forgiveness

 

Thursday, 6:54 a.m., a lovely spring morning on the Florida Gulf Coast. Looking out across St Andrews Bay, I can see over Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico. An osprey shrieks loudly while circling high and peering down, God help the mullet or other fish he spies! They dive feet first, which we see them do frequently. One of my favorite framed pictures here in 7H is a perfect color photograph snapped by Arthur Reedie of an osprey just as he is about to hit the water, claws extended; a treasure that Arthur and Mary Ellen gave us years ago.

All of which stirs various sensibilities, including that one of Charles Darwin's problems with the outrageousness of "creation science" had to do with the pain of the victim that suffers being fed upon by its predator; that a merciful God could not possibly have conceived such a scheme. Believe it or not, there was a Time in his early life when Darwin seemed destined for theological college and ordination. His wife, and maybe their children, I do not recall, continued in the faith lifelong. Exploring and discovering, Darwin did not.

This violent way of creation generally comes to mind when I watch live while the Boulder County Fairgrounds ospreys land on their nest with a flapping fish and, always starting with its mouth, tear it apart and swallow bites while the fish is still flapping.

Or a video of a just caught wildebeest or other animal bellowing in pain as it's torn apart by a pride of lions or hyenas. 

All of which leads me to realize that as I contemplate the osprey, my wandering mind actually circles back to what I started out meaning to say in my +Time blogpost this morning.

By intent, seldom do I allow my blogposts to continue yesterday's thought, but not so today. Yesterday's ramble was generally about judgment, judging, judging others. In some sense, what my father used to warn us about sweeping around our neighbor's back doorstep before we swept around our own back doorstep. Or, people who live in glass houses throwing stones. Or Jesus advising us to remove the beam from our own eye before we remove the speck from our neighbor's eye, eh?

I'm not going to go back to read and analyze what I wrote yesterday, but I think I closed with a notion of forgiveness instead of clinging to anger, hatred, offense, bitterness, a grudge. And of course, I was challenged from within and from without by the thought that some things may be beyond forgiveness. I agree with that in reality if not theologically. I'm going to try and address both reality and theology, briefly.

Theologically, Easter is the very point of Good Friday: that God whose property is always to have mercy proves God's love for us by coming right back to us no matter how we treat God. And that the entire point of the Nativity is to show and tell us how to live into the divine image in which we are created.

Does God do this for us because God loves us, or as an act of love for God's own self? Carl Jung writes (it's somewhere on my bookshelves, I'm not going to stop and search for it) that Good Friday, the crucifixion, was God's act of contrition for God's sin against Job, an intriguing notion for Sunday school class. Do we forgive God?

An instance that won't leave me. Forty to forty-five years ago there was a write up in our Episcopal Church News about an Episcopal priest whose daughter had been raped and murdered. She, the priest, had determined not to let this destroy her, but to seize control of her own life rather than let it be destroyed by this horror; she would forgive her daughter's rapist murderer. At the Time, it sounded beyond the pale to me, but this is what she, the girl's mother, an Episcopal priest, did for herself. She visited the condemned man in prison repeatedly over the years that he was on death row, praying with him and getting to know him as human instead of beast. She grow fond of him to the point of adopting him as her son in the sense, "thou art my beloved son; this day have I begotten thee." She worked to have his death sentence commuted, which it was not. She was with him in his last moments, and he knew that he was loved no matter what. And she knew that she had conquered hatred with love.

I will confess, I am so totally invested with love for my daughters, and have been since the moment they were born, that what that mother did outraged me. Not at all something I can imagine, it still boggles my mind to this day more than four decades later. But it so sticks with me as the total equivalent and meaning of Easter that I cannot forget it. That mother, an Episcopal priest (otherwise I'd likely never have heard about it) reclaimed her own life by love alone. She had conquered her bitterness, hatred, anger, with lovingkindness, which is chesed, agape.

Where love is not a feeling, but something you do for others.

And where forgiveness is not a feeling, but something you do for yourself; to salvage your own life.

Forgiveness is not a feeling that everything is alright now, because you have forgiven and everything is all lovey dovey between you and whoever offended you. 

Forgiveness is what you decide to do, and act on, to try and relieve yourself of the heavy, life-destroying burden of anger, hatred, offense, bitterness, resentment. Forgiveness might take any avenue, any way, any number of forms of decision and action against any manner of offense; including a decision not to sue, a decision not to shun, a decision not to badmouth, a decision not to glare at, a decision to ease your bitterness by getting professional counseling, a decision not to take vengeance by hurting or killing in return. Forgiveness might include a decision to help yourself by staying away from someone. In the sense of the commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself," the idea of forgiveness is not to love someone else and make them feel okay, but to love yourself out of your pain and anguish, or at least, to make it bearable, that you can live into it.

What that mother, an Episcopal priest, did for herself and for the man who destroyed her daughter is beyond me. I could not imagine it, and could not do it, and cannot imagine even wanting to do it. Already beware of myself as a violent person way deep down, in that mother's place, my own inclination in rage would surely have involved my second amendment right to keep and bear arms no matter the destruction to others or the further cost to myself. I confess that I have sinned against thee in thought, word, and deed ...

I am not God, I am not Jesus, I am surely not even in the likeness and image of God; but I know someone who was and is.

All glory, laud, and honor.

T

this thought is not complete by any means, but I'm going to stop and post it and return to my Thursday