forgiveness

so much to say . . .

Revenge and Forgiveness

I am just back from the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

I thought this was relevant to our discussion (this poem made me cry and cry.):

The Cemetery

. . . They were facing in another direction. The evening sunshine gave them a reddish tinge, and they trembled gently in the breeze. They seemed to be whispering to each other. Were they horrified by the ragged men who were marching past on tired feet? The color of the sunflowers - orange and yellow, gold and brown - danced before my eyes. They grew in fertile brown soil, from carefully tended mounts - behind them, gnarled trees - and above it all, a deep blue sky. . .

My Thoughts on Mary Gordon's response

When I read Edward Flannery’s and Mary Gordon’s respective responses to The Sunflower, I had radically different responses to their thoughts.

I found Flannery’s words to be thoughtful, insightful, and oddly gentle. I found them completely in harmony with my own reading of Wiesenthal’s story. Flannery’s response also contained an element of compassion for Karl, the dying Nazi soldier.

Mary Gordon’s understanding and reaction could not have been more different. Most prominent in her response is her dehumanization of Karl by never referring to him by name. She calls him “the Nazi”. She uses Nazi in place of his name six times, each time rendering the word as a spitting epithet.

Gordon sits in judgment of Karl and refuses any compassion or understanding to enter into her response. I found her understanding of forgiveness to be incomplete. Forgiveness can be freely given at any time but to truly restore a relationship, a change of behavior is required.

She also has, I believe, a total lack of understanding of a priest’s role in the sacrament of absolution; nor do Catholics desire anything more than private contrition. The practice of public penitence exists, to a certain degree in various Catholic cultures but these public displays have their roots in the extant culture it is found in.

The strongest sentiment I felt in Gordon’s response was one of anger, but was it personal anger, righteous anger, indignant anger? I couldn’t tell but I do know that her anger, no matter the source, lead to the awful eye for an eye solution she offered for true atonement. It wasn’t enough for Karl to suffer with loss of friendship, eyesight, and physical capacity. It wasn’t enough for him to have been given time to linger in pain and reflect on his heinous acts. No. Mary Gordon feels that the only appropriate setting for atonement for Karl is for him to suffer in the camps as well.

I cannot agree with her because even in the camps there was a sense of shared community, shared suffering, and opportunities for relationship. By remaining alone, Karl was denied even that. He was totally and completely alone on a human level, left alone with his thoughts. His only companion was God who never abandons anyone.

Gordon’s words suggest she has much to learn of compassion, forgiveness, relationship, and love. She must cast a wider net for deeper understanding otherwise she will remain always at an undeveloped emotion level of understanding. Until the anger is controlled, her emotional warfare will be on-going.

The Sunflower

A small sketch based on the book, The Sunflower. Click on it to see it larger.

Dalai Lama — My Response

A few years back, a Tibetan monk who had served about eighteen years in a Chinese prison in Tibet came to see me after his escape to India. I knew him from my days in Tibet and remember last seeing him in 1959. During the course of that meeting I had asked him what he felt was the bigest threat or danger while he was in prison. I was amazed by his answer. It was extraordinary and inspiring. I was expecting him to say something else; instead he said that what he most feared was losing his compassion for the Chinese.


If I were to lose my compassion for those who have harmed me, then I would continue the cycle of anger and abuse that began long before I was born. I feel the desire to forgive and I feel compassion for those people. I know why they were abusive and angry. There are times when I even feel that I have forgiven these people. So I was heartened to read the passage that I quoted above in The Sunflower because it reaffirmed a conclusion that I had reached independently.

So why is it that I am still experiencing profound sadness and grief about the past? The death of my stepmother, whom I erroneously regarded as a mother, has burdened me with too much pain. What do I need to do to forgive (and I thought I had forgiven because I did not ever consciously feel anger or hate)? Obviously the Dalai Lama has spiritual wisdom that I don't have but I have no background with Buddhism for guidance. So I looked to Christianity, with which I am more familiar, and I read passages that are inspiring and comforting, such as Annie's response to Edward Flannery's response in the previous post. Annie quotes Mary Karen Read, who wrote, “When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.”

I have prayed, sought help and read both the Bible and secular books (including The Sunflower). Forgiveness, and its peace, still evades me. I may have a clue why: I think we can only forgive if we are part of a larger community of compassionate and spiritual people who can lead the way and comfort us.

Now I ask the Dalai Lama, the Buddhists, the Christians and all readers: How do we forgive and find compassion? Is forgiveness such a large task that it requires years of study, reading and meditation? Is it inevitable that we feel that primitive anger before we can forgive? Do Buddhists experience that anger? Wouldn't I be as bad as the abusers if I felt deep anger and hatred?

I need to forgive so that I can recover.

