Initiatives of Change - Barriers to Forgiveness '- and Forgiveness, Barrier to Revenge by Donald W Shriver, United States

Dr. Donald Shriver

We had confirmed last night, in our visit to the shop and dinner at Boaz and Ruth, the centrality of interhuman relationships for the fulfillment of human personhood. In individualistic America, we need constant reminders that no one can become a person without relation to other persons. That is biologically true of our beginnings; it is also socially true of our growing up.

Along the way, our relationships and our growth are likely to have an indispensable assist from what we must call forgiveness. That human beings do wrong things to each other can hardly be disputed empirically. How humans learn to live together, in spite of their wrongdoing, is something of a mystery. How does it happen? Robert Frost’s poem, “The Star-Splitter”, has an answer. It tells the story of a New England farmer who develops a keen interest in astronomy. To further that interest, he needs a telescope, and to get money for it he decides to burn down his barn and to collect the insurance money. But the law catches up with him, and he goes to jail for a year. Upon his return, townspeople have to decide if they want anything to do with him as a ex-offender. But then they got to thinking:

“If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.”

In his classic little book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis picture Hell as a place where inhabitants can live as far apart from each other as they wish. (Napoleon has moved to a very distant planet!) And that matches Dostoievsky’s definition of Hell: “Hell is not to love anymore.”

Forgiveness is one form of love. But it is a rigorous form, difficult for anyone who has ever tried it. I think, for example, of a brutal murder which occurred across the street from our Union Seminary in New York one evening in 1978. Sixteen-year-old Hugh McAvoy emerged from the Corpus Christi church and for some misunderstood, trivial chuckle gave a thirteen-year-old youth the impression that he was being “dissed.” The thirteen-year-old pulled out a gun and shot Hugh McAvoy dead. Next day his grief-stricken father, also a loyal Catholic, said to a reporter: “I know that my faith teaches that we must forgive those who ‘trespass against us,’ but it’s hard.”

It’s so hard that it is cruel for pious friends to say to the victims of such a crime, “You should forgive.” Forgiveness may take a lot of time. There are some formidable barriers to the transaction. Here are three of them:

I.

1. Suppressed, incomplete endurance of grief and anger.

A judgment that something wrong has taken place is the necessary beginning of the logic of forgiveness. To underrate the evil of an evil deed is to pay scant respect to the victims and the perpetrators of that evil. Some advocates of the idea of forgiveness suggest that forgiveness is inconsistent with moral judgment. To the contrary: forgiveness assumes and incorporates moral judgment. And one justified impact of that judgment is the grief and anger which victims do experience and must experience before they can get on to other dimensions of forgiveness. To be sure, grief and anger can be so deep that they become victims’ prison from which they cannot get free. But prompt expressions of forgiveness can be diversions from grief and anger, which can produce suppressed memories of pain and depth charges that explode in new disruptions of relationship. We add cruelty to the victims of cruelty when we advise them, “You should forgive”, when they are far from being ready to forgive.

2. Contempt for the perpetrators.

The inclination to have contempt for enemies and perpetrators is common in almost all deadly human conflicts. Whom we would kill, we may conveniently first define as inferior to us, and whom we condemn as perpetrators of evil fall easily into our same category of sub-human. “We” are better than “them.” That axiom fuels many a war.

Take, for example, two recent wars in Iraq. From the Gulf War of 1991 we still do not have any word from the U.S. government on the number of Iraqis killed the, though our military carefully counts the number of Americans killed.. As it happens, in 1991, an employee of the Commerce Department, Dr. Beth DePonte, investigated the question and began to come up with a probable total of 158,000, which included the deaths that ensued in the ‘nineties from an international trade boycott. For her trouble, the Commerce Department fired her. Then, in December 2003, the reviving Iraqi Ministry of Health started counting Iraqi dead in that year’s war, only to have that research cut short by the Pentagon. In contemporary America, we count “our” Iraq war dead carefully–approaching 1500 now. We put their pictures in our media.. We don’t count Iraqi dead, which means that for us they don’t count. As Professor Luc Sante of Bard College remarks, “It must be because Iraqis do not matter.”

