"The Point of Forgiveness"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

03/20/05

In the village of Faken in innermost Friesland there lived a long thin baker named Fouke, a righteous man, with a long thin chin and a long thin nose. Fouke was so upright that he seemed to spray righteousness from his thin lips over everyone who came near him; so the people of Faken preferred to stay away.

Fouke’s wife, Hilda, was short and round, her arms were round, her bosom was round, her rump was round. Hilda did not keep people at bay with righteousness; her soft roundness seemed to invite them instead to come close to her in order to share the warm cheer of her open heart.

Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he allowed her; but her heart ached for something more from him than his worthy righteousness.

One morning, having worked since dawn to knead his dough for the ovens, Fouke came home and found a stranger in his bedroom lying on Hilda’s round bosom.

Hilda’s adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and the scandal of the Faken congregation. Everyone assumed that Fouke would cast Hilda out of his house, so righteous was he. But he surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as his wife, saying he forgave her as the Good Book said he should.

In his heart of hearts, however, Fouke could not forgive Hilda for bringing shame to his name. Whenever he thought about her, his feelings toward her were angry and hard; he despised her as if she were a common whore. When it came right down to it, he hated her for betraying him after he had been so good and so faithful a husband to her.

He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punish here with his righteous mercy. But Fouke’s fakery did not sit well in heaven.

So each time Fouke would feel his secret hate toward Hilda, an angel came to him and dropped a small pebble, hardly the size of a shirt button, into Fouke’s heart. Each time a pebble dropped, Fouke would feel a stab of pain like the pain he felt the moment he came on Hilda feeding her hungry heart from a stranger’s larder.

Thus he hated her the more; his hate brought him pain, and the pain made him hate.

The pebbles multiplied. And Fouke’s heart grew very heavy with the weight of them, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to strain his neck upward in order to see straight ahead. Weary with hurt, Fouke began to wish he were dead.

The angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart came to Fouke one night and told him how he could be healed of his hurt.

There was one remedy, he said, only one, for the hurt of a wounded heart. Fouke would need the miracle of the magic eyes. He would need eyes that could look back to the beginning of his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife who betrayed him, but as a weak woman who needed him. Only a new way of looking at things through the magic eyes could heal the hurt flowing from the wounds of yesterday.

Fouke protested. “Nothing can change the past,” he said. “Hilda is guilty, a fact that not even an angel can change.”

“Yes, poor hurting man, you are right,” the angel said. “You cannot change the past, you can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past. And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes.”

“Only ask, desiring as you ask, and they will be given you. And each time you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will be lifted from your aching heart”

Fouke could not ask at once, for he had grown to love his hatred. But the pain of his heart finally drove him to want and to ask for the magic eyes that the angel had promised. So he asked. And the angel gave.

Soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously. He began to see her as a needy woman who loved him instead of a wicked woman who betrayed him.

The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from Fouke’s heart, one by one, though it took a long time to take them all away. Fouke gradually felt his heart grow lighter; he began to walk straight again, and somehow his nose and his chin seemed less think and sharp than before. He invited Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began again a journey into their second season of humble joy.

Two decades ago, I heard Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist, deliver a lecture at Chautauqua in which he told of how inspired he was by his encounter with Ruby Bridges. Coles wrote several books about how children coped with complex circumstances, like those raised in Northern Ireland, the children of migrant workers, children from affluent families, and in Ruby’s case, Black children who lived through the civil rights era.

Ruby was one of the children who had to be escorted to school every day through screaming mobs by federal marshals because they were integrating the New Orleans schools. Ruby’s teacher called Coles’ attention to Ruby who seemed not to be traumatized by the experience. Was she in denial? Was she repressing the trauma? Coles decided to investigate. He and his wife visited Ruby’s family in their home, and he managed to work the conversation with Ruby around to asking her what she did when she walked through the crowd on her way into the school building. After much hesitation, she told him that she would say, “Forgive them, Lord, because these folks don’t know what they are doing.” The reality was that Ruby was protected from emotional scars by the armor provided by her ability to see past the hatred to the frightened people who were behind it and forgive them. Coles thought there might be a lesson there for us all.

The fall after I heard Coles’ lecture, I led a workshop on “Living with the Loss of a Love.” In preparing for it I discovered a fascinating book called, “How to Forgive Your Ex-husband (and Get On With Your Life.”). The authors, Marcia Hootman and Patti Perkins asserted from their personal experience, and from their experience with other women, that there is nothing more self-destructive than the clinging to the hate which is so commonly connected to the divorce process. Women and men are often unable to get on with the next stages of their lives until they have come to terms with their anger toward their ex spouse. They asserted that forgiveness is not altruistic – it’s appropriately selfish.

