Isn't that just preachy?

[captainsblog]

The minister's on vacation, so our two pastoral assistants and the other certified speaker guy- that would be me- got to divide up his three Sundays off, leading the entire service and giving a personal-reflection sermon on the very broad theme of "Voices of Faith."

Today was mine.

There were the usual snafus. I'd asked the minister if it would be okay if Cameron did a solo during the service, and he said it was fine. Nobody told the music directors, though, and so somebody else already had been lined up to do two (very good, as it turned out) solos during the hour.  The liturgist I'd asked to help out (who I did the same for last Sunday) didn't show up until about two minutes before the service started, so I'd already sprung the job on the other one with no notice, but she was very gracious about doing it. (The other one did find time, once she got in the pews, to bitch Eleanor out for reading in church after the service had started. It was Joshilyn Jackson's latest book, who is as close to God as I can think of, and it was a passage about Vacation Bible School she was reading at that moment, for crysake:)  My remote microphone was gorked, I messed up the order of service at least twice, and we got at least one complaint about the bulletin cover.

But other than that, Sister Mary Lincoln, the play was fine:)

The message, largely, was based on things I've read on friends' blogs in recent weeks- about the recent controversy about harassment at Readercon and the organization's official (and eventually revised) response to it.  I felt a need to speak on the importance of forgiveness, but these recent events finally made clear to me that forgiveness is not merely the flip side of apology.  What I didn't "get" about the whole Readercon reaction was why the guy's attempt at apology was so angrily refused.

In time, though, and largely through the help of another online friend's experience, I came to understand:



I want to be clear that I am not excusing or justifying what originally happened between these two people, but at first, I thought it a bit harsh that they were including the guy’s attempt at apologizing as part of his offense.  Perhaps because of how I was raised, and maybe because of the bad feelings [a] time I crossed that boundary with words, when I offend someone, I want to make it right with every fiber of my being. So shouldn’t the guy have been given every chance to plead his case to be forgiven, even if the answer to that prayer was going to be no?

After further consideration? No.

I realized it maybe a week later, after hearing a far different, and far sicker and more painful, story told to me by another friend.  [She] shared a series of Facebook postings that she had received, all these years later, from the man who had done [long ago and very bad things] to her. He started out sounding polite and contrite, but she was not in a place, spiritually or psychologically, to respond to him at all, much less give him the forgiveness he demanded. As I read the thread of escalating responses from him, I saw that initial contrition turn into hate and, after she banned him from contacting her, he came back to haunt and threaten her under the clever fake name of “John Smith” with a hurtfulness that I don’t think I could achieve in a lifetime of trying.

And that’s when I got it. You can’t beg, plead or pray your way into insisting on forgiveness any more than your church attendance or good works can buy your way into heaven. That line about “you do not get to choose how you apologize” suddenly made a lot more sense.

None of this is to deny the importance of an effort to make things right. But the focus has to be on the one who was wronged, rather than the one who did the wronging. Jesus did not tell Peter to apologize seventy times seven; the call- our call- is to forgive in that bountiful quantity.

Sometimes we have to take “no” for an answer... and in this context, we have to be prepared to accept “no,” or “maybe,” when we’re feeling the pain of having wronged someone and we ask them for forgiveness. But if we look only at ourselves and overlook the grace that MUST be there in order to be forgiven, we’re missing the point of what this passage tells us. We may need to just accept that not everyone will follow the seventy-times-seven precept, and instead of dwelling on a failure to be forgiven, we should increase our efforts to forgive those who have done us wrong in our own lives.

It was important for me to expound on this message to others because of how hard it's been for me to understand and accept it myself. On at least three occasions I can think of over the past several years, I've had someone remove me from their online life (or some meaningful part of it) because of something I said, or otherwise referenced, in the things I've written here. In each of those cases, I made an immediate and what I believed was a genuine effort to apologize. (There were other incidents where the same things happened, I apologized just as quickly, it was accepted and our friendships were restored, maybe even improved, as a result of resolving the misunderstanding.)  Until these recent events, I always felt sad, and a little frustrated, that I'd been unable to reconcile with these other people, and that my efforts to apologize weren't even acknowledged, much less accepted.

But that's part of this. Like the quote above put it, "you do not get to choose how you apologize.”  It's far better to accept what happened as a consequence of my own words or actions, and focus on the friendships I can continue, and any that I can restore by reaching out to those who may have hurt me, rather than hounding those I've wronged into further corners of discomfort by anything I've ever said or done.

If that was you, ever, I am sorry. But I won't go out of my way to dwell on it anymore unless you tell me you want me to.