Tag Archives: lent

Mea culpa, dimitte mihi

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Another of my Lent thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness.
I’m wondering what the impact is of living a life unforgiven – both from the point of view of forgiveness for something you have done, or from the perspective of just not being able to forgive something done to you.

I like to think I’m good at forgiveness.
The boyfriends who dumped me?  You know what, you were probably right.  It was awful at the time. But I’ve a lovely husband and an adorable son and wouldn’t have it any other way.  That wouldn’t have been possible without you. See?  Easy.

But forgiveness is not easy.

Simon Wiesenthal’s book “The Sunflower” detailing his experience during the holocaust shows how seriously the concept needs to be taken.  Could you have offered forgiveness in his position?

People that impress me are not the Beckhams and the rich and famous. These people have done well for themselves, but ultimately they are not really heroic.  This week we went to Warrington (not the town centre, just the IKEA) and we talked about what it mean to us.  To my husband who grew up in that area, it’s the memories of his childhood.  To me, from nearly 300 miles away, Warrington is a name with other connections – sad ones.  I think of the IRA bomb that killed two children.   Colin Parry, father of Tim, is a hero.  His forgiveness of the people that murdered his son so indiscriminately, so futilely, and his continued pursuit of peace are what impresses.  “Forgive and not forget” is at the heart of his message. 
And there must be days when he has to deal with the people that did this when the anger, the hurt, these things ressurge and forgiveness seems impossible. 
Forgiveness after all, seems to me to be dynamic – it has to be worked at and remembered or it slips away. 
And always the question, if it was you, could you forgive?

The scale of forgiveness required can be awesome.  Can you forgive, but not forget, and move on at more than an individual level?  Well, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa had a go at it after apartheid and is generally thought to have succeeded.

In Matthew 18:21- 22, Peter asks Jesus “How many times shall I forgive my brother? Seven times?” 
And Jesus says, “not seven times but seventy times seven (seventy seven times in other translations)”. 
Obviously he didn’t say the bit in brackets… and the actual number is not important, the point of the story is that the Law (for which the rabbis at the time has said forgiving twice was sufficient) is now being fulfilled by Jesus who was saying that forgiveness mattered so much that it should not be a simple matter of enumeration. 
And it may be even more important than that.   In Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus says ”For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
Jesus forgave on behalf of God, with an audacity that shocked (in claiming to forgive sins commited against others and against God, which is God’s prerogative, he was claiming to be God). 
And we are called to forgive too.  It’s there in the Lord’s prayer – forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.  We say these words but do we think about what they actually mean? Is forgiveness for ourselves conditional?  Is refusing to forgive a sin?  
Who are we to stand in judgement over others?  It’s not just about specks and planks in our eyes, it’s about how we stand in God’s eyes. And it’s by God’s grace that we can be forgiven, given how badly we measure up against his standards.  To see what I mean try Philip Yancy’s “What’s so amazing about grace?” – still one of my favourite books 7 years after being given a copy by a friend from church. 

Of course recognising the importance of forgiveness is not just a Christian thing.  Google “why is it important to forgive?” and you get 10,700,000 results, and that’s only in English. From this life coach to this islamic questions website, there’s recognition that peace in your heart can only come from forgiveness.  
Lily Tomlin summarises forgiveness like this:  “To forgive is to give up all hope for a better past“.
It’s about letting go, stopping trying to “what if” the past away, stopping trying to rewrite it, stopping trying to find someone to blame, stopping the anger.  And it is so, so hard.  But not being able to forgive burns, eats away, and hurts you so much.  And that’s whether you can’t forgive others, or whether you feel unforgiven and can’t forgive yourself.  It’s no wonder that everyone encourages you to try.

So we have to make an active choice to forgive, and once we’ve done so, we need to remember that we have done so, and why we have done so, and to not bring it all up again with all the anger and hurt as fresh as the day it happened.  And it’s easy to talk about it, easy to know that we should forgive as everyone tell us to, easy to believe that of course we’ve forgiven but that it’s somehow ok still to be angry and recount and mull and… Lilly Tomlin’s right.  We have to give up all hope for a better past.
  
Can we live a full and healthy life without forgiving? The only references I’ve found to this are people talking about never forgiving an abusive parent, but not allowing it to interfere with them getting on with their lives.  Every other reference to forgiveness on the internet (and I’ve been looking at this for an hour or so now) says that only by forgiving can life be lived to the full.  

