First Parish Unitarian UniversalistForgive Us, as We Forgive
A homily by the Reverend Diane Teichert given at
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
November 12, 2006
The title of this homily comes from the Christian tradition, from the prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples, traditionally called The Lord’s Prayer. Some of you may remember it. A familiar translation begins:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts (or some say “our trespasses” ) as we forgive our debtors (or “those who trespass against us” and it goes on from there.
Debtors or trespassers, both have to do with property, one might notice. Money or land. Even though, often, the most difficult things to forgive each other for are hurts of body or soul.
One translation directly from the language of Jesus, Aramaic, puts it more broadly, not suggesting property rights, simply: “detach the fetters of faults that bind us, like we let go the guilt of others.” (Neil Douglas-Klotz, www.songofhome.com/Klotz and Desert Wisdom: Sacred Middle Eastern Writings From the Goddess through the Sufis).
But, really, the point is that we ask to be forgiven as we forgive others. If we forgive others, we will be forgiven.
Rowan Williams, leader of the Anglican Church, writes of this prayer, “So it's a bit of a vicious circle of If I don't forgive I can't be forgiven. If I can't hear the word of forgiveness and really let it change me, then I shan't be able, I shan't be free to forgive, so this is quite a sobering prayer about forgiveness… But there's a wonderful image in [early church writings] about this, [where it] says that it's a bit like teaching a child to do something. The parent does it carefully a few times, then steps back and says now you show me. God forgives us and then steps back and says now you show me how [you can]… forgive.”
The Amish, who are of a type of Christian called Anabaptist, are steeped in this expectation of forgiveness, as the world saw last month when they were so quick to forgive the local man, non-Amish, who on October 2 nd murdered five of their daughters and wounded another five in their schoolhouse and then killed himself.
There was a photo in the NY Times eleven days after the tragedy. It showed a man and child walking on the edge of an expansive green field, approaching an empty area of bare earth near a single tree, the place where the school had stood. It had been wrecked by heavy machinery: obliterated, the remains carted away, the dirt smoothed over. I thought it a fitting end to a place of horrible memories and terrible sadness, and a healthy way to direct anger: toward inanimate things rather than people.
The caption of the photo said that the ground will be returned to pastureland. The article gave as reasons for the demolition: it might be too hard for the children who were in the schoolhouse that day to return, and to cut down on the clogged roads caused by tourists and well-wishers trying to get a glimpse of the schoolhouse. (“Amish Destroy Schoolhouse Where 10 Girls Were Shot,” New York Times, October 13, 2006). May healing grow like the grasses on that patch of soil.
Many of us were awed by the quick response of the Amish to their tragedy: to forgive the murderer and to reach out to his bereaved family. I read that at least half of the 75 people who attended his burial were Amish. And, furthermore, the Amish helped to establish a fund for the assassin’s family. (“The Amish Way: Forgiveness Clause” by Donald B. Kraybill, The Christian Century, October 31, 2006).
How could that be? Where did they find the strength? Would we? So quickly?
The world marveled at the Amish response, but really, it turns out that people from all walks of life and all religious backgrounds are known to choose to loving forgiveness over hateful retribution. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa comes immediately to mind.
This we heard a few moments ago in those stories of forgiveness (from a website theforgivenessproject.com). None of those individuals, and not many of the others whose stories appear in the same collection, cited their religion as the reason they forgave the perpetrators of harm against them.
One story that did involve religion was a bit too complex to read aloud. In that story, the forgiver was—like the Amish—intensely religious and part of a close, small and disciplined community in the U.S. Like for the Amish, the expectations of his tradition regarding forgiveness were deep within him, from its practice within their group, and so he found true comfort in forgiving and reaching out to the family of the gang member who had killed his 20 year old son who was a college student in San Diego, shot doing his the job, delivering a pizza. The father was a Sufi Muslim.
Awesome as that Muslim father and the Amish parents are, forgiveness is not only extolled by religion but also, now, by medical science. The Harvard Medical School recently reported that scientific research shows that “mentally replaying situations in which we were wronged or misunderstood, feeling all over again the anger or victimization, and silently rehashing our side of the story or thinking about ways to get even, creates a stress response, with higher levels of stress hormones and increased blood pressure and heart rate.” The report goes on, “If we hold on to anger and past trauma so strongly that the stress response never goes away, we pay a toll in our physical and emotional well-being.” [“Five for 2005: Five Reasons to Forgive,” Harvard Women’s Health Watch, January 2005].
Still, the question persists in my heart, how would I respond? How would we Unitarian Universalists respond? Perhaps we only need practice on forgiving the plenty of petty grudges we carry? Of which, I’m told, the Amish have their share, too.
And more. A professor of Anabaptist studies has written, “One might wonder how these forgiving folks can be so unforgiving of their own members who stray—excommunicating and shunning them. The Amish answer is that those who break their baptismal vows are always welcome back and will be fully forgiven if they confess their errors. But, until they confess, the shunning (which is based on biblical teaching) is a dose of tough love to remind them of their transgression.” (Kraybill).
