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"Forgiveness: The Art of Return"

Message by Rev. Laurie Bushbaum
Sept. 29, 2009

First Reading: “Good Night, Willie Lee,” by Alice Walker

"Good night, Willie Lee,
I’ll see you in the morning.”
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the first time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles,
without regrets
but with civility.
"Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning."
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.

Second Reading: from Beyond Revenge, by Michael McCullough

"A century of research in the social and biological sciences reveals an unsettling truth about the place of revenge in human nature: the desire for revenge is normal – in the sense that every neurologically intact human being… has the biological hardware for experiencing it. Few of us… are strangers to the desire for revenge. Its potential destructiveness… can blind us to this fact. But by viewing the scientific research on revenge through the lens of evolutionary theory, we’ll arrive at the conclusion that a readiness to seek revenge served important functions for ancestral humans, and that it’s still capable of serving many of those important functions…

To claim that revenge is a … Standard-issue… feature of human nature doesn’t imply that we slap it on top of an unwilling, brutish, core. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, when you sue evolutionary science as a lens… on the research on forgiveness… you can’t help but conclude that that our capacity for forgiveness, like the capacity for revenge, solved critical evolutionary problems for our ancestors and it’s still solving those problems today."

It may seem odd to some of you that I would choose to deliver one of the first sermons of the new church year on forgiveness. "Isn’t that a little pessimistic?" you may wonder. But I believe that all beginnings need forgiveness. And actually, I’m not the only who thinks this way. TheJewish Community is celebrating their High Holy Days. The Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. For the Ancient Hebrews, the New Year was a gathering of the harvest, a thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth. The tenth day of the New Year is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day of righting wrongs. As Rosh Hashanah is the counting up of the earth’s harvest, Yom Kippur is a “counting up” of our spiritual life.

A Jewish legend says that on Rosh Hashanah, the sound of the Ram’s horn, which is blown to mark the day, carries all the way to God’s ears, and reminds God to open the Book of Life. Everyone’s name is there and under each name are that person’s good and bad deeds. On Rosh Hashanah, God counts up the deeds, and sets the person’s fate for the next year. So on the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, individuals have a last chance to consider their actions of the last year and to right their wrongs. An old Rosh Hashanah custom was to go to the banks of a stream and turn one’s pockets inside out. Let the water carry away the sins. Start anew.

The Jewish New Year is a holiday of hope - a time to be grateful for life and it’s bounties; a time to consider what our spiritual harvest is likely to be, given our actions, and to tend to the “weeds” we may have. In this way, spiritual discernment of our actions, confession and forgiveness, and hope are all connected.

The words “sin” and “confession” are not popular with most UU’s. Many UU’s have a hard time just hearing the words, let alone putting them in a proper perspective. But any good theology, I believe, has to take into account both the inevitability that we will hurt and be hurt by others AND the essential related ness of all beings. This is our hope for survival. Forgiveness is not a luxury; it is a necessary restoration of connection.

I’ll tell you a story about restoration. More than 25 years ago, when I was in seminary, I did a chaplaincy residency in a hospital. When I was on call I was woken up in the middle if the night. The daughters of an elderly woman who was dying, requested a chaplain. The mother likely had only a few hours or less to live. Two of the daughters were in the room with her and the third one was pacing in the hallway when I arrived. She was crying wringing her hands, deeply distraught. The other two sisters explained that this sister and her mother had a falling out more than 20 years ago, which had never been reconciled. This third daughter was unable to enter the room with the other two sisters to be near her mother.

We all talked together for a few minutes and then the third daughter and I went for a walk. She deeply wanted to be near her mother but was terrified, terrified that her mother would not forgive her. When we returned to the other sisters, they assured the estranged one over and over, that “yes” mother would forgive her and would actually be very relieved to forgive her. Gently, we all walked into the room hand in hand. And then the third sister took her mother’s hand, and though her tears, said she was sorry and asked her mother’s forgiveness. Her mother was in a coma and could not respond in a way that we could recognize. But it was amazing to see the distraught daughter slowly become more peaceful and relaxed. When the mother died a few hours later the sisters were united to carry on their grief together.

I want to return to the poem by Alice Walker:

“Good night, Willie Lee,
I’ll see you in the morning.”
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the first time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles,
without regrets
but with civility.
“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning.”
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.

I want to contrast the story of the dying mother with a short Buddhist story. It is a story about a man who was taking a walk in the woods one day. Out of nowhere he is struck by an arrow from an unknown assailant. It is not a fatal wound, but the man is so enraged by this invisible attack that he doesn’t tend to the wound. He refuses to remove the arrow until the offending archer is found and punished. So he spends his days searching the town for his enemy. In the meantime, the wound festers and the resulting infection kills him, the arrow still in his arm.

So far I’ve shared Alice Walker’s poetic version of the truth that forgiveness is a kind of healing. I’ve shared a story from my own experience in which I was fortunate to witness the immediate power and hope of forgiveness in restoring peace. And I’ve shared a religious teaching story about the danger of being poisoned by a focus on revenge.

I want to turn now to the words and work of Michael McCullough and his summary of revenge and forgiveness in the evolution of humanity. His conclusion is that if we use the lens of evolutionary biology, it is clear that both revenge and forgiveness were adaptive tools that allowed humans to survive and thrive. His book is a romp through complex studies in the fields of anthropology, sociology, mathematics, and psychology. And his argument is convincing to me. Actually, his arguments confirmed what the language of poetry and experience have already taught me. But McCullough offers not just an explanation that humans are hard-wired for both revenge and forgiveness but that we can use what we know about how they work in the human brain to minimize revenge and maximize forgiveness and contribute to the greater good.

One of the first things that McCullough does is explain our dominant culture’s idea of revenge as a disease and forgiveness as the “cure.” He argues that since we are hard-wired for both, neither is aberrant. To be revengeful is not to be mentally ill, though mental illness will sometimes have a component of revenge as a part of it. Research shows that there are other complicating factors in such situations. In theological language, this means that human nature is neither angelic nor demonic, but a combination of both. To play with the metaphor of Eden, we’ve always had the taste of apple on our tongues.

Back to revenge. McCullough claims that there are 3 reasons why humans adapted for revenge. One was to deter aggressors from aggressing a second time. In addition, revenge warns would be harm doers to back off. And thirdly, revenge coerces free riders to co-operate. And Forgiveness? Forgiveness restores relationships that are necessary for survival. All of McCullough’s work rests on the premise that Homo Sapiens are deeply cooperative. That in order for our ancient ancestors to survive and thrive they had to form collaborations for hunting, childcare, to develop language. And the more that our ancestors learned to cooperate, the more they thrived and the more complex our cultures became.

Of course, McCullough reminds us that though revenge may have had adaptive purposes early on, the world that most of humanity lives in now, is not served by the strategies of revenge. But since we cannot change human nature, it is best to take what we know and organize society to maximize for forgiveness. He’s hopeful that humanity is, in fact, expanding its possibilities for forgiveness. Just one example he cites is that there are now more than a hundred “truth and reconciliation” programs in the world, bases on Nelson Mandela’s model in S. Africa.

I want to ponder the role of religion in forgiveness. To head in that direction, let me share a few paragraphs that McCullough writes about the Amish.

“The Amish are at the top of every anthropologist’s list of the world’s peaceful societies, but they are no strangers to violence. Like the other Anabaptist sects that took root in Switzerland, France, and Germany, the Amish faced horrific religious persecution during the seventeenth century. The Swiss government was particularly brutal toward the “non-conformists”: with a blessing from the official state, the Swiss set up a secret police force of ‘Anabaptist hunters’ to hunt them down and arrest them. The Anabaptists were stripped of their property, tortured, and deported. Some were burned at the stake, and some were sold into slavery… But despite the persecution they faced, the Anabaptists refused to take up arms against their tormentors. Violence, even in self-defense, simply wasn’t in their toolbox…

… This violent history, and the Anabaptists’ peaceful response to it, has etched an indelible ethic of forgiveness into the Amish culture and identity. So in a sense, the Amish had four hundred years to prepare their response to what happened on October 2, 2006. That Monday morning, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and took ten young Amish schoolgirls as hostages… The police quickly arrived on the scene, but before they cold disarm the man, he shot and killed five of the girls, wounded the remaining five, and then killed himself.

