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"Forgiveness: The
Hardest Act of Love"
A Sermon By Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O'Neill
Delivered Sunday October 8, 2006
At The Unitarian Fellowship of West Chester, PA
In the crowded urban neighborhood where I spent my
earliest growing up years, there was an amazing array of
people for a young boy to encounter and observe. One of the
nicest and most exotic personalities of that long ago place, I
remember, was an elderly immigrant Frenchwoman who lived in
our building.
Madame Boutellon was always very
elegantly dressed, and she always carried herself with an
upright posture and stately demeanor. She spoke with a very
thick French accent, and she was my sister's piano teacher.
She and her husband were both shy and very quiet, and how
tolerant they must have been, living next door to the
boisterous racket of seven O'Neill children wrestling past
their door night and day.
My mother once told me that the
Boutellons were Jehovah's Witnesses. This fact only added to
their mystique, as far as I was concerned, for that sounded
like a very select group indeed.
I was to have one very important
encounter with Madame Boutellon. I was very young, in first
grade maybe, and several older boys - second grade thugs, I
suppose - had run by me and pushed me face-first into a snow
bank. It was a huge indignity, and I sat there on the stoop
crying tears of outrage and frustration.
Mrs. Boutellon had witnessed the
incident from her upstairs window, and she came down and
collected me from the stoop and brushed the snow and tears
from my face, and brought me into her kitchen for a cup of hot
cocoa, while fussed over me in French-accented maternal
phrases that seemed to right the universe again.
"You are angry at those boys for what
they did to you, Patrick, and it is natural for you to feel
that way. But now you must let you’re anger go," she said.
"This day has other things to give you."
It wasn't until years later, after
Mrs. Boutellon and her husband had both passed away, that my
mother mentioned her name in conversation, and I told her of
the day Mrs. Boutellon rescued me from that hard experience on
the front stoop. "That sounds just like her," said my
mother. "You know, don't you, that the Boutellons were both
survivors of the Nazi death camps in the War?"
I had never known that. But it gave
even more power to the words Mrs. Boutellon had offered me on
that cold day when I was still a young boy. "This day
has other things to give you." Imagine hearing that
from a death camp survivor.
Besides the hurts and
indignities of an unfair universe, this day has other
things to give you. Besides the anger that you want
to carry in your heart for all the wrongs done to you -
this day has other things to give you. If you are
ready to let go of your anger, to forgive what has happened in
the past, this day has other things to give you. I
heard that from someone who knew a thing or two about pain and
hurt and injustice and indignities. I heard that from a
survivor.
At a workshop I attended not long ago
where one of the topics was helping people deal with their
anger, a therapist was holding forth about how important it
was for people to learn how to forgive others and sometimes
how to forgive ourselves for the wrongs that have occurred in
our lives or for wrongs that have been done to us. The
therapist rightly pointed out that the willingness to forgive
is one of the most powerful tools we have to help us move on
from some of the most deeply wounded places in life.
Just after the therapist finished
saying this, one woman raised her hand and said with wonderful
honesty, "But I'm not really ready
to forgive the person who has hurt me. Can't I skip this
forgiveness part for a while and still move toward healing for
myself?"
Forgiveness is hard. It's hard
to do. It's hard to give, it's hard to receive, it's even
hard to talk about. Forgiveness is hard business. It is soul
work on the deepest level.
Forgiveness is hard for a lot of
reasons, some of which are healthy and understandable, some of
which are very unhealthy and damaging. Despite all the
practice we've had over a lifetime of telling each other we're
sorry for all the intentional and unintentional hurts and
harms we do to each other in this limited living space
together - forgiving each other is hard.
Let's be clear that we are talking
about an adult activity here. When children practice
forgiveness they are practicing adulthood and maturity. And
when adults refuse to forgive, they are quite often acting out
of a very childish stance. Forgiving is the act of a
thoughtful and mature civility between people, the opposite of
aggression and vengeance. As one psychologist puts it,
forgiveness is about "preventing
the pains of the past from distorting the joys of the present
and undermining the promise of the future."
If there is one fundamental
misunderstanding about what forgiveness is and what it does,
it is this: a lot of us still think forgiveness is
something we give to other people, to people who have wronged
us and who may or may not be sorry for what they did to us.
But that is only part of what forgiveness is, and it
completely misses the true nature and power of forgiveness in
our lives.
Forgiveness is first and foremost a
gift to ourselves. It is an act of
self-love, self-care, self-respect, self-healing,
self-liberation. It is the permission we give
ourselves to let go of the pain of the past so that it
does not define us for the future.
Madame Boutellon always wore high
necked frilly blouses with long sleeves. But one day at the
piano my sister saw the number that was tattooed on Mrs.
Boutellon's forearm. It was her identification number from
the prison camp. And when my sister innocently asked what it
was, Mrs. Boutellon patiently explained that the number on her
arm represented her past identity as a prisoner, but now she
covered it over not because she was ashamed of it, but
because that was not her identity anymore. It was not her
present, and it was not going to be her future. She
had moved beyond the victimhood of her past, and her
future was different.
