Journey to Forgiveness

A service for the season of Yom Kippur

The Rev. Carol A. Huston

Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, NY

September 27, 2009

 

 

 

Opening Words

Who can say, I have purified my heart, and I am free from sin?

There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.

Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.                                                                (Chaim Stern)

 

 

 

Reading        Genesis 11:1-9    (Translation, David Rosenberg)

As I was deciding what translation to use for the reading to day, I took The Book of J down from my shelves.  I don’t know if any of you remember fuss about this book written by Harold Bloom in the early 1990s[1].   Bloom played with well established scholarly idea that there are different strands of text written in different times and places, that were woven together to create the Torah or the first part of the Old Testament that we have today.  One of those strands has long been called J, because in it the name for God began with a J (Yahweh), rather than an E (El), as in the E strand. 

 

The J Strand seems to have been the source of the real story-telling in this part of the Bible.  In his book, Bloom isolated the material of this strand and published it as an independent narrative in a fresh translation by David Rosenberg.  In his somewhat notorious commentary, Bloom attempted to visualize the personality and the context of this story-teller, and launched the wonderful idea that the writer of J might have been a woman of royal class in the court of King Solomon.  All of this is the content for another time, perhaps my colloquium session at 9 a.m. next Sunday. 

 

I bring this forward because it made sense to me to preface this week’s reading from Hebrew Scripture with this notion, that maybe, just maybe, the much of the book of Genesis was the creation of a gifted woman, writing stories to explain the world around her, and casting as a central character, a brilliant, creative, but impish divinity that she called Yahweh.  Bloom wonders about the idea that literary creations came to be used for liturgical purposes.  Again more of this another time.  But as you listen to this story today, I hope you will hear it in a new way:  as the creation of a gifted writer, trying to give us an answer to a deep question. 

 

In many times and cultures, people have believed that humans descended from one source.  Some call that original unity Adam; many see it now as the beginning cells of evolution.  And here’s the perennial question:  If humanity descended from one source – how did we become so divided on the face of the earth?     This is one writer’s answer.

 

 

Now listen:  all the earth uses one tongue, one and the same words.  Watch:  they journey from the east, arrive at a valley in the land of Sumer, settle there.

 

“We can bring ourselves together,” they said, “like stone on stone, use brick for stone:  bake it until hard.”  For mortar they heated bitumen.

 

“If we bring ourselves together,” they said, “we can build a city and tower, its top touching the sky—to arrive at fame.  Without a name we’re unbound, scattered over the face of the earth.”

 

Yahweh came down to watch the city and tower the sons of man were bound to build.  “They are one people, with the same tongue,” said Yahweh.  “They conceive this between them, and it leads up until no boundary exits to what they will touch.  Between us, let’s descend, baffle their tongue until each is scatterbrain to his friend.”

 

From there Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of earth; the city there came unbound. 

 

That is why they named the place Bavel:  their tongues were baffled there by Yahweh.  Scattered by Yahweh from there, they arrived at the ends of the earth.

 

 

Sermon

Why did the tower of Babel fall, why did the city become unbound?   Why did humanity divide itself into scattered warring groups?  The writer of J had an explanation:  it was the act of the mischievous deity, Yahweh..  If the writer of J really was writing around the time of King Solomon, -- and many biblical scholars agree with Bloom on this point --   she was actually asking why did the kingdom of David fall?  Because it did.  The kingdom established by David and expanded by his son Solomon was gone in the next generation as two sons of Solomon failed to work together.  The story of Babel holds that humanity remained ever divided, and the kingdom of David remained divided as well, with angers and resentments that never disappeared.  Humanity seems unable to cooperate, communicate and forgive.  . 

 

Look around and you see it.  Cities, nations, and institutions like Babel will fall, and people will continue to fight because communication and cooperation never are that good, even when all speak the same language.  We never could work out all of our differences.   And we could never learn how to forgive.

 

There are many sides of forgiveness; the concept twists and turns as we think of it.  In our guilt we crave self-forgiveness and forgiveness from some greater power, which really is the same as self-forgiveness.  And with people around us, we often recognize a responsibility to ask for forgiveness when we need to, to accept forgiveness if it is offered us, and to forgive others.   

 

Forgiveness is at the core of the Jewish High Holy Days.   Yom Kippur begins tonight, and I hope that you will come back this evening at 7:30 for our annual UU Yom Kippur service.  Deb Morra and I will share leadership of the service with Dean Silverberg and Claire Kuczinski, for whom these holy days are their cultural heritage.  The choir will sing; Adam and Sibylle Johner will play.  We will talk of justice, remember ancestors.  And we will consider both the divine or cosmic forgiveness which can allow us to forgive ourselves and make a new start, to be written anew in the Book of Life, without the accumulated guilt of the year just past..

 

The high holidays also stress interpersonal forgiveness.  Observant Jews can take on the mission of making apology to all they may have harmed in the past year.  Many take seriously the self-examination that makes it possible to do this.   Of course there are many kinds of apology.  A cartoon in the New Yorker Cartoon from this week showed a man at a florist shop counter.  He asks the woman behind the counter:  “What flower says you are sorry without admitting wrongdoing?”  Maybe that does work in some situations, but as an honest soul, you may want to go deeper.    

 

In the service tonight, we will read together:  “I shall seek out those whom I have harmed and ask them to forgive and pardon me, whether I acted deliberately or by accident, whether by word or deed.  May I not willfully repeat the wrongs I have done.”   And actually there will be pieces of paper and envelopes out this evening.  If you have a simple apology letter that you could write, do it tonight, while the music is beginning for the service.  Use this time to offer apology, if that is in your mind.

