Forgiveness
Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
January 22, 2006
Palo Alto, CA Amy Zucker Morgenstern
“Is Hitler in Heaven?” That was the provocative title of a workshop at General Assembly last June. I circled it in my program right away as a must-not-miss. It wasn’t just the title that drew me in. The leader, the Reverend Edmund Robinson, has been grappling with the problem of evil since long before he went to seminary, and doing it well, and in this workshop he challenged us with the Universalist faith we have inherited from Hosea Ballou, whose crucial book, A Treatise on Atonement, was published 200 years ago last fall. Ballou proposes that God can and does forgive anything, and so his ideas challenge us to ask ourselves: can I forgive those who have done me wrong? What are the barriers to forgiveness? What does the word even mean?
Forgiveness is hard, oh, so hard … it’s one of the great problems of our lives, whether the challenge is for two six year old children to make up after a quarrel, or for a child to allow a too-long-absent parent back into his life, or for a subject people to move on from the oppression that has weighed them down for centuries, or for a superpower nation to make wise foreign policy after having been terribly wounded by terrorism. Forgiving anything more than the most trivial offenses is hard, and almost all of us have some distinctly non-trivial hurts to forgive. Reverend Robinson chose Hitler because he is the acid test, but Jewish teaching instructs us that forgiveness can come only from those who have been personally hurt by the person. So I ask you to think now about someone who has hurt you, someone you have not quite forgiven. It can be a large offense or a small one … anything that you’ve had trouble forgiving.
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Forgiving those who have hurt us is so immense a task, it asks us to make our hearts so much larger than it seems any heart can be, that I am talking to you this morning about just the smallest sliver of the problem. (For an example of how complex the problem is, the title in your order of service [“Reassembling the Broken”] is a relic of a part of the problem that in the process of thinking and writing, I ended up leaving for another day. No doubt you’ll see it again in a year or two, and I’ll talk then about brokenness and reconciliation.) Today, I want to look at what is within us when we are the ones who have been hurt, and I will start with what our wise forebear has to teach us.
Hosea Ballou was born in New Hampshire, five years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In the dominant religious teaching of the timeÑin the official religion of that place, the one in which he grew up — one of the primary messages was that most people were headed for hell. How could a merciful God condemn his flawed children to eternal punishment? Ah, well, you see, where the mercy came in was that according to Calvinist view of humanity, we actually all deserve to go to hell, because we are utterly depraved: unable to do anything good of our own will. The fact that some of us can be saved is entirely down to God’s having mercy on us. We do not deserve it and cannot earn it, and most of us will not receive it.
Ballou protested this miserly view of God’s mercy. He had grown up with this theology, but as a teenager, he read his Bible, with its God who gave people new chances again and again; he heard an itinerant Universalist preacher, and rejected the view he had been taught. He turned toward, in his words, “the consoling belief that God will finally have mercy on all,” and became a Universalist minister himself. According to the Universalist vision he laid out in his book, God’s love and compassion for his children is infinite. We do wrong, but God is always ready to forgive us. In the words of one neat summary, “It is not God who must be reconciled to human beings, but human beings who must be reconciled to God.” And eventually, we all will be, because Ballou, like his Calvinist colleagues, believed that God’s power was infinite and irresistible. We commit sins, sometimes terrible ones, but nothing we do puts us out of the reach of the loving embrace of the one who created us.
So said Ballou, in a book that changed American religion. For some decades, Universalism was the third biggest denomination in the country. The message caught on, and many other Christian denominations adopted the gentler view of human fate, downplaying the concept of hell. Historians widely believe that the reason Universalism declined as a denomination was that its ideas were so thoroughly absorbed by others that it lost its niche — a nice reason to decline!
Not that the Universalist message is out of date. All you have to do is flip on any conservative Christian radio or television broadcast to find out that the doctrine of hell is alive and well. love to see Ballou debate any one of those preachers, and bring his saving message — you are safe from hellfire! — to their listeners. Fifty-nine percent of adult Americans believe in hell (The Harris Poll® #90, December 14, 2005). That means that tens of millions of people still live with the same terror that racked Ballou’s 18th-century childhood: this life is a short respite, and thereafter they will exist in unending torment in hell.
And as we discovered in the workshop, Ballou’s message poses a challenge for us 21st-century UUs as well, those who believe in God and those who do not, those who believe in some kind of judgment on this life and those who do not, because of what it says about other people, the people who do us harm, sometimes irreparable harm. We talked and questioned and argued. Did we really have to forgive? Could we? Should we? Weren’t we letting people get away with it — literally get away with murder, in some cases — if we let go of our righteous rage against the terrible things they had done?
It was the kind of impassioned discussion I always hope to have with my religious community. There we were, mostly strangers to each other, bound together by the “Unitarian Universalist” on our name badges, and by the fact that we were all seekers struggling together to answer some of the most important questions of our lives. Was forgiveness just a pipe dream, or worse, an injustice? Could anyone be changed for the better by our forgiving them? Had we ever changed by being forgiven?
My heart was full of these questions as our time drew to an end. I had another event I wanted to get to right away: I hurried to the plenary hall, where Pete Seeger was giving a concert. And there he sang to us a song he’s sung thousands of times, “Guantanamera,” and in the middle of the song, he told us the English translations of the lyrics so we wouldn’t miss what he was saying. The last two verses, he said, were particularly interesting. Coming from that workshop, with my heart full of hope and doubt about forgiveness, whether it was possible, whether it was desirable, I was absolutely arrested by the words he spoke and sang.
I cultivate a white rose
In June [the original poem says July] and in January
For the sincere friend who gives me his hand
And for the cruel one who would tear out this
heart with which I live
I do not cultivate thistles, nor nettles
I cultivate a white rose.
(“Guantanamera,” by José Fernandez Diaz, after two poems by José Martí)
His voice almost broke when he sang that line, so I wasn’t the only one in the hall who was choked up.
The words of the chorus mean “country girl from Guantanamo,” another name that has come to be very loaded with brokenness that may need forgiveness. Sing the chorus with me, and the 2nd and 3rd verses too, if you know the tune.
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Cultivo la rosa blanca
En julio como en enero
Cultivo la rosa blanca
En julio como en enero
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Cardo ni ortiga cultivo
Cultivo la rosa blanca
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
This is the challenge of reconciliation. This is the question it asks us, and the question our Universalist heritage answers. What is it we are going to cultivate in our hearts? Will it be thistles? Nettles? Or will the seeds we tenderly nurture be roses? People do us harm. The things that happen between others and ourselves are seeds scattered on the ground of our memories. Some of them put down roots and grow into a tangle, like weeds. The hurts that have been done to us are part of the garden of our spirits, part of who we are, what we have to work with. Someone wise said, “Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.” The past is what it is; we cannot change it, no matter how badly we have been hurt, no matter how bitterly those who hurt us may regret it and wish to make restitution. We cannot give ourselves a better past, we cannot unsow the seeds that have been sown, we may not even have any seeds that don’t bear some thorns as well as sweet blossoms, but we can decide what we will cultivate and what we will allow to wither.
So often, when we think about forgiving, we get mired in the question of the other person: if we forgive them, will they learn their lesson? Will they change? That too is an interesting question to take up another time. But the song challenged us to leave that question and each ask ourselves, instead, “What do you want to cultivate in your heart?”
Ballou was speaking to a particular theological problem from a particular theological perspective that we may no longer share. But what he did was say, in effect, This is not about God. It is not about God! Whatever happens, God will be waiting for you with open arms. So he put the question right back on us. What are we going to do?
What makes it possible for us to forgive, sometimes, is true remorse from the other person. A World War II veteran named Eric Lomax was tortured in the war. “If you are a victim of torture you never totally recover,” he says. “You may cope with the physical damage, but the psychological damage stays with you forever.” For many years he thought obsessively about the man who tortured him, about how he would like to beat him and cage him and drown him. Nettles and thistles. He learned that the man had built a Buddhist temple and done many other charitable works. Later he received a letter from him, a deeply compassionate letter. It was not enough to make Lomax forgive, but it was enough to make it possible for them to meet.
When we met Nagase greeted me with a formal bow. I took his hand and said in Japanese, “Good Morning Mr Nagase, how are you?” He was trembling and crying, and he said over and over again: “I am so sorry, so very sorry.” I had come with no sympathy for this man, and yet Nagase, through his complete humility, turned this around. In the days that followed we spent a lot of time together, talking and laughing. It transpired that we had much in common. We promised to keep in touch and have remained friends ever since.
After our meeting I felt I’d come to some kind of peace and resolution. Forgiveness is possible when someone is ready to accept forgiveness.
(The Forgiveness Project, http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/eric-lomax)
But sometimes the person is not ready to ask forgiveness. The person who hurt us may die before we can revisit the hurt. He or she may never even acknowledges remorse. Sometimes, too often, the people we may need to forgive aren’t helping us grow roses. They aren’t giving us anything but bitter seeds. We will have to set the other person aside and tend to ourselves.
Denise Green and her husband Bill were two of many parents who suffered doubly when a Liverpool hospital where their children died betrayed their trust. Denise and Bill’s toddler son died in surgery, and she later learned that the hospital took his organs for research, without asking their consent or notifying them. They had to demand them back and have two more burials to inter them.
What made things worse was that no one ever took responsibility. She says, There was a lot of anger among the Alder Hey families, because no one was prosecuted. Justice hadn’t been done, and people felt betrayed and let down. Forgiveness was a not a word I used at first, but hearing the bitterness and anger I knew I didn’t want to go down that road. So I prayed to be able to forgive. In the end I came to forgive the surgeon who did the illegal stripping, and the hospital management. I chose forgiveness because I did not want to be destroyed by bitterness. What happened was out of my control, but how I respond is within my control.
(http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/denise-green)
This is your heart. You’re the one who’s going to walk through the garden, every day. The person who did you wrong doesn’t have to live there; you are the one who must live with what is in your heart. Do you want it to be a mass of thistles and nettles, or do you want it to bloom with sweet roses?
Please take a few moments now and think about the person you identified earlier, the one you have not forgiven. Think about what you want to tend in your heart.
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The choice is before each of us. Whatever we want to see growing, let us cultivate in our hearts.