Hardly a day goes by that forgiveness doesn’t enter my mind in one way or other. Either it’s a tug on my conscience asking me again to forgive someone else or a nagging reminder that I’m the one who needs to be forgiven. Such items of unfinished business are rarely far from consciousness.
Experience tells me that such dilemmas are symptoms of the human condition. In the dense web of our interactions, we inevitably incur debts and acquire debtors. On a parallel note, when the grand theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was asked how he knew human beings were stamped with original sin, he said, “Because I have never met any other kind.”
Until the summons to do a book about forgiveness came along, however, I hadn’t thought very much about the subject. The importance of it was instilled in my religious upbringing as a mandate, but it had remained with me mostly part as a great idea that most of us believed to have little practical application in the rough and tumble unforgiving world we were entering.
Indeed, as I came to see even more clearly though my research, forgiveness is counterintuitive to the assumptions that govern the way the world works. The ethics of a highly competitive, win-at-any-cost society rests on a view of the self as righteous and the opponent or offender as villainous. “Don’t get mad; get even” is the credo that suits this strain in popular behavior.
The adoption of a forgiving attitude has no doubt always required a rejection of the culture of revenge and unrelenting hatred. Not surprisingly, therefore, the appearance of this anomalous way of behaving strikes the surrounding community as foolish on the practical level, the hand played by the wimp, but unimpeachable and enviable on an instinctively moral level. There is something magnetic and magnificent about the act of absolving someone or being absolved that we want to emulate.
But thinking about it sharpened my awareness that that attraction runs headlong into the most formidable array of inner defenses that fight to defeat that urge. Someone once said that the supply of truth far exceeded the demand for it, and I think the same applies for forgiveness. It is the pearl of our ideal selves that we seem so often unable or unwilling to purchase.
The allure of this contrary alternative gathered momentum while writing the book. Two recent examples of the power of pardon became particularly influential. One was the granting of forgiveness by the Amish people to the assassin of their little girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse. The beauty of its simplicity and guilelessness was astonishing to me. The other was the “truth and reconciliation” drama in South Africa that healed many wounds by giving adversaries an opportunity to let their rage go.
An act of forgiveness may be a candle lit in the heavens, but it is mostly, as I discovered, a mundane struggle. Encouraged to be victims, we are prone to want to receive our recompense and refuse to see our own complicity. Fortified against looking vulnerable, we stubbornly cling to the guilt we have against ourselves. We know so many reasons why forgiveness would diminish us or cause us to give up that one thing we think keeps us strong: our resentment. But resistance can also at times be justified, when refusal to forgive may be warranted.
Yet forgiveness patiently waits for all those who yearn for its blessings. Religion says it’s good for the soul no matter what. And, oh, social science now says it can lower your blood pressure. Finally, it remains the other response to inner troubles and it appears to pay dividends.
Kenneth Briggs is author of The Power of Forgiveness, the companion book to Martin Doblmeier's award-winning documentary of the same name. PBS stations will begin broadcasting the film this month. Briggs is a former religion reporter and editor at Newsday and the New York Times.
Briggs and Doblmeier, along with Thomas Moore, will discuss The Power of Forgiveness from 9-11 a.m. March 12 at the National Press Club in Washington. On Faith co-moderator Sally Quinn will lead the discussion.
