Beginning Again in Love

"I hereby forgive whoever has hurt me, whoever has done me harm, whether deliberately or by accident, whether by word or deed. I will seek out those I have harmed and ask them to forgive and pardon me, whether I acted deliberately or by accident, whether by word or by deed. May I not willfully repeat the wrongs I have committed." -from the Kol Nidre

I don’t know about you, but I really identified with that little story I told this morning ["Are Your Potatoes Heavy?"]. I think I have some familiarity with that slimy bag of potatoes. Too often we carry baggage that only drags us down. Sometimes, the life we save may turn out to be our own. I think this is at least in part the meaning of the recent Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

My colleague Will Saunders writes,

The Days of Awe lift up the most complicated and salient themes of our lives: renewal, reconciliation, atonement, and the spiritual journey into forgiveness. . . . Forgiveness does not mean denying our experience or our heart. Forgiveness does not mean resigned martyrdom. . . . Forgiveness does not mean excusing unjust or evil behavior. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. . . .

So what is forgiveness? To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release a person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment, however justified that judgment may be. It represents a choice to put aside resentment and to put aside any desire for retribution, however just that desire may be. It is a conscious choice to leave behind the power of the offense--its power to hold us, to keep us, to limit our being in the world. Forgiveness is unilateral in contrast to reconciliation. We forgive a friend who does not even know she has hurt us. We forgive persons or groups of persons without their knowing or having any way to respond. We release others from the judgment of our own heart.

We do this because, as the story suggested, the weight of our pain, negativity, and judgment of others is so great and so messy a burden to carry. Forgiveness, as the story concludes, is not just a gift to the Other, it is also a gift to ourselves.

The ideal of forgiveness which is enshrined in the Jewish Days of Awe also found its way into Christianity through the teachings of Jesus. In his most famous prayer, Jesus taught his followers, "forgive us our trespasses--that is, those places where we have missed the mark--as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Indeed, forgiveness is a major theme of Jesus’ teaching and parables, whether it is the forgiveness of a father toward his "prodigal" son--prodigal meaning "wasteful" or "extravagant"--or the words which Jesus is supposed to have uttered upon the cross, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Even his challenging call to "turn the other cheek" can be seen as a kind of forgiveness for the hurtful actions of the Other.

This teaching on forgiveness found its way into some of the great, non-violent human rights movements of the last century, including Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence, and the American Civil Rights movement so powerfully represented by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Curiously, Jesus’ forgiveness-based non-violence found its way to the Christian minister King not via the Bible, but via the writings of the Hindu lawyer Gandhi. God works in mysterious ways, Her wonders to perform.)

Forgiveness, according to my dictionary, means "to grant pardon without harboring resentment." No one said that it would be easy.

What a beautiful example of forgiveness we have seen this week in the response of the Amish community in Pennsylvania to the recent tragic events there.

Robert Swain writes that forgiveness is "not a price paid or an apology. It’s a recognition that we all sin against one another, that we all have the need to lay down our anger and fear and humiliation. Some of this is vis-à-vis God, the eternal all-that-is, and some of it [toward] one another. We seek at-one-ment in mutual self-respect. And we do it ourselves; no one can do it for us."

That messy sack of potatoes is ours; we can continue to carry it with us, or we can choose to lay it down. It’s ultimately up to us.

My colleague Anita Farber Robertson has written that Yom Kippur "is the day when, having dealt with our transgressions against others, we deal with those transgressions which have been against ourselves and our God. It is when we reflect on how we have fallen short of our hopes; a time when we dream anew and commit ourselves to those new dreams."

All of us fall short. All of us miss the mark. I daresay there is not one person here this morning who is not in need of forgiveness toward oneself or toward others. I know that I am. Every one of us is carrying a heavy, messy burden of missteps, ill-spoken words, or hurtful thoughts and actions or even inactions. Every one of us could do better at times, could have done better at times.

But none of us deserves to be weighted down indefinitely by our failures to be those better people we long to be. And that is why the Jewish religion makes a time each year for people to lay that burden down, to make a fresh start, to begin again in love. If you think of it, what a profound and helpful and hopeful notion that is. We can start over. We can cast off all our negativity, pain, and hurt. And we can help to lift that burden off of others, as well.

Unitarian Universalism is also a religious approach which teaches that it is never too late to amend what we are. We, too, believe that change--often profound change--is possible. Because we believe that all persons have inherent dignity and worth, we are called to do that difficult work of forgiveness for ourselves and others. Because we believe that all persons are worthy of salvation--that is, of achieving health and wholeness in this life--we are called to do that work. And because we believe that God is most perfectly revealed in the activity of love, we must do that work.

None of us should have to carry that sack of bitterness and negativity and pain indefinitely. Each of us can make the choice to lay it down. To forgive, even if not to forget, can lighten our load immeasurably. There is no one present here, man, woman or child, who could not afford a lighter load to carry along life’s sometimes perilous pathway. We can all use a little help, from time to time, along the dark journey.

As my colleague Mark Belletini has written in an adaptation of the Kol Nidre prayer, which opens the Yom Kippur service,

We vowed, not so long ago, to live lives that added, not subtracted.
We vowed, not so long ago, to live lives that matched our words.
     Lives not hard and brittle with anger, but soft with letting go.
We made an oath, not so long ago, to live lives that reached for the stars,
     and did not consist of strings of little disappointments,
     or fragments of the shattered dreams we once used as mirrors
     to see how good we looked.
The days have flown quickly, and they will flow quickly in the year to come.
Circumstance, stress, and brokenness come to all--it is the human condition.
And thus I say before the witness of the blue sky bending above,
     and before the nodding blue chicory flowers of early autumn
     still growing here below,
and before the clear eyes of children not yet born,
children who will inherit the world from us,
that all the vows we will make not long from now,
all the promises we will make, all the unspoken oaths we will declare,
are hereby cancelled, annulled, voided, and made unbinding.

We are free, not to promise to be good,
but simply to get on with loving each other.
We are free, not to vow great transformations,
but to engage life with tenderness and understanding and outpourings of kindness.
We are free, not to swear oaths of everlasting loyalty and righteousness,
but to continue to be generous to each other, to ourselves, and to the common good.
At the start of the new year, we begin again in love.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock