Forgiveness East and West
You know how the most beautiful music is almost always sad? I feel like that’s because life is sad, sad in a beautiful kind of way because it tries so hard, we try so hard. There’s happiness, yes. It appears suddenly in our lives, like a gift – it is a gift – but we cannot keep it because we cannot keep anything, right? So even happiness feels sad because the happiness ends. I always wanted to go sailing with my father-in-law, but now he is dying, and it just won’t happen. The fecundity of life, the constant motion and creative energy of life, guarantees tragedy. And that’s where forgiveness gets really practical. On the self-help shelves of bookstores, you’ll see a lot of books about finding happiness. But the old religions know life better. The sadness of life isn’t reduced by happiness, only delightfully ignored. We shouldn’t try to reduce the sadness of life; we should instead infuse that sadness with meaning to make it beautiful. The real daily life skill is forgiveness, forgiving life for the suffering, life in guise of our loved ones, our neighbor, whoever and whatever hurts us.
When I was twenty, suffering from chronic depression and probably full of buried anger over childhood things, I read something from Nietzsche that just lit me up. He was distinguishing the strong from the weak – these are his terms – and he was saying that while the weak hold onto their hurts and failures and thus become resentful and deceitful, the strong – those who are confident and purposeful and courageous – the strong by contrast, “just forget.” I felt liberated, back then at age 20, because I got the message that I am an independent person and I can choose how I feel.
But, well, then I fell in love with Chara the beautiful crazy Greek girl, dated other women, fell in love with Jen, got married, had kids, started earning money to pay for the family rather than just for me, and by age 30 Nietzsche’s line didn’t resonate. It didn’t resonate because, frankly, it isn’t true. The strong don’t forget, because no one is independent. We are interdependent, not independent; there’s nothing like a few years of family life with small kids to teach this lesson! And because we are interdependent, we quite frankly don’t completely choose how we feel; other people, loved ones, influence our emotions tremendously. That’s what interdependence means; it means that other people choose your emotions to some extent. We ask for this vulnerability, this emotional openness to others, in our love.
How many of you have seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”? Kate Winslett and Jim Carrie try Nietzsche’s suggestion, don’t they? And the feeling I get from the movie is, it’s the wrong solution, to forget. It’s the wrong solution because to forget the hurt and pain is to unweave the whole fabric of togetherness they have stitched. We see the beauty of that love affair played out for us as some machine destroys the memories, and we see that the hurts contribute to the beauty of their love. Interdependence means struggle; we can’t have the meaning, we can’t have the beauty, if we don’t keep the pain. Life is beautiful and sad. The psychotherapist Gerald Jampolsky once wrote “forgiveness means correcting our misperception that the other person harmed us” (LLGF, 66). No it doesn’t. We are interdependent, and that other person, that person we love and trust so much, that person did harm us. This idea that forgiveness means ‘forgetting’ or ‘correcting misperceptions of hurt’ works fine if you intend to jettison the hurtful thing or person from your life. In grad school, I got a B- on my very first paper and I immediately threw the paper in the garbage, kept studying, and got the A’s afterwards. But when a friend hurts us, or a family member hurts us, you can’t and you won’t throw them in the garbage. You love them too much; you and your loved one are stitched together. So how do you forgive, if you’re going to keep the memories, keep, in some sense, the pain itself?
You know those stories of the soldier who recently comes back from Iraq or Afghanistan and she’s sitting on the sofa reading, and her son starts up the weed trimmer – one of those loud two-cycle engine jobs – and the soldier, well, she jumps behind the sofa and puts the book over her head? Well, we don’t want to ask this soldier to forget her battlefield experiences, but we want her memories of these experiences to help, rather than hinder, the life she has now. So maybe what we want to understand is how our experiences of the deep hurt and pain caused by loved ones can, in some way, help us live our lives rather than weigh our life down.