To treat other human beings with contempt–or as “beneath contempt”–is to build a barrier against even considering forgiving them or being forgiven by them. It is to cut off one of the necessary stages in a forgiveness-process, which may be called empathy. A capacity for empathy gets activated when we concede that both victim and perpetrator are as human as we are. Perpetrators dehumanize their victims, and later on surviving victims may dehumanize their perpetrators. No renewal of a human relationship is possible in the midst of such mutual contempt, which easily transmutes into the barrier of thirst for revenge. Contempt and revenge are siblings in the family of barriers to forgiveness. They cut off the road to reconciliation. They send victims down roads littered with the bodies of counter-revenge. Contempt and revenge are dead-ends in human affairs, but many there be who do not care if the way to their own deaths is littered with the deaths of others.

3. Despair over this, our human nature.

The world of the 20th century and early 21st has been so littered with masses of murdered humans that it is not easy to avoid falling into the temptation of despair over human being itself. In the midst of World War Two, the novelist Kenneth Patchen remarked, “The chief question of the 20th century is not whether we believe in God, but whether God believes in us.” Why should God believe in a specie, homo sapiens, some of whose members have been “sapient” enough to have invented a weapon capable of killing every one of its members? I am haunted by Harold Haaris’s poignant question of yesterday, as he reflected on a murder in this very neighborhood, “Why are we so cruel to each other?” I think he had in mind chiefly the people of urban ghettos. But the question deserves to be globalized:

Why did a communist government in Cambodia authorize the killing of over 20% of its own people in the name of “justice”?

How did the Holocaust happen in a country, Germany, whose citizens were among the most highly educated in the world?

How did a Hutu-dominated government in Rwanda manage to convince thousands of its supporters to join in the slaughter of 800,000 fellow citizens known as Tutsis, all with an efficiency in the use of rifles and machetes that killed at a rate exceeding the rates achieved by Nazi murderers in their Polish death camps?

And how was it that in the very hour in which Patrick Henry, up this very hill, was intoning that watchword of the American Revolution, “Give me liberty or give me death!”, slaves down the hill in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom were being bought and sold and transported to plantations all over the Southern United States? What sort of “western civilization” was it that engaged in the enslavement of Africans for nigh unto 400 years?

The list of atrocities can be extended almost ad infinitum. To sum it up, how long a catalogue of errors do any of us need to tempt us to despair over this our common human nature? Why should the Creator of us all continue to believe in such creatures? Why should we not fall into the clutches of that existentialist slogan, “People are no damn good”?

II.

There are answers to this threatening slogan from faith and theology. I know what the Bible says: “While we were yet sinners, God loved us and keeps on loving us.” That is a sturdy faith, and I pray that all of us, against much evidence, will believe that God does love us, and that–because God does–we must be worth loving.

But rather than proclaiming that faith simply against the evidence, I want to conclude by identifying evidence that helps sustain the faith. That brings me to another, opposite kind of barrier, a barrier that enables some of us to “keep on keeping on” in love of ourselves and each other, namely, our persisting experience that love is alive in some members of our specie who contradict the evidence for despair. Yesterday we met some of those folk who offer the contradicting evidence. They had been years in jail for crimes of harming their neighbors, but now they are out of jail and working on a new version of their human relationships.

I have to concede that one support for practical-minded atheism would be existence of a human society in which love was nowhere in sight. Likewise, one support of practical-minded faith is the existence of human love in the midst of much hatred. I, we, can be loving because we have been loved. We have experienced the love of God in some of God’s creatures. God has witnesses in our midst who setrengthen us for keeping on keeping on.

Someone asked George Bernard Shaw, “Do you believe in infant baptism?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “ I have actually seen it!”

Forgiveness is one form of love between human beings. I have not offered here an analysis of all the features of forgiveness which deserve attention, but most of all I mean to call our common attention to some facts in our historical surroundings whose reality cannot be denied: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down” [Robert Frost]. There is love, even reconciliation, in the air, enabling us to doubt that alienation is the final fact of human existence and to work at the building of new facts in these our human relationships. Deep-down we can believe that God means the survival and reconciliation of this community of human sinners, for the loving survivors and the faithful reconcilers live among us.

Let us pray for the privilege of being counted among them!