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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 6, 2011
You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen Anthem
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
One of the things you will hear over and over again from this pulpit is that church is for proclaiming liberty to the captives and setting the prisoners free. One of the things that keeps us prisoner is the idea of perfection, specifically that there can be perfect relationships, that if mistakes have been made, a relationship is somehow compromised, scarred, less than it once could have been. Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection, so we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks in our relationships? How do we live with the cracks in our experience of church? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.
If we do not practice forgiveness, our scars can wind around us like those monstrous vines in fairy tales, our resentments can hold us hostage. Oh we get to watch movies while we’re held hostage, though. The movie plays over and over, a bit different every time. We replay the wrongs done to us while waiting for an apology.
Booker T Washington, organizer and first president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had a lifelong motto: “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him”
When I talk about wrongs done, some people will think about a fight they have had with a sibling or a friend, others will think of the boss who is making their lives hell and still others brace themselves, wondering if I am going to say they have to forgive and forget incest or other abuse. What I want to ask is that you listen this morning as you are able, take what speaks to you and let the rest go. You are the only one who can say where forgiveness is needed between you and another, between you and yourself, or between you and God. Some people live feeling that God hasn’t forgiven them, and some people live as if they have not forgiven God. Why do we need to talk about forgiveness? Forgiveness is related to both emotional, physical and institutional healing. Every religion of the world says it’s important. Feeling you have been wronged is not good for you. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. It may be a collection of small grudges and resentments or it may be rage, but if the anger is not bearing good fruit for you in terms of moving you out of hurtful situations, protecting you from hurtful people, energizing you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. We may talk more about anger another Sunday.
Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is dangerous, the root of almost all wicked behavior. Remember the movie we watch over and over while our resentments hold us hostage? In it, we articulately explain our point of view with just the right amount of calm and just the right edge. The end is the best part. At the end of the movie we watch over and over, the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. They say. “How wrong I was!!! You were right and I was wrong. What can I do to make it up to you?” We exercise our arguments, we polish our grudges. We repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moment’s notice; we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. It feels good to be a righteous victim. We go to friends and get as many people as we can to hear our story. It is soul satisfying to hear them say “Oh NO she did not say that!”
There is nothing wrong with this if we do it in good faith. We are trying to validate our perceptions “Would this make you mad? Is this person being a jerk or is it me?” I have to say there is a lot to learn about yourself from watching to whom you go to tell your story. Some people are going to be on your side no matter what. Others will tell you if you are being a jerk. We go to the people we think will tell us what we are ready to hear. Many people are completely justified in feeling like a righteous victim. It’s an archetypal role, an ancient one, and it may be appropriate for a time, but we have to watch out for it, as we do all well-defined roles, that we do not start sleep-walking, letting it make our choices for us. Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive, looking at the stiffening righteousness. The harm is that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. The harm is that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced, ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers. You get to be the right one. Being RIGHT is a BIG part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely. And still be hurt by harboring anger against the person who hurt you. The Course in Miracles, which some of you have studied, says “You can be right or you can be happy.”
One way to let go of someone and get your strength back is the resentment prayer. Ask for/wish for them everything you want for yourself. You don’t have to mean it. Try it for fourteen days straight. It’s amazingly powerful magic, and I’m not sure exactly how it works. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working/playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.
1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.
2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation.
3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.
4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. Make a ritual to mark the event.
Several years ago I read a book called “Lovingkindness,” which expands on many of the things about which the Dalai Lama writes. The author says the first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself.
Say:
May I be free from danger.
May I be physically happy
May I be mentally happy
May I have ease of well-being.
Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself.
