by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening words

Welcome to all of you this day,

we come here to walk together, fellow pilgrims on the journey.

This is a house of memory and hope,

of love and justice.

It is good that we are here together.

Come, now, and let us worship.

Writer Barbara Crafton tells the story of the matriarchs of her childhood church. Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Ralston both dressed better than anybody else. They wore their furs, tailored suits and hats to church.  As a rule, Mrs. Ralston’s hats were higher than Mrs. Williams’s, who favored wider brims to balance her taller figure.

Mrs. Ralston sat near the front on the right side of the church. Mrs. Williams sat in the back row of that side, and was the first person to arrive, since her husband, Stuart, as small and meek and resigned a man as his wife was large and formidable, was the usher and needed to be at his station early to pass out the service leaflets. There they would be when worshipers walked in, Mrs. Williams greeting each arrival like a queen and Stuart fussing over his pile of leaflets. She greeted them all, that is, except one: when Mrs. Ralston made her own queenly entrance, not a word was exchanged, not a word or a glance.

At church dinners, Mrs. Williams ruled the kitchen and Mrs. Ralston ruled the dining room. But again, there were no words spoken between them.

Nobody thought much about all this. It had gone on for so long that everyone had long since learned how to manage the little cold war. But then one day a new minister to the church. He made inquiries as to the origins of the estrangement and got nowhere: small towns do not yield up their secrets too quickly.  This was annoying, but he was not about to give up. He knew from his study of the Prayer Book that there was a provision in it allowing the minister to refuse communion to those in his parish.

And so he spoke to each of the ladies privately. They would not be admitted to Communion the next Sunday unless they spoke to each other.

Word got around about the situation. Everyone was in church the following week. Sunday came and Mrs. Williams, of course, was already seated. Enter Mrs. Ralston. Her process down the aisle was as always, stopping here and there to accept somebody’s hand. And then she turned and spoke.

“Good morning, Mrs. Williams.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Ralston.”

And then she sat down in her pew. The rector, half hidden in the sacristy doorway, heard the exchange. And he also heard the silence that followed it. He thought a moment and then signaled the organist to begin the processional.

It was not all he had hoped. Still, they had spoken.

It was not until twenty years later that the writer learned of the reason why Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Ralston never spoke. They had grown up together in that little town, two girls about the same age. They had gone to the same school and the same church. In her teens, Mrs. Ralston had become pregnant out of wedlock. In a plan that may seem strange and even cruel to us now but was not uncommon then, she and her mother remained at home in seclusion until the baby was born, whereupon her mother presented the child to the world as her own and they resumed their lives as if nothing had happened. The little girl reached adulthood never knowing that the woman she thought to be her sister was really her mother. These facts were known by almost everyone. But by silent consent they were never discussed.

Somewhere along the line, though, Mrs. Williams had made a snide remark to someone about Mrs. Ralston’s secret, and Mrs. Ralston had heard about it. Mrs. Ralston took from that event a great deal of shame. She lived in daily proximity to her child without a mother’s place in that child’s life. Even after she married Mr. Ralston, she never had another child. How cruel a thing it must have been to hear that a friend had gossiped maliciously about her. And the exchange that day did not make things any better. After that day, they never spoke again.

That’s a long time to carry a grudge.

Does that story sound familiar? Things like this seem to happen all too often in our lives. Something happens between two people, or between two groups of people. Between sisters or brothers, between friends, between parents and children. It may be intentional, it may not be. It may be lived out in public or in private. But something happens and then there is the distance. And then there is the silence.

But once that distance gets established, more often than not it never goes away. As I have had the privilege to come to know people’s stories over the years, I know that this is a common theme. It certainly has happened in my life. And it can take on all kinds of variables. We might be on one side or the other. We might be full of anger about what has been done. We might be full of shame about what we have done. Over time we might even forget about just what started it all, but once it is there, it is hard to make right. There is hurt. There is pride. There is shame. And it all gets rolled up together.

And all of this brings us to the subject of forgiveness. It is a universal theme that most—if not all—of us have struggled with on one level or another. No matter what side of it we might be on. No matter if it is ourselves that need the forgiving. No matter the particulars, the road to forgiveness is a part of being human.

As I’m talking about what forgiveness is, it may be important for me to also say what forgiveness is not. It is not forgetting. It is not putting ourselves again at risk. And it is not about denying what we have done or what someone else has done. And in finding forgiveness for someone else, it does not mean that we somehow give in, that we somehow justify whatever it is they have done.

Forgiveness, more than anything else, is about the way that we come to look at ourselves in relation to another—and to ourselves. It is an awareness that ultimately there is something bigger than this hurt we have done or this hurt we have endured. In the act of forgiving we allow ourselves to be focused not so much on the past, but on the future. We let go of the hold something has on us and find the freedom to see ourselves in some new place. It is a kind of relinquishment, to release whatever hold something has on us. It is something that works in its own time and can’t be rushed.

That all sounds good, you say. But it is not so easy. Life is too complicated.

I know oftentimes for me it is just as easy to hold on to that grudge. Especially when I feel I have been wronged, it is so easy to want to just hang on. There is that feeling of superiority that comes with it. There is a kind of energy that comes with that feeling of being right. That energy may let me feel superior in the situation. And of course when I’m feeling righteous, it means that I really don’t have to pay attention to how I might have contributed to the situation.