I decided there was a message there, and so for the first time in 20 years of ministry, I prepared and delivered a sermon on forgiveness. Now, in many churches, sermons on forgiveness are routine – they happen all the time. This is not such a popular topic with Unitarian Universalists. In Christian churches, the focus is often on how the people need to be forgiven for their sins. There is something about the thought of being forgiven that makes us squirm. It implies, of course, what we have done something for which we need to be forgiven, and we are not ready to buy into that. If it is interpersonal forgiveness, it implies that someone else is being magnanimous in forgiving us, which puts them up one and us down one. And when it comes to us forgiving others, it seems sort of namby-pamby, goodie-two-shoes: it seems weak. We want to stand up for ourselves and others and not forgive that which is evil.

In Christian theology, divine forgiveness of our sins is supposed to be a model for us in forgiving others of their sins on us. Interestingly, some of those who talk the most about forgiveness, are those who demonstrate the least forgiveness themselves – they are the most prepared to judge and condemn others. Someone pointed out that what we call the Bible Belt could also be called the “death belt” because it is the section of our country which has the most executions. So much for forgiveness.

There is a now-dated, but I suspect still valid, survey of Unitarian Universalists which asked how we rated various values. and our results were compared with other religious groups. Forgiveness rated eleventh for UU’s, following Honest, Broad-minded, Loving, Responsible, Courageous, Independent, Intellectual, Capable, Helpful,

and Imaginative. It was then followed by Logical, Cheerful, Self-controlled, Ambitious, Polite, Clean, and Obedient. Interestingly, people who indicated no religious preference ranked Forgiving 16^th, Jews ranked it 15^th, while Christians –both Protestant and Catholic - ranked Forgiving 4^th.

Two decades ago, when I delivered my sermon on Forgiveness, which was, in fact my first, and until today, I believe my last sermon on the subject, there was relatively little attention paid to forgiveness by mainstream psychologists. It was a process attended to mostly by Christians. That has changed a great deal over the last twenty years. Forgiveness is very “in.” There are major centers of forgiveness studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and at Stanford University. Conferences are held at which scores of research papers on Forgiveness are delivered.

One of the things that has happened is that scientists, not just theologians, have discovered that the ability to forgive correlates significantly with good health. Those who do not forgive tend to suffer not only from anxiety and depression, but from gastric and endocrine disorders, elevated blood pressure, and heart disease. The research seems to demonstrate that people who are taught to forgive, and “yes,” people can learn, experience a reduction in those symptoms.

Our culture delivers mixed messages about forgiveness. As I said, a lot is said about it in Christian pulpits, but the stress outside church is on “getting even” and on “holding people accountable.” It would be nice to think about a world in which we did not need forgiving, nor did we need to forgive – a world in which everyone always met everyone else’s expectations. That is, of course, unreal. I cannot imagine any relationship in which forgiveness does not play a part. If we have no expectations of others, there is probably something very wrong with us. At the same time, others have expectations of us. These expectations are not always realistic, and they can be mutually exclusive, so there is bound to be disappointment, and that is the mild kind. In the real world, even loving people sometimes betray one another. One of my favorite authors on the subject, Dr. Robert Karen, insists that:

All sustained relationships depend to some extent on forgiveness. Successful marriage means an inevitable round of disappointment, anger, withdrawal, repair. People hurt one another no matter how much love they share, and it’s a truism that the greatest hurts are meted out by the closest of intimates. No friendship, no marriage, no family connections of any kind would last if the silent reparative force of forgiveness were not working almost constantly to counteract the incessant corrosive effects of resentment and bitterness, which would otherwise tear us apart. Without forgiveness, there could be no allowance for human frailty. We would keep moving on, searching for perfect connections with mythical partners who would never hurt or disappoint.

Indeed, is that not a part of what our divorce rate points to? We fantasize that it will be easier to find a perfect partner than to deal with the imperfect one with whom we’ve been stuck. And some people never learn – they keep on searching for the elusive perfect mate who will help them feel whole, never discovering that they may be a part of the problem.

Being in relationship with others almost always involves some disappointment, some anger, some forgiveness. Some people decide to keep their lives simple by excluding all those who disappoint them. Doris Donnelly has a fascinating concept of “scissors people” – those who simply cut out of their lives all who fail to live up to their standards. She writes of a family of two parents and three daughters who, at one time, considered her their friend. The status of being their friend was a tenuous one, as any slipup by an acquaintance, any failure to maintain the family’s high standards, would mean that one was eliminated from the acceptable list. At some point, for a reason she never knew, Doris failed to measure up and was snipped out of their life. Donnelly says:

Last year, the mother of the family died. Weeks later, I learned form the clergyman who officiated at the service that the father and daughters, expecting large crowds to gather to say their final farewells, enlisted the service of the local police to handle traffic on the morning of the funeral. Telegrams were sent to neighbors who had moved away, phone calls were made, and local motels were alerted to prepare for out-of-town guests the night before the burial. Yet, in the end, only the husband, the daughters, their husbands, and a grandchild or two attended the services.

