A woman recently loaded her four children into a mini-van and drove it into the Hudson River drowning all but one of her children. Before she committed this suicide/murder, the mother posted on her facebook page: "I'm so sorry everyone, forgive me please for what I'm gonna do ... " Knowing she was about to commit a horrible crime, the mother begged for forgiveness -- but to whom? God? Her family? A world horrified by her actions? And will God, her family or the world grant her that forgiveness?
'Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.' This pivotal phrase in what is known as the 'Lord's Prayer' reveals the unambiguously mandated centrality of forgiveness in the Christian tradition. Within Judaism, Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, requires repentance and forgiveness between humans, and between humans and God. And Muslims pray for forgiveness five times a day using the words: 'I seek God's forgiveness from all wrongdoings, and to God I return.'
Forgiveness is such an obvious part of religious commitments and human sensibility that the conversation around giving and getting forgiveness is often mechanistic, sentimental or superficial. Fortunately, veteran filmmaker Helen Whitney is offering a rare chance to shine a clear light on the question of forgiveness in all its complexities, horror and hope in her two part series entitled: Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate to be shown on April 17th and 24th on PBS stations around the country.
The prologue immediately lets the viewer know that Forgiveness will not be an exercise in easy answers or cheap grace. An opening scene shows a white South African asking forgiveness from a family whose son he murdered. As the man expresses his contrition, an object is hurled at his head leaving his face covered in blood, and eyes wide in shock as the narrator intones:
"If the request for forgiveness comes too late, if it is felt to be false or to violate our sense of justice, then it can provoke outrage, even understandable violence."
Whitney's film takes the viewer on a slow roller coaster of emotions. Instead of finding hundreds of talking heads and moving speedily from idea to idea, the documentary lingers on a relatively few cases; letting the viewer sift through the layers of complexity and raw drama. The shooting of the Amish School children, a victim of a brutal attack with an axe, the murder of a police officer by a 1960's revolutionary, a woman knowingly infected with AIDS -- different life situations that challenge the breezy rhetoric of 'forgive and forget' and move deeper into genuine wrestling with the emotional and spiritual demands inherent in forgiveness.
While the first part of Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate focuses mostly on personal interactions, the second segment pulls back the lens to include forgiveness on the national and international level. The viewer watches German Chancellor Willy Brandt fall to his knees at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as one step in the long and unfinished process of Germany's repentance and atonement for the Holocaust; and witnesses excruciating footage from the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in South Africa; and the tribal courts or 'gacaca' after the Rwanda genocide.
Familiar terms such as acknowledgement, repentance, contrition, atonement and reconciliation may seem to forge a well-cleared path towards forgiveness, but in case after case the depth and magnitude of the pain inflicted and evil endured serve to severely complicate the question of forgiveness. As the film proceeds, the viewer begins to appreciate that forgiveness on the national or personal level is tenuous, non-linear, specific to any situation, and requires the will to endure the hardest emotional and spiritual work humans can do on both the part of those asking for and granting forgiveness.
Even more troubling is the viewpoint expressed by people in the film that sometimes forgiveness is not possible, or even appropriate. In the wake of the shooting at the Amish schoolhouse, the world expressed admiration for the immediate forgiveness granted by the relatives of the victims for the deceased shooter, his wife and children. Yet some in the film insist that only the immediate victims of a crime can offer forgiveness, and in the case where there is a death, the victim is gone and cannot grant forgiveness.
In the case of the Amish shooting, theologians and counselors in the film also wonder if there is a kind of violence to the self that such a quick forgiveness might inflict. They worry that the suppression of natural emotions might stunt healing; and that a legalistic understanding of forgiveness could short-circuit the full response that such a tragedy requires. In a chilling anecdote, two boys are watching the destruction of the school house where the murders took place and one boy says: "They can take down our school, but they can't take away the things we remember." To which another boy replied: "You better be quiet don't let people hear you say that -- we are supposed to forgive."
And yet in other cases, forgiveness is a way to cut loose from the perpetrator and finally begin life again. For a Jew who survived the concentration camp and continued to live in Germany surrounded by his oppressor and for the woman who was infected with AIDS by a knowing partner, to forgive was less an act of graciousness but rather an intentional effort towards personal freedom and renewed power.