Through all of this there is something that feels pretty stuck about it. There is something that is out of whack. Like when you find yourself going out of your way not to talk to that person. Over time it takes energy to hold on to that grudge. It takes energy to be out of relationship. Studies show that forgiveness can actually lower the amount of pain someone is in.

But still, forgiveness is not necessarily a logical thing. Our natural response to all kinds of hurts is to want to protect, to strike back, to keep ourselves well defended. We may even carry a desire for the other person to suffer. It is a desire to see the other person as just that—the other. And the world becomes a polarized place—this side and that side.

But the truth is that eventually we will find ourselves on the other side of the wall. Eventually we will do this or that and we will hurt others. We will be hurt and we will see our own capacity to hurt. We come to see that often we have the hardest time forgiving in others the very character flaws we see in ourselves.

A linguist has written: “To ‘for-give’ is, in the English language, an extended, expanded, strengthened form of the verb, to give. By intensifying the verb we speak of giving at its deepest level, of self-giving, of giving forth and giving up deeply held parts of the self.” It is a kind of relinquishment: We give up the right to revenge, to perfection, to justice, and instead we give forth to ourselves—or to the other person—freedom from the past and an openness toward the future. Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves and others.

Ultimately, forgiveness is in our own self interest. As we can open ourselves to love, we come into our own capacity not only to love but also to be loved. We come into our power to know not only the ways that we have been hurt, but also to understand the capacity within us to hurt others.

Forgiveness is an invitation to not only be in right relationship with others, but to be in right relationship with ourselves. It is not forgiving the act, but forgiving the person. If love can transcend whatever it is someone else has done, it can also transcend whatever it is we have done or are capable of doing.

A psychologist who worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa said that when you forgive a person, you restore that person to his or her humanity. This is done because the forgiving person understands that he or she could have committed the same crime. You understand you could have done it yourself. A story from the Nuremberg Trials: A man who had been a prisoner in one of the Nazi death camps was supposed to testify against another man who had been a guard in the camp. When the witness saw the guard in the courtroom, he fainted. All those around him thought it was because he was so horrified to see his oppressor again. But when the man regained consciousness, he said, “No, I fainted because I realized I could have been him.”

Does this not come back to the golden rule—that we would do to others what we would have then do unto us?

Martin Luther King said forgiveness is not just an occasional act. It is a permanent attitude, a way of being in the world that we cultivate, over and over again. One writer has compared it to quitting smoking. You may need to start over again and again before you finally pull it off.

There is a story from the Dalai Lama about one of his senior monks who spent many years in a Chinese labor camp. When he finally gets permission to visit India, he went to see the Dalai Lama. His holiness asked the monk whether he faced many dangers in Tibet. “Yes,” he replied, “sometimes there was the danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.”

As we are able to forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.

Forgiveness is what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called the final form of love. It is the final form of reconciliation. It is the final form of coming back together. When we have nothing else, we have that. We bring all the pieces of our lives to the table. All the ways that we have been hurt, let down. All the ways that we have hurt others and let them down too. We are asked to see our lives as part of a whole and to bring all of the parts with us and look to the future with hope.

In the film “Smoke Signals,” written by Sherman Alexie, a young Native American man is trying to come to terms with his father’s death—and his father’s life. In the final scene of the movie, the young man stands on a bridge high above a river scattering his father’s ashes. As he does this, his companion, the narrator of the film, says:

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. He’s in your power. You twist his arm. But you’re not sure it was he that stole your money. You feel calm and you decide to let him free.

Or he’s the one, as in a dream of mine, I must pull from the water, but I never knew it or wouldn’t have done it, until I saw the street-theater play so close up I was moved to actions I’d never before taken.

Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage at all?

Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?

Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning? For shutting doors? For speaking only through layers of cloth, or never speaking, or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs? Or in their deaths? Saying it to them or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers, what is left? 

We live in times that are not very forgiving. We live in times when vengeance and fear are the examples most often before us. We live in times when it is so easy to make someone else the other, and to see not their humanity, but how it is they are different from us. But when we do that, it does not take long for us to become the other as well.

What of our lives? How are we called to be in the world? How is it that we are to make our way?

Every day of our lives, we are called into relationship.  Every moment of our lives we are held in a love that is so much greater than any one of us. We are held by a love that makes forgiveness—no matter what the sin, no matter what the wound—possible.

We are asked, over and over again, to recovenant with ourselves, with others, with God as we define God. As we forgive what is flawed in others, we are better able to forgive what is flawed in ourselves. We come to know that we are more than the sum of what we have done or the sum of what has been done to us. We are called to be at-one with God.

We see ourselves as part of an evolving creation. We see that we are not just held in the past, but live in the possibility of what will come tomorrow.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Let us pray. Great spirit of life, we come asking your blessing on this day. Call us to make manifest love in the world. Call us to cultivate a spirit of forgiveness—for ourselves and for all beings. We pray that the past might ground us and sustain us and not hold us captive. We pray that in our lives we might find a way to turn from pettiness and separateness. We pray that we might turn towards love and reconciliation. May we know our potential to do good, as well as to do harm. Help us to turn, that we may live more abundantly. Amen.

Benediction

As you leave this place, may you always find your way to Yes: Yes to yourself, Yes to all the possibility that life has to offer. Go now in love and go in peace. Amen.