[She observes] People who use scissors in their relationships think they’re cutting people out of their lives, while in reality that are cutting themselves out of the human family.

In his book, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, Lewis Smedes affirms that we can be deeply and unjustly hurt by other people. That is no fantasy – it’s a reality. Some partners physically abuse their mates; some abuse alcohol or other substances; some are unfaithful; some are verbally abusive; some are so self-centered that the partner is only supposed to play a supporting role in a drama in which they are the star, the only one who matters. The result is commonly hate, and that can sometimes be an appropriate response. Smedes says:

Hate is a tiger, snarling in the sand. Hate is our natural response to any deep and unfair pain. Hate is our instinctive backlash against anyone who wounds us deeply,. . . Hate’s searing flame coexists with love’s soothing flow . . . Hate eventually needs healing.

One problem about hate is that it usually does more damage to the hater than it does to the one who is hated. It eats at us from inside, consuming our time and our energy and blocking us from moving on to the present and future. It isn’t that we have no right to be angry – being angry is being motivated to change things for the better, hated is not focused on making things better for us so much as on making things worse for the other. Says Smedes:

We attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, endowing it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die – for it is a parasite seeking our blood, not theirs.

One of our problems with the concept of forgiving is that we have the mistaken impression that it means tolerating abuse: forgive today; forgive tomorrow; keep on forgiving: be a doormat. That is how some understand the Christian message. One Christian Unitarian minister I know tells the story of the Hispanic woman who came to her for counseling. The woman’s husband abused her physically on a regular basis. Pointing to the cross on the wall of the minister’s study, the woman said her priest kept telling her that the cross was a reminder to her that she needed to accept that suffering as Jesus had accepted his suffering on the cross, but she was not up to the task: she felt like she was a failure. [The minister took down her cross after that; she wanted no symbol that people thought meant that they too should suffer.]

Forgiveness does not mean that anyone is supposed to endure continued suffering. The first step is to end it. The problem is that many people continue to suffer long after the immediate cause of the suffering has ceased. They put the physical source of their pain out of their lives, but they carry the emotional baggage with them. The oppressor takes residence within them. Their anger is so great that they continue to suffer day after day – they keep the suffering alive. They become attached to the view of themselves as victim and cannot get beyond it.

The studies of forgiveness demonstrate that people who have experienced terrible wrongs in their lives, traumas which they have relived day after day and which have locked them into the past, can in fact be freed from their prisons if they can learn to forgive the perpetrator. Parents of children who were killed, victims of torture, women who were raped, children who were abused by their parents – the list is long and the suffering horrendous, but in many cases, the act of the perpetrator pales in comparison to the continued suffering by the person who cannot put the experience behind them. Those who have discovered the power of forgiveness have demonstrated they can let go and stop reliving the trauma.

Various authors have somewhat different advice about how to learn to forgive. There are, however, some common factors.

The first step seems to be that you must really accept the enormity of what was done to you by the offender, and not minimize it. What really happened? How did it feel? We tend to want to shield ourselves from the reality, and we cannot get beyond it if we do not really focus on what happened. It is sometimes helpful to tell a couple of trusted people the story in its painful details.

One of the problems is that people who have been wronged often blame themselves – the child believes his or her evil causes the parent to beat them [that’s easier, safer, than believing that the parent is wrong]; the victim of rape wonders if she may have unconsciously come on to the rapist; the abused spouse wonders if his inadequacies may not justify his wife’s angry outbursts. Some people are so afraid that they might be responsible, that they intensify their anger at the perpetrator to hide from their feeling or guilt. Risking an honest look at the situation through the eyes of an objective observer consistently demonstrates that abuse, violence is never justified.

It is important to be angry at the person who has done you wrong. We are not doormats. We are not punching bags. We have worth and dignity, and anger is a legitimate response to abuse. The question is, are there limits to our anger? Is there a point at which the anger becomes self-destructive. There is a Confucian saying, “Before you begin on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” If your continued anger is hurting you and getting in the way of your continuing life, you need to make a decision to get beyond it. You need to decide to forgive. Dr. Edward Hallowell points out that:

Forgiveness is not turning the other cheek. Forgiveness is not running away. Forgiving someone does not mean that you condone what the person has done, nor does it mean that you invite them to do it again. It doesn’t mean that you don’t want the offending person to be punished. It doesn’t mean that you forget the offense, nor does it mean that by forgiving you tacitly invite bad things to happen again. It doesn’t mean that you won’t defend yourself.

