A Pattern So Vast
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I still use the copy of The Joy of Cooking I got for Christmas in 1969. This now-fragile cookbook has memories stained into many of its pages (especially the peanut-butter cookie page).
I’ve always loved how the “Fish” chapter ends. The authors give many dozens of fish recipes, arranged alphabetically by fish—from fried catfish, scalloped cod and marinated herring through casseroled octopus, glazed salmon, broiled swordfish, and so on. Then the final fish recipe, on page 362, just says: “Whale. Last, but vast.”
As I thought toward this month’s theme, forgiveness, that phrase kept coming to mind: Last but vast.
Forgiveness is a whale of a topic for exploration. Vast, certainly…and, last, in a way, in that it’s a lifetime’s work—forgiving and being forgiven. Forgiveness is a big part of getting our house in order when we come to die. The hospice booklets tell us that two out of four of the things we need to say to each other pertain to forgiveness. The final four? Thank you. I love you. Forgive me. I forgive you.
(Last, but vast.)
We know that in this world the pattern of revenge and hatred is vast and ancient, fed every day by new bloodshed and breakage. We know about the vast pattern of hurt and warfare. That’s why it’s so amazing when we hear about those who break the sequence, who do something surprising.
If you’d like to read stories about surprising patterns of forgiveness, I recommend a website called The Forgiveness Project (http://theforgivenessproject.com). It’s an international nonprofit dedicated to healing the wounds of the past. The Forgiveness Project collects people’s stories: you see a page of tiny head shots of individuals from all over the world and you click on a photo and the full story appears.
There’s Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie Marie was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In the months after her death, Bud changed from supporting the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to taking a public stand against it. There’s Andrew Rice, whose older brother David was killed on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed. Andrew is a member of Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded by family members of September 11 victims seeking effective non-violent responses to terrorism. There are stories of people from Northern Ireland, Rwanda, the US, England, South Africa, Israel, Ukraine. People who are part of a vast pattern of forgiveness.
In the archives of the Forgiveness Project there’s the story of a woman who was brutally assaulted while she was out running. She picked a man out of the lineup and he went to prison for 18 years—and then, after 18 years, DNA testing showed that she’d picked the wrong man. This woman had spent a couple of decades trying to forgive the man, and now she’d spend her future trying to forgive herself. Self-forgiveness, she says, is more difficult, by far.
Forgiving ourselves. It’s a big one, perhaps even more vast than forgiving others.
Occasionally when I’m here at church and I need to remember to do something I call myself at home and leave a message. It’s quick and easy. I call my home number, I hear my phone ring, I hear myself answer and I invite me to leave a message. So I do. I say, “Hey! It’s me. It’s you. Would you look for the book of wedding readings and bring it for Sharon? Thanks. See you.”
The first time I did this—called myself and heard myself answer—I had a strange couple of seconds, where I wondered: “This person I’m talking to…will she be glad to hear from me? Will she get back to me? Is she kind? Has she forgiven me for some dumb things I’ve done? Do we have unfinished business?” I had a teeny urge to stay on the line and check out a couple things: “Hey, that weird time back in—what, 1991? —and that thing that happened around the time Dad died, is that all okay now? Are we square? Do we need to talk?”
When you search online for “How to Apologize,” you get a drop down list: How to apologize: to a girl, to a friend, to a girlfriend, effectively, for cheating, to a guy, to your mom, to someone, to a woman. Nothing about apologizing to yourself. But it’s interesting to imagine how some sound guidance on apologies might apply to forgiving yourself.
Rochelle Melander of the Alban Institute has some good thoughts in her article “Learning to Apologize.” She suggests a four-part process. The first step is to listen and learn how we’ve hurt the other person. It’s usually not comfortable. “We want to say, ‘No, you’re wrong, I’m not that bad!’” Instead, the idea is to be still and listen, and then ask, “Is there more?” And when we’ve heard the whole story, we check to see that we’ve heard well. “Is this what you are saying?” we ask, repeating the story until we get it right.
The second step is to say, “I’m sorry.” Period. We do not qualify our apology by saying, “I’m sorry if you took offense at what I said.” Or “I’m sorry if you felt that way,” or “…if you heard me say that.”
That’s like saying, “I’m sorry you are hyper-sensitive; I’m sorry you are mixed up; I’m sorry you don’t hear well.” The best apology is just, “I’m sorry.”