The psychotherapist Gerald Jampolsky also wrote “love is letting go of fear.” I was a bit dismissive of Jampolsky a few minutes ago, but this statement is profound, in my opinion. Love is allowing another person into yourself: their thoughts, their feelings. Your very self shifts a bit because a loved now lives inside of you – that’s love. But that’s also interdependence, too, right? Fear, in my opinion, is the denial of interdependence; when we are afraid of someone, we don’t want them to influence us. What we want is, for the hurtful person to go away, and this is where negative emotions do their work. Sometimes we get angry and try to drive the hurtful person away; sometimes we withdraw, and become depressed. Raise your hand if you cope with fear by withdrawing: how about anger? Yeah, it depends on the person, but in both instances, we deny our fear rather than face it. To say that love is letting go of fear means that you cherish again the togetherness between you and the person or loved one that hurt you. Buddhists say this; you have to embrace your suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh tells in every one of his 100 books.
The Buddhist way of embracing suffering is to practice mindfulness, which I understand to mean the fearless choice to allow the present reality, including all the very hurtful things in that present, to come inside of us and to let that pain and hurt just be inside of us. Thich Nhat Hanh will say that we must “look deeply into the heart of things” (TL, 52). When we are mindful in this Buddhist way, we have let go of our fear of someone, and become intimate with them again. We become intimate with them because, in our mindfulness, we see the hurtful person as they truly are – as struggling, as preoccupied, as carrying their own hurt, as damaged – and then we can forgive them. My Dad hurt me a lot, emotionally, when I was a kid; I did the withdrawal, depression thing for a long time. But as I got older, I began to listen to who he was rather than just go numb, and I saw a hurt, struggling person with his own unreconciled pain. I could forgive him; he did not act in malice, but out of his own suffering.
So the Buddhist notion of forgiveness, which connects tightly with a lot of contemporary psychotherapy, teaches that we forgive when we stop denying our suffering and we embrace it instead. Forgiveness is to see the hurtful person completely as they really are. I feel like this is a good teaching unless the hurtful person is very close to you and very involved in your daily life: say, a child living at home, or a life partner. I forgave my Dad, but I had to leave home to begin to do it.
When forgiveness means restoring an intimate relationship with someone who has hurt us badly, the Buddhist vision feels incomplete to me. There is another step to take in the case of restoring intimate relationships.
That’s why I read the story of the Prodigal Son. This time of year, Jews observe the Day of Atonement, the day of asking for forgiveness of sins. What is interesting about this Jewish tradition is that Jews themselves, the perpetrators of the sins, do the work of forgiveness. This is a very different emphasis than that of the Buddhist or contemporary psychotherapeutic tradition, which generally place the work of forgiveness on the victim. Now granted, God, the victim in the case of Atonement Day, presumably forgives, but my point is that for the Jewish tradition forgiveness is a social act, a cooperative action between victim and perpetrator. It is not an inward psychological movement of the victim alone.
And that’s what we see in the Prodigal Son. Granted, the father sees his wayward son from a distance, and felt compassion and kissed him. This is the Buddhist movement; the father embraces the loved one who has caused him pain. But the story does not end with compassion. The story ends with a restoration of the prodigal son’s status as a son, and this restoration only occurs after the son has acknowledged his mistake. Why does this matter? Why is it that sometimes we can only forgive if the other person feels remorse and promises to change?
To me, the restoration of the son as a son is the key. If forgiveness includes restoring an intimate relationship, the victim needs the security of knowing that the future will be different from the past. Re-embracing someone who has hurt us deeply, seeing them as they truly are in their own hurt and pain, may bring us peace. But embracing the present moment with this hurtful person will not convince us that this person will change their behavior. All intimate relationships imply a promise to act and feel within a certain discipline. If the perpetrator has strayed from those boundaries, then the perpetrator must atone, must find a way to show that he or she will not do the hurtful thing again. Otherwise, you have forgiveness but with the end of the intimate relationship.
What you have is letting go. Sometimes, that’s the best kind of forgiveness we can do, just letting go in peace. But we are not bodhisattvas; we grasp, we desire, we want, we hope. In the Jewish tradition, the Jews are the bride and God is the groom. It is a relationship full of desire and grasping on both sides. Each year, at this time, Jews seek to restore that intimate relationship with their God. For this restoration of intimacy, forgiveness is not solitary; forgiveness is as much the work of the perpetrator as it is of the victim.