I don’t know anyone among us who shuns our offspring for leaving the Unitarian Universalist fold. Many of us, instead, blame (incorrectly, I believe) Unitarian Universalism for losing its young ones. Amish, we’re not!
But, let me suggest to you that if we held as closely to our first and last principles
as the Amish hold to the teachings of Jesus to “turn the other cheek” and “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” maybe we would find both the courage and the humility needed to forgive even those whose offenses against us are most painful and to accept forgiveness for the worst of what we do to others.
To hold close to our hearts, to hold as beloved to us, to practice as a spiritual discipline, our first principle—the inherent worth and dignity of each person, including ourselves—and the seventh and last principle, our deep inter-connection with all people and all of creation, that we are in a profound sense all one—if we hold these as beloved to us, and practice them in relation to, ideally, everyone we encounter, or at least each other here in our religious community, we would and could come from a place of love to forgive--neither condoning nor accepting wrong-doing, but forgiving, because we have been forgiven and because know the power of forgiveness to transform for the good both the forgiver and the forgiven.
Forgive us, as we forgive. We forgive, as we are forgiven.
James Luther Adams, the best known twentieth century Unitarian Universalist theologian, professor at Harvard and Chicago Universities, a member of Boston’s Arlington Street Church in the last years of his life, famously said “We come to church to practice being human".
Let this be a place where we practice forgiveness, where we forgive as we are forgiven.
Amen.
Readings (from © The Forgiveness Project http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/)
Bud Welch
In April 1995, Bud Welch’s 23-year-old daughter, Julie Marie, was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In the months after her death, Bud changed from supporting the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to taking a public stand against it. In 2001 Timothy McVeigh was executed for his part in the bombing.
Three days after the bombing, as I watched Tim McVeigh being led out of the courthouse, I hoped someone in a high building with a rifle would shoot him dead. I wanted him to fry. In fact, I’d have killed him myself if I’d had the chance.
Unable to deal with the pain of Julie’s death, I started self-medicating with alcohol until eventually the hangovers were lasting all day. Then, on a cold day in January 1996, I came to the bombsight – as I did every day – and I looked across the wasteland where the Murrah Building once stood. My head was splitting from drinking the night before and I thought, “I have to do something different, because what I’m doing isn’t working.”
For the next few weeks I started to reconcile things in my mind, and finally concluded that it was revenge and hate that had killed Julie and the 167 others. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had been against the US government for what happened in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and seeing what they’d done with their vengeance, I knew I had to send mine in a different direction. Shortly afterwards I started speaking out against the death penalty.
I also remembered that shortly after the bombing I’d seen a news report on Tim McVeigh’s father, Bill. He was shown stooping over a flowerbed, and when he stood up I could see that he’d been physically bent over in pain. I recognized it because I was feeling that pain, too.
In December 1998, after Tim McVeigh had been sentenced to death, I had a chance to meet Bill McVeigh at his home near Buffalo. I wanted to show him that I did not blame him. His youngest daughter also wanted to meet me, and after Bill had showed me his garden, the three of us sat around the kitchen table. Up on the wall were family snapshots, including Tim’s graduation picture. They noticed that I kept looking up at it, so I felt compelled to say something. “God, what a good looking kid,” I said.
Earlier, when we’d been in the garden, Bill had asked me, “Bud, are you able to cry?” I’d told him, “I don’t usually have a problem crying.” His reply was, “I can’t cry, even though I’ve got a lot to cry about.” But now, sitting at the kitchen table looking at Tim’s photo, a big tear rolled down his face. It was the love of a father for a son.
When I got ready to leave I shook Bill’s hand, then extended it to Jennifer, but she just grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She was the same sort of age as Julie but felt so much taller. I don’t know which one of us started crying first. Then I held her face in my hands and said, “Look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives. I don’t want your brother to die and I’ll do everything I can to prevent it.” As I walked away from the house I realized that until that moment I had walked alone, but now a tremendous weight had lifted from my shoulders. I had found someone who was a bigger victim of the Oklahoma bombing than I was, because while I can speak in front of thousands of people and say wonderful things about Julie, if Bill McVeigh meets a stranger he probably doesn’t even say he had a son.
About a year before the execution I found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather than for him.
Six months after the bombing a poll taken in Oklahoma City of victims’ families and survivors showed that 85% wanted the death penalty for Tim McVeigh. Six years later that figure had dropped to nearly half, and now most of those who supported his execution have come to believe it was a mistake. In other words, they didn’t feel any better after Tim McVeigh was taken from his cell and killed.
Andrew Rice
On September 11 2001, investment banker David Rice was killed when the World Trade Centre collapsed. Since then, his younger brother, Andrew Rice, has dedicated himself to trying to understand the underlying causes of violence. He is a member of Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded by family members of September 11 victims seeking effective non-violent responses to terrorism.
“I was covering the Toronto Film Festival as a journalist on September 11. It was a bright sunny morning when my mum rang. ‘Andrew, are you alone?’ she asked, and a kind of dread came over me. She told me David had rung to tell her that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre but that he was OK: it had hit the other tower. I rushed to the pressroom of my hotel and as I walked in I saw the second jet hit. I was hysterical now and ran back to my hotel suite. I turned on the TV to catch the first tower collapsing. At this point I just let out this terrible shriek, overwhelmed by the certainty that David was dead.