 

But turn the crystal of forgiveness a quarter turn and you will come to shat might be a bigger challenge for you.  And that is the challenge of forgiving others for ways they have harmed you.   During tonight’s service, we will also read this together:  “I hereby forgive whoever has hurt me, whoever has done me any wrong whether deliberately or by accident, whether by word or by deed.”

 

I want to dwell on that aspect of forgiveness for a time.  That statement has no qualifications, but it is not always easy to forgive, and I am not even sure that forgiveness should be offered in all cases.  Those who have deliberately inflicted real harm – the murder, the rapist, the molester, the identity thief, all those who break the law and make someone else suffer – may never be entitled to the forgiveness of the victim.

 

And even the smaller and still legal words and gestures that harm our hearts and souls are hard to forgive.  The slights, the oversights, the changes, the choices, -- how many times have those kinds of things brought forth anger and resentment which become more of a burden for us than the original slight.  We must learn to shed those resentments, and forgiveness is a part of that shedding. Our culture offers this definition of resentment:  drinking poison yourself, and waiting for the other person to die.  But how to do it?  how to get past the aanger?  how to forgive?

 

Years ago a parishioner whom I will call Maddie came to me, suffering with the anger she was harboring toward a childhood friend, Ella.  They had known each other as neighbors while growing up.  Later, they lived at a distance but visited back and forth as young women.  And when they both married the friendship expanded to include both partners (and you know, that doesn’t always happen!).  But then Ella’s marriage ended in a difficult divorce.  Maddie was quick to make a trip to be with her friend in this crisis, and that was when the friendship fell apart.  Maddie came home from the visit angry and wounded, her help rejected. Ella loudly declared that Maddie had never understood her, never been a real friend.  Hatred replaced friendship, and as Maddie thought about their whole relationship, she realized that Ella had always been aloof and cool.  Had they ever really been friends?  There was no relationship to repair, no reason to forgive, but still Maddie was deeply troubled that she could not forgive Ella.

 

I was a listener on this journey with Maddie, as she worked through what was bothering her.  She was still processing the slights and the rebuffs of her childhood relationship with Ella and the recent disastrous visit.  Oddly her memories of the visits when Ella was married were not marked by these moments.  And then it hit her:  Maddie’s real anger was because Ella was getting a divorce!  Maddie and her husband would lose the relationship they had had with Ella and her husband.  Maddie was angry over something that Ella could not help, and over something that was not personally aimed at her.  Maddie needed to forgive Ella for the divorce.  And Maddie needed to forgive herself for being such a poor support in the crisis of the divorce.  She did that, and then she could put energy into building new relationship with her long-time friend.

 

I hope I have described clearly enough what was a long and difficult process of self understanding for Maddie, so that it can provide a background for a path to forgiveness that I want to suggest for those of you who are carrying any burden of anger, large or small, for those of you who are heavy with the need to forgive someone.  These angers and resentments are real in our lives, and often are based on something that the other person doesn’t even know about. 

 

The journey to forgiveness might go this way:

 

1. Take some time to think about the situation and the whole relationship.  Go through it year by year, as Maddie did.  Isolate as clearly as you can the specific acts you see as harmful.  This is hard work, needing rational attention.  You may need the help of a dialogue partner, or a therapist, but the goal is to figure out exactly what the harm was, as you see it.

 

1. Sit down and write a letter to the other person, setting out the elements of the harm, from your point of view.  Be clear, be specific in your statements, so that the other person will understand what is wrong.  This is an indictment.  You so not need to end this letter with words of forgiveness.   (This is not one of the letters you might write quickly tonight!)    Then put the letter away for at least a few days.

 

1. Read the letter again and ask yourself what would happen if you sent it?  Could the relationship survive this level of clear communication?  On second glance, could you modify the letter so that you could send it?  Or is it impossible to communicate in this way? 

 

So far this has been basically a rational process, although certainly emotion has come into it.  But as you decide whether or not to send the letter, you will need to listen more to your heart, and maybe even make a leap of faith.  And three things may happen.

 

1. Maybe you don’t need to send any letter.  This is what happened with Maddie – once she understood the sources, forgiveness was automatic, and she restarted the relationship with increased understanding, and her own apologies for not being better during that visit.  That’s one possibility

 

1. Or maybe you decide that you will send the letter.  Forgiveness may be possible, but only after interaction and communication.  Decide in advance whether an apology from the other person will be necessary for reconciliation.  If a needed apology doesn’t come, then you have done your work.  I hope that you would be able to let go of the need to forgive.

 

1. Finally, you may decide not to send the letter.  If that is the case, I suggest that you do one more thing:   that you pray for the person. 

 

Actually I found this last idea in one of Forrest Church’s books that I was rereading this week, on learning that he had died after his three-year battle with cancer.  He wrote about relationships in which there has “grown up a thicket of anger, bitterness, recrimination.”  And Forrest suggested this.   “You find a quiet place, where you will not be interrupted.  You close your eyes.  And you pray for this person.  First you picture his or her face in your mind.  Then you remember that he too will die and everything between you will soon pass, that the universe will fold you both back into her bosom.  Picture his face and pray, perhaps with words like these:  ‘May this person find some peace in his soul.  May the sun shine upon him and brighten his life.  May he be released from some of his pain.  May he find love in his heart.’”[2]   Forrest is clear.  This will not change the other person.  But it can change you.  It can set you free from the thicket.  You have worked on this resolution, and now is a time to let it go.

 

Our search for personal forgiveness could grant us personal freedom as well. The result may be reconciliation, renewal of a relationship, or it may be letting go without guilt.

 

We humans in our scattering over the world, have learned to build towers and cities, but what more could we do if we could find new communication?  What more could we do if we could analyse our motivations and make leaps of faith.  What more could we do, if we could use the tools of forgiveness to create new hope and freedom.

 

May we look inside ourselves to find that way.  Amen.