The third step is to make it right. Both parties talk about what can be done to bring healing. They ask: “What are our needs here?” “What do we do or say differently from now on?” They look each other in the eye and agree on a plan.
The fourth step is to ask for forgiveness. Receiving forgiveness—officially—is essential. It isn’t helpful when the offended person brushes off our apology with, “No big deal,” or “What’s done is done.”
Melander says, “It’s hard to be content with ‘no-big-deal’ responses when we suspect that it was a big deal. These responses don’t have the healing power of ‘I forgive you.’ To say ‘I forgive you’ is to say we are letting go of any claim for punishment or payment. We’re ending our hold on the other person. We’re setting them free.”
“If the wronged person does not offer forgiveness,” Melander says, “simply ask, ‘Do you forgive me?’”
Four steps: Hear the hurt, say “I’m sorry,” make it right, ask forgiveness. And then, I’m thinking, we might be wise to go through the whole thing—all four steps—again with ourselves.
I know and admire a woman whose life journey (she’s now in her mid-40s) has included living with the fact that when she was a young adult she was the driver during a car accident that killed her father in the passenger seat next to her. She considered suicide, but instead she chose meditation, and since then her life has been about healing and becoming a healer.
She can see farther than a lot of us. People can bring her anything. She’s unflappable; she has the most hospitable heart.
I haven’t known regret like hers. I do remember, though, a particular time when I narrowly escaped a bad crash. It was my fault. In a confused moment I turned left against the light. The oncoming car screamed to a stop and saved us both. I was so rattled I immediately pulled over into the closest parking area, just to get my breath and fall apart a little.
When the other car followed and pulled up beside me I braced myself. The guy who got out of the old Chevy was twenty-something with tattoos, and he was gonna let me have it. I was ready—I’d been stupid. But what this young man did was come over to me with a face full of concern, as he asked politely, “Are you okay?” He asked me, the negligent one, if I was okay, after I’d nearly killed him. I felt something release way down in my chest. It was beyond personal. He not only gave me back my dignity; he redeemed the whole human race.
One thing I understood, right then, was that the hardest thing, ultimately, is to be the perpetrator. And I got a better understanding of something else, too—something Jesus reportedly said to his disciples when they complained about the sudden generosity of a former sinner. Jesus said, essentially: “One who has been forgiven much, loves much.”
The disciples didn’t quite get it, but I do. When I think about the woman who was driving when her father died in that accident, I have a wish or a hunch or a prayer that her father has visited her somehow—maybe often, maybe in dreams. He’s come to her whole, and with the tenderest concern, the tenderest expression, he’s asked, “Are you okay?” Because they both know that she’s the one who needs the reassurance. She’s the one who needs to be set free.
No matter how careful we humans are, we can never be careful enough to avoid hurting and being hurt. That’s the human condition and that’s why we need forgiveness.
Not long ago, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron asked Buddhist teacher Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche what advice he had for Western Buddhist practitioners. He replied that what we in the West need to understand is guiltlessness. “You have to understand that even though you make a lot of mistakes and you mess up in all kinds of ways, all of that is impermanent and shifting and changing and temporary.
But fundamentally, your mind and heart are not guilty. They are innocent.”
He continued: “Most of our striking out at other people, in this culture, comes from feeling bad about ourselves.” He said that when you get upset or hooked by something, in the first four seconds it feels like “bad me.” After a few minutes it has shifted, and it feels like “bad them.” Our response is to blame, and the root of blaming is a deep discomfort about ourselves.
Kongtrül suggests that when you get hooked by something, pause, breathe, let it be. Don’t strike out at yourself or anyone else. Breathe, relax. Let all the feelings pass through you. Let the whole thing “unwind and unravel.” Feel how it feels “to hang out in ineffable space.”
The universe forgives, as theologian Matthew Fox reminds us. The earth moves on. Wild daisies bloom again on the battlefield. Our Universalist message of hope says that Love has the final word and Love’s work is to heal and forgive. It says that vaster than our wrongs is the vastness of the mystery; vaster than our misdeeds and hurts is the vastness of our kinship. It says the last vast thing is Love.
Kate now writes, serves as a spiritual director, and remains involved with UU and Quaker projects in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
- What Helps - October 1, 2020
- Receiving - December 1, 2013
- A Pattern So Vast - September 1, 2011