David and I were always close. As teenagers we were both wild - we dropped out of college and partied too much until our twenties, when we both sobered up. The process of sobering up makes you face yourself and makes you understand that everyone has good and bad in them. When David was killed it helped me to handle my grief and anger.
When the New York Times published its “Portrait of Grief” of David, I was too distressed to take it in, but some months later I looked at the newspaper again and was shocked that in that same edition - just six days after the attacks - Vice President Cheney was saying, ‘if you’re against us you’ll feel our wrath’. The nation was in shock, like clay waiting to be moulded, and here were our leaders saying we would rid the world of evil. There was a battle going on inside me - the visceral part was saying ‘we’ll show them’, but the more rational part was saying ‘force won’t help’. Then, as reports of civilian casualties came in from Afghanistan, I found myself getting more and more upset that ordinary people like my brother were losing their lives. When I discovered Peaceful Tomorrows on the Internet, it was a huge relief to realise I wasn’t the only one who thought retribution would get us nowhere.
Later, a group called Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation were contacted by the mother of the alleged 20th hijacker, Zacharias Moussaoui, who has been held in solitary confinement in Northern Virginia since September 11. She had a unique request. She wanted to meet some of the families of the victims and ask for their forgiveness.
We were nervous; scared of our Government finding out, and scared it would be just too upsetting. But finally a small group of us agreed to meet Madame al-Wafi in New York City in November 2002. As we waited in a private university building, a mother whose son was killed in the World Trade Centre went down the hall to meet her. We heard footsteps, then silence. Then we heard this sobbing. Finally they both came into the room, both mothers with their arms around each other. By now we were all crying. Madame al-Wafi reminded me a lot of my own mother, who had cried so much after David died. She spent three hours with us and told us how the extremist group had given her mentally ill son a purpose in life.
One day I’d like to meet Zacharias Moussaoui. I’d like to say to him, ‘you can hate me and my brother as much as you like, but I want you to know that I loved your mother and I comforted her when she was crying’.
My attitude is not all altruism. Of course I’m angry, but there’s a spiritual supremacy. I’m protecting my brother’s spirit by putting a barricade around him. I’m refusing to fall in line with what “they” want, which is visceral hatred between two sides; this gives me permission to reconcile. Those people crying loudest for retribution so often seem to be the least affected.”
Gill Hicks
On July 7th, 2005, 26 people died and many were severely injured and maimed on London Underground's Piccadilly line tube train between Kings Cross and Russell Square stations.
A suicide bomber was responsible. Australian born Gill Hicks miraculously survived but lost both her legs due to the explosion.
I wish the world would Stop – just stop and give us all the time to see what is happening. Why are we killing each other – everyday? It may sound naïve, simple, maybe too simple to take seriously – but – I don't understand why we are 'accepting' and 'tolerating' war and destruction and famine and poverty and oppression. When will the final bomb explode? When will enough be enough?
The cycle has to stop – I can not hate the person who has done this to me; the cycle must end with me. I don’t see it as my place to forgive the act, yet I am compelled to understand – to offer an open heart, to try to hear and ask Why?
As I lay waiting, trapped in what resembled a train carriage - but was now a blackened, smoke filled indescribable 'room' of destruction and devastation - I was able to think. This period of time, some 40 minutes, was to prove to be the most insightful and blessed gift that I am yet to receive, apart from the ultimate gift of a second chance at life. As the blood poured from my body (despite the scarf I had tied on each leg as a tourniquet to stem the flow) I felt incredibly weak, fighting to hold on, to survive. There were two voices holding a very powerful, conflicting conversation in my head – one voice willing me to hold on, to remember those who love me and need me here, the other calling me softly to let go, to drift away into a peaceful deep and permanent sleep. Both sides were stating their case – asking me to choose between life and death. I thought about all the things that mattered to me –my then partner and now husband Joe, my brother Graham, my family, my dear friends – I wanted to spare them this pain. They gave me the strength to choose life. I made a decision and the conversation ended. I wasn't going to die in the carriage, not there on that day; I had to wait for a light.
Help did come and each person who 'saved' me did so not knowing who I was. It didn’t matter if I was rich or poor, black or white, female or male, muslim or jew, religious or not – what mattered to each of them – the police, the ambulance, the paramedics, the surgeons, the nurses –was that I was a life that hung in the balance, a life they were so desperate to save. I arrived at the hospital as 'One Unknown' – an estimated female.
When I awoke I was euphoric to be alive and to have survived. I feel like a very blessed person – filled with emotions of love and compassion and joy. I am able to appreciate life – but a different life than I had before, one that is rich and fulfilled and not consumed by anger and hatred.
I am committed to building Peace – to endeavour to eradicate ignorance in the world and to encourage mutual understanding. I don't want to accept terrorism, we all deserve to live in a world that is not plagued by war and famine and poverty and oppression. We can change that – each and every one of us – each 'one unknown'.