Within hours of the Nickel Mines shooting, people from the Amish Community …
were assuring the reporters who flocked to the scene that the Amish would find it in their hearts to forgive the killer. Indeed, within days they were reaching out to the killer’s family with expressions of love and concern. Donald Kraybill, one of the leading experts on the Amish, explained their reflexively forgiving response to the senseless slaughter in the simplest of terms: ‘Retaliation and revenge are not part of their vocabulary.’ The Amish people model their lives on the life and teachings of Jesus, as most Christians claim to do, but something enables the Amish to practice what they preach in a way that most people – self-professed Christians included – would find unfathomable.

‘We’re strongly taught to forgive like Jesus did,’ one Amish woman told a reporter… Without formal creeds, their simple (but not simplistic) faith accents living in the way of Jesus rather than comprehending the complexities of religious doctrine… And that is why words of forgiveness were sent to the killer’s family before the blood had dried on the schoolhouse floor.”

There have been several other high-profile cases in the last few years, in which radical forgiveness has been extended in the midst of horrific violence. Just a year ago, one of our own churches in Tennessee was the sight of killing rampage during a Sunday morning service. And, McCullough states, the people who are able to forgive in these situation are more often than not, people with a religious background. Without a doubt, religion helps people proactive forgiveness.

How then, do we also account for all the violence and revenge perpetrated in the name of religion? The Crusades, the rancor between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Protestant reformers who burn other reformers at the stake? The witch hunts of Salem? And in Minneapolis in the 19th century, one Univeralist minister who turned on another, dragged him through a heresy tria, and had him ex-communicated? Is religion good or bad for humanity?

The answer is both. Religion reinforces both our hard wiring for revenge and our hard wiring for forgiveness. McCollough demonstrates that successful, large religions have, in fact, been successful exactly because they have been adaptive. When it was useful for the religion to be forgiving, it was. When it suited the religion to be revengeful, that portion of theology came to the forefront.

We know many of the stories in which Jesus forgives: he forgives the tax collectors who were lowest on the social totem pole; he forgives the woman caught in adultery and prevents her from being stoned to death by challenging any of those nearby and “without sin” to cast the first stone. No one does.

In the Hebrew Scriptures there are any number of examples as well, of ugly, bloody, vengeful acts of God, or of God condoning such acts. Islam, too, is laced with both revenge and forgiveness. I quote McCullough: “Take Islam, for example. Muhammad and his early followers valued Islam so much in part because it provided an alternative to revenge – not a justification for it. The Arabic root s-l-lm, from which we derive the word Islam, is also the root word for ‘salam,’ meaning peace… but did you know that among Allah’s ninety-nine names is not only ‘the all forgiving’ and
‘the pardoner’ but also ‘the avenger?’” Since 911 we’ve all heard Osama Bin Laden articulate the vengeful side of Islam. Religions like, people, express both sides of human nature.

Have you noticed that it is generally easier to forgive someone who is closer to you and more like you? For example, if someone in this congregation offended your religious sensibility it might be easier for you to forgive them, than a Baptist or a Lutheran. And harder yet to forgive someone from another race, class, religion and culture halfway around the world. We’re wired that way.

And that’s where our 7th Principle comes in. We know that we live in an interdependent web; we know our lives, ultimately, are tied up with the lives of all other beings. And so, we have to practice forgiveness, near and far. I can think of few more important spiritual practices. So why are we UU’s nearly apoplectic about any kind of confession and forgiveness practice in our public worship? Do we simply just hate the old words many of us had to say in earlier religious associations, words that were tinged with a theology that wasn’t ours? Do we think that we are better than those other religious communities who do practice confession and forgiveness in worship? What could UU’s do and say together on a Sunday morning that would strengthen our practice of forgiveness? Could we say together something like this on Sunday mornings, and mean it:

We are complex and beautiful creatures;
May we use our powers to heal and not to harm
To help and not to hinder
To bless and not to curse
To serve the Spirit of Life.
And when we fail
May we breathe deeply, confess, and begin anew.

Could we say that and mean it? Would that be so hard?

  

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