What people like Mrs. Boutellon
understand is that forgiving is the intentional act of moving
away from a place of woundedness, letting go of that
woundedness, letting go of the hurt feelings we harbor from
that woundedness, and leaving it in our past in order to
receive unencumbered the gifts of future growth.
Let me say that again, because a lot
of people never think of it quite this way.
Forgiving is the intentional act of moving away
from a place of woundedness, letting go of that woundedness,
letting go of the hurt feelings we harbor from that
woundedness, and leaving it in our past in order to receive
unencumbered the gifts of future growth.
That honest woman in the workshop (to
whom we can all relate) wants to move on to new wholeness in
her life, but she is not ready to put down the burden of the
hurt that has been done to her, she isn't ready to forgive.
The wounded child in her wants to carry the psychological
cargo of that hurt around for a little longer. She's moving
in the right direction, she's aware of what she's doing and
what ultimately she ought to do for herself, but she's not yet
ready to forgive.
"Can't I skip this forgiveness
part for a while and still move toward wholeness for myself?"
she asks. Which is exactly what all of us do whenever
we choose to harbor a hurt rather than forgive it.
"Can't I carry this pain with me for just a
little longer? Can't I keep this grudge growing inside of me
for a little longer? I don't know if I'm ready to part with
all this anger yet - I'm used to it now, and I'm used to
having this as part of my story. It's part of how I explain
and justify my life now. Can't I carry it for a while
longer?"
When we do that, of course, we may
indeed move forward in life even carrying our cargo of
unforgiven hurts with us, but we do so only with diminished
capacity. Of course, you would be amazed at just how much
emotional junk some people manage to carry around with them
every day. There are people who carry within their hearts the
freight of every pain and hurt that life has ever dealt them.
That such people can even get out of bed in the morning is a
stunning act of strength. Some people do it. And they do it
for years and years and years. Hold on to all that pain, hold
on to all that anger, carry all that old hurt, never forgive,
never put it down, never clear it out.
The problem is, you see, there's only
so much room in the human heart, literally and figuratively.
And if all your heartspace is taken up with a collection of
unforgiven hurts and the junk and clutter of unprocessed anger
and the pain of bitter resentments that you have never managed
to clear out through forgiveness, then your heartspace is all
occupied, unavailable when the good stuff comes along. The
good news is this day has other things to give you -
if you've made room in your heart to receive
other things.
The tragedy of some people's lives is
that they've never given themselves the gift of forgiveness.
It isn't an all-or-nothing kind of deal, we know that. And it
isn't a quick fix-all, we know that, too. The heart gives up
its bitterest cargo only piece by piece and the process can
take years, we know that. But how tragic to watch someone you
love allow some terrible event of the past to take up so much
of their heartspace that there isn't any room left for new
love to touch them, for new hope to lift them, for new faith
to call them out of their pain..
Can you move through life "skipping
this forgiveness part," carrying the cargo of unforgiven
hurts? Of course you can. But it will cost you dearly. It
will cost you heartspace. It will cost you energy and joy and
freedom and love to keep carrying all that junk. In some
senses, it may even cost you your life.
One book on forgiveness illustrates
this principle by telling the story of how national park
rangers in Africa catch monkeys in the wild. Maybe you know
this already.
"The ranger
brings a plexiglass box, which has a small round hole on one
side. Into it he slips a banana. He places the box
underneath a tree in which there are some monkeys, then
retreats into the distance. Inevitably one of the monkeys
gets curious and comes down out of the tree to explore the
situation. He finally puts his hand through the hole and
picks up the banana. But when he tries to withdraw his hand,
his fist, holding the banana, will not fit through the hole.
The monkey jumps up and down squeaking and squealing, trying
to get free. In the meantime, the ranger appears and captures
the monkey. So the question is, what did the monkey need to
do in order to get free?
OPEN HIS FIST AND DROP THE BANANA."
(From How To Forgive When You Don't Know How by
Jacqui Bishop and Mary Grunte, Station Hill Press, 1993,
Barrytown, NY, p.50)
Learning how to open our fists that
have been clutched in rage or anger for a long period of time
is not as simple as it sounds. We have a lot of wrong ideas
about what forgiveness is and how it works, a lot of
misconceptions. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness
is not tolerance. Forgiveness does not mean denial of a past
hurt. It does not mean that the feelings of anger are not
real or justified. Forgiveness means simply that I will not
allow myself to be defined only by those things. Forgiveness
means I will not allow my foot to be nailed to a spot in the
past from which I can never move again.
When the great prophets and teachers
of history speak of the human heart, their teachings begin and
end with the lessons of love and its great and powerful tool
of forgiveness. "Forgive us our trespasses," one of them
taught us to pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against
us." In my opinion, the world would be vastly improved if
churches spent less time teaching people how to repent and
more time teaching people how to forgive.
"This day has other things to give you": a
lesson about heartspace and survival and liberation from an
old French Jehovah's Witness. I hope you pass it on.
-- Patrick T. O'Neill |