The Sunflower - My Response

God’s power to forgive is limitless. Our own ability to forgive is strengthened by our ability to call upon God for His help in our own efforts to offer forgiveness. Forgiveness does not happen in an instant. Before we can forgive, we must have the desire to forgive.

When Simon Wiesenthal was brought before the dying SS soldier, Karl, Karl told him his story, confessed his crimes, and asked for forgiveness. Wiesenthal had no time to assimilate and respond to this enormous plea. The desire to forgive had no chance to bloom with Wiesenthal. His Jewish theology and the circumstances he found himself in, would not allow for it.

From the moment of his encounter with Karl, Karl’s plea for forgiveness became one of the singular events of his life. He was not able to offer forgiveness to Karl before he died but he was so deeply effected that for the rest of his life he asked others, “What would you have done”? Had he not been so deeply moved, I would not be here, over 60 years later, writing my own thoughts and trying to answer the question that haunted Wiesenthal for the rest of his life. We also would not have had the collective thoughts from generations of readers of his book, The Sunflower, thoughts from classrooms, discussion groups, private reflections and the published responses found in the book along with Simon’s story.

Why is this question so important? The short answer would be simply that forgiveness is freeing for both the giver and the receiver. To forgive frees us from vengeance, bitterness, the sense that we are victims; all feelings that can only corrode the soul.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are welded together in Christian thought. God is all forgiving and merciful and we are called to be as He is. However, to forgive does not mean to be reconciled. Reconciliation is a restoration of the relationship between the victim and the victimizer. Reconciliation suggests that there is a change in the behavior of the victimizer. If there is no change, there can be no reconciliation. So, we can forgive but not be reconciled.

By going through the process of forgiving, we are freed from evil’s power over us. Thus, with forgiveness offered, we are able to go forward in our lives. The lessons of evil have the power to teach the world that there is a better way. Forgiveness becomes a tool of God’s hand that takes evil and makes it an instrument of good. St. Augustine wrote, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to allow no evil to exist.”

We have many modern day examples of the power of forgiveness becoming a tool for good. Mary Karen Read is one of the 32 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. After her death, at age 18, notes on forgiveness were found in her private journal. Two months before her death, she wrote, “When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.”

Remarkably, this was just one of a series of quotes on forgiveness that Mary had been collecting since her mid-teens. The notebook, now used by Mary's father to help others, shows most profoundly the healing and comfort that can be found in forgiveness. It has become God’s tool for bringing good out of evil and showing the way out of pain and sadness.

Holocaust survivors remind us that if you have not been through it, you cannot understand the depth of the pain. Mary’s family echoes this same feeling. On a very small scale that can in no way be equated with Wiesenthal’s experience or the Read family’s loss, I found myself being called for years to forgive an individual who was instrumental in causing great havoc and wreckage in my life.

Until I could forgive, I could not free myself of the fears and insecurities that had settled around my heart and mind. But with forgiveness came the sensation of shedding the anger, hurt, bitterness and fear that was physically felt as it flow from my body through my fingertips and feet. The power of those past evil acts literally flowed out of me leaving a cleansed space from which I could start again and grow in personal strength. Forgiveness became not only a spiritual and mental experience, but also a physical experience.

Wiesenthal may not have given Karl what he was asking for but through thought and action, I believe that he was clearly moved in the direction of forgiveness. There simply was not enough time for Karl to show by his actions that he was truly remorseful and changed. But in those shared hours, Simon and Karl became God’s tool for good to emerge from great evil. And what of Karl’s plea for forgiveness? Simon, by hearing his plea, was led on a lifelong quest regarding God’s expectations of us. Karl, as an instrument of evil, was given a penance commensurate with his crime. He suffered tremendously. His suffering was not just physical. He suffered in conscience. He suffered the loss of the one thing that would have given him comfort and consolation: the nearness of his beloved mother.

But even here I see the hand of God at work. By not having the comfort of his mother, he was left truly alone with his thoughts. We cannot judge the quality and value of Karl’s remorse. We can only know that by his punishment he was led to reflect on his actions, arrive at deep remorse and then beg for forgiveness.

The object of his quest , a Jew, should not be judged either. He had nothing else to lose. His life was at an end. His confession and expression of remorse was true remorse. He did not spare himself. He did not excuse him. He did not explain himself. He accepted the grace that comes from accepting the knowledge of his crimes.

As I read Edward Flannery’s conclusion in his own response to Wiesenthal question, “What would I do?”, I could not help but identify completely with his words. I take Flannery’s words here now and embrace them wholly as my own.

“ . . .I would have – I do hope – forgiven him and, as an obstinate believer, suggested to him that he make his peace with God by asking for His forgiveness, and, taking full advantage of the situation, uttered a prayer for the repose of his soul and those of the victims of his inhuman behavior."