Hallowell turns to his American Heritage College Dictionary to define “forgiving” as:

“To renounce anger or resentment against.” [He says] It goes back to a Greek root word that means “to set free,” as in freeing a slave. Ironically, when we forgive, the slave we free is ourselves. We free ourselves from being slaves to our own hatred.

To forgive, there must be a decision to forgive. There are some theorists who suggest that it can then follow instantly. I am not persuaded. Most insist that it the wrong is serious, forgiveness takes time and work. It is necessary to work toward understanding what happened from the other’s perspective as well as one’s own. It is necessary to work toward compassion. One of the realities is that when we define an enemy, it is often on the basis of a single incident in that person’s life. We create a caricature of them to hate, while in truth they are whole people, with pains and sorrows of their own. That does not make what they did to you insignificant. It does not make it go away. But it can place it in a context which is comprehensible and makes forgiving possible.

The theorists disagree as to whether it is necessary to be in contact with the person whom you are forgiving. Some say “yes,” some “no.” I am most persuaded by those who see it as a process within the offended person and that there is no need to communicate with the offender. One of the problems with forgiving the person in person is that it risks the element of one-ups-manship. “I’m better than you are because I can forgive you.”or it risks denial, “See, you didn’t really hurt me after all because I am stronger than you thought.”

Forgiveness involves perspective. It requires placing something that happened in a larger context than the moment of pain itself. It involves seeing a past which cannot be changed, but a future which is still open and not irrevocably determined by that past event. “I can never recover,” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if we permit it to. Fred Luskin encourages us to:

Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. . . . Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways to get what you want. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you.

Unforgiveness, bitterness, resentment and anger are like the four walls of a prison cell. Forgiveness is the key that opens the door and lets you out of that cell. What will you find when you get outside? Frankly, I can’t predict what will happen in each individual case. I do know that the vast majority of people who forgive with whom I speak are much happier outside that prison than they were inside. In fact, I can’t think of one person who, having gone through the forgiveness process, wants to go back into the prison of resentment.

The confession of John Evander Couey and the discovery of the body of Jessica Lundford while I was working on this sermon called to mind my relationship, and this church’s relationship with Ken Rogers, a convicted rapist and murderer who became a member of this church after faithfully watching Fusion for years. I came to call Ken friend. Ken’s crimes were thirty years before he joined us in absentia - he was still confined to prison. While there are those who insist that such offenders can never change, I believe Ken had, but we’ll never know because he died in prison. One of the times when the possibility of Ken’s parole was being considered, a newspaper reporter contacted the parents of one of his victims. Their response was that they had long since put him out of their minds and they frankly did not care any longer whether or not he was in prison. They were free. On the other hand, we had a family in the church that was still living daily with a rape that had occurred long before. They were so offended that we would even consider allowing Ken to become a member of this church that they immediately resigned, in spite of all the support this congregation had offered that family. Sadly, they were prisoners every bit as much, or more than Ken was.

I will venture that we all know people who are mired in the misery of unresolved pain from the past, who cling to the pain of wrongs done to them. It is easy for us to see how they would be better off forgiving. Now. our hates, our pains, are, of course, a different matter altogether. The things done to us are unforgivable. It is, as the Gospel of Matthew asks, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own?” [Several people commented that they knew other people who needed to have heard this sermon.]

If forgiveness were easy, we would all do it all the time. We know that. We are not stupid. It is not easy, but that is not to say it is impossible. People do it, and it works. We need to keep the possibility alive and not just file it under “impossible ideals.”

Not forgiving ourselves [which he stresses as essential], not forgiving others, not forgiving, even when the whole world thinks we should, is a part of who we are. It is as natural to us as our defenses, our repression, our dissociation, our denial. No one is able to look at himself [or herself] whole. No one is so evolved as to deal creatively with every loss and insult. No one is free from illusions about himself, positive and negative. No one is immune to the joys of victimhood and revenge. We all have this in us. We are all enmeshed to some degree in our inner dramas and the unimaginable passions and loyalties they represent, which hold sway over us in ways that not even we can know. If we can see some of this in ourselves, accept it, be concerned about it, talk about it, it is less likely to control or overwhelm us. We will have a better chance to stay connected,, to expand our zone of connection, to dissolve whatever scar tissue we can from a life of hurt and conflict, and move on to the goodness of love.

In the context of the fable with which we began, we need to seek the magic eyes with which to look upon the brothers and sisters with whom we share life.

Enright, Robert D. Ph.D., Forgiveness is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 2001.

Hallowell, Edward M., MD, Dare to Forgive, Health Communications, Deerfield Beach, FL, 2004.

Henderson, Michael, Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate, Book Partners, Inc., Wilsonville, OR, 1999.

**Karen, Robert, Ph.D., The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection, Anchor Books, 2003.