I’m not good at forgiving.  I’ve just been extrordinarily lucky in my life to be able to.  So far.
And it’s not easy at all.
But the freedom, the grace that comes with being forgiven and from letting go and forgiving, that’s worth the inner battle.

Lent – not just a past participle…

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Embarrassing incident at work today. 

As I walked through reception I saw a colleague I barely know with a dirty mark on her forehead.  I thought about telling her, but decided as she was about to get into a mirrored lift that she’d see it herself in good time. 

But when I got back upstairs, I saw another colleague with a mark and said “ok, I’ve missed something, what’s the mark about?”

“It’s Ash Wednesday”, said my colleague.
Of course it is. What a fool I felt.

I made pancakes last night for Shrove Tuesday (embarrassingly good since they were made from a Betty Crocker instant batter shaker, and it made me wonder why I’d bothered making them by hand so many years). 
I won my only real school prize for Scripture, writing an essay on the origins and meaning of pancake day (see this post for more detail).  As they said on the TV news yesterday, we’re all so used to thinking about pancakes and live in such a relatively prosperous and increasingly secular society that we’re forgetting that they symbolise something.

But the ash marks reminded me that not everyone’s forgetting. 
My colleague mentioned the services that were taking place at Westminster Cathedral and asked me if I too was Roman Catholic, to which I replied no, C of E, and that I’ve not seen that for years (the universal tradition is to burn last year’s palm crosses from Palm Sunday to make the ash, which in itself is a symbolic act).
She suggested looking up the Westminster Abbey website to see if my denomination was doing it too, which was kind of her.  One thing about working on equalities issues is that – far from the way that we see equalities described as being about the sweeping away and secularisation of society – it’s about celebrating and recognising our diversity and that that’s what makes life interesting.

But it reminds me of a conversation with a friend last week.  We talked about giving things up for Lent and how hard it was this year (I’m trying to give up fruitless worrying about the future, she’s giving up alcohol).  Both are small, commemorative acts of personal use rather than big dramatic acts clearly visible to all.

She mentioned that her parents were unlikely to consider what she’d given up “enough”, but she hoped that it would be understood and would not be held against her getting a pass to heaven.
I’ve pondered this last point, because its on this precise issue that we pass for the cultural to the spiritual and a small but significant difference of view.
It’s easy to forget what is cultural (rememberance of the 40 days in the wilderness) with what is spiritually necessary (that is acceptance of Jesus’s gift to us, God’s forgiveness, that the price of our sin has been paid and God’s law fulfilled). It’s not about trying to fulfil a standard – Jesus’s whole message was effectively that this is pointless as no one on their own merit will ever be good enough to meet God’s perfection.
We’ve seen this reflected in so much of religion, both within Christianity and in other faiths, the hope that by setting rules that must be obeyed you’ll be more what God is looking for, or trying to buy your way in to God’s good books through good behaviour. And of course we know that rules that set out to help can become a hindrance by being too hard to meet or becoming the aim themselves rather than the glory of God. 
Christians know from Jesus that nothing they do will be good enough, that it’s faith in Jesus (known as justification by faith) but even then the issue is complicated, with James 2:24 in the New Testament the point being made is that what you believe modifies your actions. As wikipedia sets out unusually clearly, true faith in God results in a desire to follow his instruction to love one another, and thus would result in good deeds.  But that’s difficult to get your head round – resulting in many heretical positions down the centuries.

Lent reminds us of a hardship endured, and ultimately a sacrifice made for us. It reminds us to lend part of our thoughts to this, for this short period (the classic 40 days to Easter).
But Lent is not just the past participle of “to lend”, it’s a real thing affecting the way in which millions of people in the UK live their lives (and with larger population for C&E Europe, possibly a growing number).  We may not have the parading in sackcloth and ashes of the mediaeval world but the connotations of fasting and repentance (conveyed by lack of decoration in church) and regarding the world a little more contemplatively do echo on.  Typically we’ve hung onto the fun of the pancaking feasting which the population forgets the follow-up fasting.

But the echoes are now rebounding more loudly.  Combined with increasing willingness to show religious faith publicly, whether wearing headscarf , turban, skullcap or cross, even if there are consequences because to those doing it it’s a mark of what is important in their lives. The ash marks are both traditional and the latest manifestation of this. Yes they are symbols, the symbol of the thing rather than the thing itself, but symbols matter.

Let’s think about it, while we digest.