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THE
FORGIVENESS THAT COMES HARDEST
A sermon by the
Rev. A. Powell Davies, D.D.
Minister, All Souls' Church (Unitarian)
Washington DC
April 23, 1950
Most people learn
the meaning of forgiveness from their parents--especially the mother.
The young child, not quite certain why it is that something he has done
has made his mother disappointed or angry, is anxious to put the matter
right. He wants to feel himself safe in his mother's affection. So. in
one way or another, he seeks a reconciliation. This is his first experience
of forgiveness.
Presently, owing to the influence of the father, the matter becomes more
complicated. The child may feel that when he loses his mother's approval
he can soon regain it, but in the case of his father reassurance may not
be so prompt. In this way, the child may come to identify himself partly
with the response of the mother and partly with that of the father, so
that one parent frees or indulges him emotionally and the other parent
restrains him.
At any rate, this would be the simplest way of putting the matter. Too
simple, I am afraid, since the influence of neither parent is consistent;
nor is the emotional development of a child as plainly traceable as some
of the textbooks would lead us to think. Nevertheless, these are useful
generalizations if we use them cautiously, since they reveal to us something
of the way in which conscience is formed and how it happens that an individual
has standards of behavior which he can neither live up to nor renounce.
From one parent or from both--or from the interactive influence of the
two parents upon him--the child, without really knowing why, begins to
think of some actions as likely to gain approval and other actions as
certain to be disapproved. But since he never succeeds in restricting
himself to the approvable actions only, he finds himself from time to
time in need of toleration or indulgence, or of what he learns to call
forgiveness.
When he moves out from the home into a wider social environment--the playground,
the school, the homes of his friends--he discovers that this attitude
of approval and disapproval is encountered wherever he goes. So that it
becomes implanted within himself. Some things he can do and be glad he
has done them; other things cause him unhappiness, self-criticism, remorse.
Sooner or later, he learns that this is not an accident: not fortuitous;
it is part of the nature of things, decreed by God. And he thinks of God
as a good deal like his father but much more powerful, and yet at the
same time not unlike his mother; so that the same God who condemns him
for what is disapproved may also be asked to reinstate him or--as he says--forgive
him.
Out of all this, the child as he grows becomes aware of what he calls
his conscience and sometimes is much perplexed by it. If his development
is wholesome, his conscience will be such that his reason reinforces it;
that is to say, he will consider on his own account to what extent the
judgements of his conscience make sense and improve his life and its relationships,
and will accept those judgements; and at the same time he will reject
his guilt-feelings wherever he sees them to be something left over from
his infancy and irrational. But this is not a thing he will do easily.
If his parents have been unwise or estranged and quarrelsome, or lacking
in affection, or overindulgent or in other ways inadequate, the grown
child may suffer for it all his life. His conscience may never be wholesome.
Or the same thing may happen through some defect in himself. And thus,
when we speak of conscience we are discussing something that is far from
simple. In some people, it works straightforwardly and in an open and
forthright way. These people are mature. But in other people it works
quite deviously and does much harm. These people have been impeded in
their emotional development; no matter how bright their minds, they are
immature.
When it comes to forgiveness, therefore, which all of us throughout our
lives must both seek for ourselves and from time to time grant to other
people, those who are mature manage it fairly easily but those who are
immature are constantly in difficulties with it. They are in difficulties
because their own consciences are confused, and the confusion they find
within themselves they project out into the lives of other people.
Let me illustrate. A year or so ago, a lady came into my office hoping
that I could help her to find her way out of a rather tangled situation.
Some injuries had been done to her, she said, which she had freely forgiven.
The people who had done these injuries were very hateful people: she was
sure of that but nevertheless she had forgiven them. She was acting generously
and wanted to go on acting generously. On the surface it was a very creditable
story. The lady had done well. But if she had done well, why was she disturbed
about it? Why were there tears of anger in her eyes? Why was she seeking
help?
The truth was, of course, that she had not done well at all. The forgiveness
expressed in her behavior was not a forgiveness that came from the heart.
She hated these people. And why did she hate them? Was it for what they
had done to her? Not really. This kind of hatred never persists because
of what other people do: it is rooted in what one does oneself. This lady
hated her relatives and friends because of her self-hate. She could not
forgive them because she could not forgive herself.
Which, after a while,
was what I mentioned to her. "Why don't you forgive the person most
concerned?" I asked. "Isn't the trouble that you can't forgive
yourself?" And then she told me of her childhood, a very unhappy
one, and of the tortures of conscience--of a confused and sick conscience--which
she had never been able to make well. She was in part the victim of her
upbringing--as most such people are. But she was also to blame herself--if
one may call it blame. She had fortified herself within her own resentments--resentments,
however, which she had learned to conceal. She was outwardly sweet and
gracious; inwardly she was seething with hostility. She could not forgive
herself for being herself, and for not being better than she was.
And she represents thousands of other people--not only thousands but millions.
These people, as I have indicated, have become what they are largely through
an unfortunate childhood conditioning. For that reason, they should be
understood sympathetically. Yet sympathy alone will never cure them. They
have to gain insight into their own invalidism; they have to understand
that in their cases conscience is not a guide to spiritual health, but
only a mechanism for gaining approval. They have to know that a more wholesome
state of conscience is possible. And they have to begin by forgiving themselves--which
is the hardest kind of forgiveness.
Such people are often very good people--that is to say, in overt behavior.
If they are cruel or intolerant, it is always in a quite disguised and
very subtle way. If they do other people an injury, they always make it
seem like a kindness: something generous--on the surface--which is nevertheless
intended as a condescension, or even a humiliation. The rectitude of their
outer lives conceals an inner lie.
As I have said, this is not a simple condition--or one that is easy to
describe. The extent to which I have described it this morning gives only
the barest indications. Nor has it been possible to describe it even to
this extent until rather recent years, for in this matter we are much
more indebted to modern psychology than we are to religion, or at any
rate, to the religion of yesterday. Nevertheless, the condition itself
is not new; and neither is its importance. It was this self-hatred, this
self-accusing unforgiveness, that gave impulse to heresy-hunts and inquisitions,
and to all the harshness perpetrated in the name of religion. It has done
the same thing in the life of families. It has destroyed the harmony of
human relationships of every sort.
Anyone who wishes to see what its effect was in the Victorian Era can
do so by reading Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh. Or if they wish
to come a little closer to our time they can read The Forsyte Saga.
Or, for a thoroughly modern and very clear and useful treatment they can
go to Rabbi Liebman's Peace of Mind, particularly the third chapter.
There is no forgiveness--none
whatever--that comes so difficult as the forgiveness wherewith we forgive
ourselves. I sometimes think it ought to have been included in the Lord's
Prayer. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive ourselves--as well
as those who trespass against us." It is not too difficult --not
usually--to forgive those who trespass against us. However deeply we resent
an injury at first, after a while we are ready to forgive it. Our trouble
is that it is not the injury done to us, but the injury we do
that is hard to forgive. We can forgive others, in one measure or another,
but we cannot forgive ourselves. The person who has done us a wrong we
are not embarrassed to meet; but the person to whom we have done
a wrong --we cannot forgive him because we cannot forgive ourselves.
He is a constant reminder of what we want to avoid remembering--that we
did a wrong. So we project the wrong we did out on to him; and such is
the ingenuity of our minds that we provide arguments to persuade ourselves
that we did not do the wrong; it was the other way around;
he did it.
But what it comes to is quite plain when we are willing to look at it.
We cannot forgive ourselves. And the reason, of course, is that
we do not want to admit that we need forgiveness. We want to justify ourselves.
Not outwardly, perhaps. No, but in the last analysis. For we do not want
to face ourselves as we really are.
And whether this is a condition brought upon us by our childhood conditioning,
producing in us a muddled conscience, or whether it is something that
we bring about ourselves--or both, and I think that it is often both--what
we are up against is that we hate ourselves. And so we project our self-hate
out into the world, out to other people.
And from this--or so I increasingly think--comes more unhappiness, more
sickness of soul, than from anything else in the world. It is quite frequently
from self-hate that people commit suicide. But there is also a self-killing
that goes on in day to day existence: a sort of chronic suicide. People
kill off a part of their own nature--the best part. And go on killing
it off. Because they do so, all their relationships have something of
death in them. They kill off the kindliness in other people, the natural
friendliness that is offered to them, the spontaneities that make life
joyous and bountiful. Wherever they go, these people, they are killers
of the soul. Yet, there is nothing that they do to other people that is
anything like as evil as what they do to themselves. Human beings are
not like serpents, immune to their own poison: they can never poison others
as severely as they do themselves.
Well, what may be done about it? Rabbi Liebman, in the book I mentioned,
says that "the religion of the future should take a page from the
notebook of the psychotherapist." That is what I have been doing
this morning. If we can identify a condition, if we can truly recognize
it and not disguise it, we are already gaining power over it. That is
what the psychotherapist would tell us. We must gain insight. We must
know ourselves as we are. We must recognize ourselves in our true character.
Then we can do something about ourselves. Forgive ourselves. And
perhaps begin to like ourselves. We can see how comical we sometimes are,
how full of tricks and stratagems, how far from the perfections we have
tried to claim. And we can get used to ourselves. Instead of living with
a tortured conscience, too sick to guide us, we can achieve a wholesome
conscience and learn to accept its directions. We can stop being afraid
of ourselves; cease using up our emotional energy trying to pretend. We
can be ourselves, but with an honest effort to be truly better
than we have been in the past. All this we can achieve, says the psychotherapist,
through insight. For with insight comes humility. Not a false modesty,
covering up an inordinate vanity, a greedy self-conceit, that we do not
want other people to know about. But humility: seeing ourselves for what
we are and knowing what to respect in ourselves and what to put up with
while we try to get the better of it.
