... after the condemnation of rage.)

If we consider the full scope of what Jesus of Nazareth endured, his "Father, forgive them" becomes more powerful with each thought.

I could have written a meditation on forgiveness of which 'my mystics' would have approved. Yet I have shared this bit of disjointed rambling because, for all that we may struggle with anger, we can feel guilty about admitting this.

Thomas Aquinas left many a marvellous legacy to the Church. Cranmer left us with a daily admittance of the need for divine forgiveness - and that was not placed in the Prayer Book for decoration. So, as I recite my daily words of contrition, it often is a comfort to me to know that, according to the Angelic Doctor, just willing the best for the other will be a good beginning. :)

If we remember that there is much 'death' in this world beyond what that normally means, perhaps these words, again from Benedict, can be a useful meditation.

From Benedict's 'Eschatology':
'How can we describe that moment in which we
experience what life truly is? It is a moment of love,
a moment which is simultaneously the moment of truth
when life is discovered for what it is. The desire for
immortality does not arise from the fundamentally
unsatisfying enclosed existence of the isolated self,
but from the experience of love, of communion, of the
Thou. It issues from that call which the Thou makes
upon the I, and which the I returns. The discovery of
life entails going beyond the I, leaving it behind. It
happens only when one ventures along the path of
self-abandonment, letting oneself fall into the hands
of another. But if the mystery of life is in this
sense identical with the mystery of love, it is, then,
bound up.. with the Cross, with its interpretation of
life and death... Death is ever present in the
inauthenticity, closedness, and emptiness of everyday
life..(The failure to be with our true being) allows
the promise of life to evaporate, leaving only
banalities and leading to final emptiness...

(Benedict includes a section about how pain and
illness force us to face that existence is not at our
disposal, then continues.)

The same thing happens in the central region of the
human landscape: our intimate ordination towards being
loved. Love is the soul's true nourishment, yet this
food which of all substances we most need is not
something we can produce for ourselves. One must wait
for it. The only way to make absolutely certain one
will not receive it is to insist on procuring it by
oneself.. This essential can generate anger...
Conversely, we can accept this situation of
dependence, and keep ourselves trustingly open to the
future, in the confidence that the Power which has so
determined us will not deceive us.

And so it turns out that the confrontation with
physical death is actually a confrontation with the
basic constitution of human existence. It places
before us a choice: to accept either the pattern of
love, or the pattern of power. Here we are at the
source of the most decisive of all questions. This
claim of death upon us which we come across time and
again in media vita - are we able to receive it in the
attitude of trust which will usher in that fundamental
posture of love?...

The uncontrollable Power that everywhere sets limits
to life is not a blind law of nature. It is a love
that puts itself at our disposal by dying for us and
with us. The Christian is the one who knows that he
can unite the constantly experienced dispossession of
self with the fundamental attitude of a being created
for love, a being that knows itself to be safe
precisely when it trusts in the unexacted gift of
love. Man's enemy, death, that would waylay him to
steal his life, is conquered at the point where one
meets the thievery of death with the attitude of
trusting love, and so transforms the theft into
increase of life.'