What this humility is in ordinary ways--not heroic ways, or dramatically
but just in common ways--has often been illuminated for me when I have
remembered an occasion, several years ago, in the State of Maine, when
I was driving through a sparsely populated countryside and began to run
out of gasoline. Just as I was getting desperate I saw a gasoline pump
half a mile down a hill and managed to get to it. But by this time a thunderstorm
was on its way. And the old man who had been vending the gasoline took
a look at the sky and hurried off into a barn. Nor could I persuade him
to leave its shelter and come and sell me some gasoline--not until the
storm was safely passing down the river. Then he came out of the barn.
Not in the least embarrassed ar abashed, he looked into the car window
and with his face wrinkled up into a quizzical, whimsical sort of smile,
whispered to me--as though it were a confidence--"I'm not the bravest
man in these parts."
Well, he wasn't. And he would have been better off if he had been a little
braver. But just the same, he was no hypocrite. Nor was there anything
wrong with his humility. I'm quite sure that he'll never have a neurosis--not
even a complex. What he is, he is, and I rather think he had done his
best about himself. If a bolt of lightning was going to hit the gasoline
tank and blow up some city folks--why it was something to watch, not something
to share. He was "not the bravest man in those parts." But he
was something--he was honest and humble and he didn't hate himself.
Perhaps, at his age, he ought to have achieved a little more than that.
Doubtless, he would himself have said so. But there are quite a lot of
people, both older and younger than he, and with far wider opportunities,
who are much below him in accomplishment. For they are not honest--not
really--nor humble --and they do hate themselves. They pretend
to forgive everybody else--but they don't; and they don't forgive the
world they live in, or the God who made it. They don't forgive anyone
or anything--not really: because they can't forgive themselves.
All this, as we said a moment ago, is pointed up for us by modern psychotherapy.
Yes--but not alone by that. Valid insights are never altogether new. And
this one isn't.
Or what does this story mean: Two men went to the Temple to pray. One
a pharisee, the other a publican. And the pharisee lifted up his voice
and said, "God, I thank thee that I am not as other men. I lead an
upright life. I keep the commandments, pay my bills, give a little to
charity, never cheat, never gamble, never curse, never drink. I am respectable...and
certainly not like this publican here." And the publican beat his
hands on his breast, not daring to raise up his eyes unto heaven, and
cried, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Which of these two,
asked the Man from Nazareth, went down justified?
Let us take another look at them: these two. A pharisee--who hated himself
so much that he didn't dare to take his mind off his piety. " God,"
something deep inside him was saying, "I hate the world, I hate the
people in it, I hate you and I hate myself." But he stifled it by
crying out his virtues that much the louder. Otherwise, his prayer would
have been something like this: "O God, I thank thee that I am not
as other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers--or even as this publican.
(I hate him! I hate this publican! He makes me see what I am really like,
just as full of temptations as he is--and worse, because I'm cold and
cruel and he isn't.) O God, I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of
all I get. (Why aren't you grateful, God? Listen! I fast! I do without
things! I give away my money! Why aren't you grateful, God? I hate you.
I hate you for letting me seem so feeble, so stuffy, so pallid, so lifeless,
while I do all this for you!) O God, I keep the sabbath, I set
a good example, I follow the ritual . I'm not like other men. I'm righteous.
(Righteous! I hate other men. I daren't let myself know how much I'm like
them. I'm a hypocrite. But you mustn't know this, God...in case some day
there's something you have to forgive me. Because I can't forgive you:
for creating me the way I am, to live in the world the way it is. And
I can't forgive myself.")
That's how it was--when the two men went up to the Temple to pray. And
the other man just said, "Be merciful, O God. (I have loved
the world, I have loved its people, I have loved myself--too much. And
I love you. If it's blasphemy for one like me to say it, I can't help
it. God, I think you are different from the stories they tell about you.
God, I don't think you're like they say you are at all. I think you know
that I've not done very well; and it's possible that I may not do much
better.) Be merciful! (I'll do the best I can with myself. But it won't
be very good. And yet I won't be able to keep on being miserable about
it. Although I don't deserve to be, I'm liable to be happy. I don't quite
know what to make of myself--but I have no other self. This is me and
all there is of me. You had it in mind to make me something more than
this. I know, God. I've let you down. But I shall have to forgive myself.
I want to go away from here cleansed. I want you to forgive me.)
Be merciful..." That's how it was when two men went up to the Temple
to pray.
And, said Jesus, it was the publican who went home justified. It was he
who found peace of mind. What wonderful things would happen to this weary
world if its heartsick people should find the same secret.
__________
Prayer: O God, make plainer to us what we come so close to understanding.
Amen.
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