While religion does play a part in forgiveness, it clearly no longer is the sole proprietor. In the Rwandan genocide, priests were often implicated in the killings. And yet Helen Whitney has said that in this deeply religious country, God is like the wind at their backs as they spiritually move toward forgiveness of one another in the wake of such horror.
Forgiveness: A Time To Love and a Time To Hate leaves the viewer both daunted and emboldened. The need for forgiveness is far more complex, and yet even more central to the human existence than we may have thought. As Monsignor Lorenzo Albecete proclaims in the epilogue of the film, "We are made for relationships. Forgiveness emerges as the need to re-establish a broken relationship, without which we cannot live. The search for forgiveness is the search for a healing of an ache of the human heart."
EPILOGUEChoice is at the heart of all our actions. For civil war and genocide to take place, ultimately it is the individual who commits atrocities -- horrors that stun the mind. They take us to the very limits of comprehension and forgiveness.
And yet in the resonant words of John Paul II, forgiveness can purify memory; it can travel through time and history, breathing life into the killing fields, into the collective soul of nations. Into the lives of its brutalized citizens. No less than any nation, the country of an anguished heart also cries out to forgive and to be forgiven. Personal betrayal can cut as deeply as a machete. Forgiveness can offer hope for these intimate woundings of the soul.
So in the end forgiveness begins and ends with one person facing another. Friends, strangers. A mother and a child. A father and a son. Husband and wife. The decision to forgive or not. A choice at the heart of our shared humanity.
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete: We are made for relationships. Forgiveness emerges as the need to re-establish a broken relationship, without which we cannot live. The search for forgiveness is the search for a healing of an ache of the human heart.
It is the memory of lost possibilities. It is the enormous presence of absence. It is an ache for what could have been ... and is no more.
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete: In fact, the religious notion of Hell -- what is it? Hell is absolute loneliness. It is the break of all relationships. It means the incapacity to establish a relationship, or to have anyone establish a relationship with you. It is what death is. It's nothingness. So the thirst for forgiveness is that fundamental. It is an expression of the fear of nothingness. The religions attempt to deal with it, but this ache -- this primordial ache, precedes all religion's expressions of it and ways of dealing with it.
WATCH: Forgiveness: A Time To Love and a Time To Hate Prologue
Watch the full episode. See more Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate.
WATCH: Forgiveness: A Time To Love and a Time To Hate Epilogue
Watch the full episode. See more Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate.
Heide Banks: Could You Forgive This? Liz Securro's Road to Forgiveness
Forgiveness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Forgiveness - What Does the Bible Say About Forgiveness?
Forgiveness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Forgiveness . May 18 ...
For who among use hasn't felt the sting of words misspoken or an act that cause emotional pain? And who among us can say that we have never been the cause of such things? No one, unless you are Gnostic, but there are no true Gnostics any more.
IMHO, to seek forgiveness opens ones self up to a place of intense vulnerability, for myself at least I know it is so. For not only do I acknowledge my specific wrong, but I am willing to do what the hurt party desires of me to set it right between us.
In my relationship vertically, I first must forgive other horizontals relationships that have caused me pain, resentment, harm. Then I turn to my vertical relationship with My GOD to seek his forgiveness.
when face with an I'm sorry for the first time I'm much more likely to accept it than if I'm hearing an I'm sorry for the thousandth time. But a sincere apology goes a long way in keeping friends, and the one unsaid has ruined far more.
Why don't you go eat a chocolate bunny and chill out, child...
Wherever he's going, I want to go to the other place.
There are some acts that forgiveness is not the issue. It becomes better to never interact with these individuals again. But, I do understand that forgiveness is profound in so many ways.
I am still working on understanding every aspect of the profound power of forgiveness.
study the whole story and it will reveal to you that jesus saw and had understanding of that woman's so called crime punishable by death.
one must regret their harm to others and self and change. but change is very very difficult.
we were not created perfect and our so called sin are always based in our unawareness which reveals itself in our selfishness.
awareness is not knowing right from wrong, awareness is understanding one's connection to all in the universe and have compassion for all and self.
the religious confuse awareness with knowledge. world of difference that the world knows little of.
when one is aware one sees the underlying reality of phenomena. all sin and evil have as their origin unawareness, no exceptions.
So you're saying the Roman Catholic practice of allowing the flock to return to confession is ineffective.
And that a better practice would be to grant sinners just one confession in a lifetime, since anything more would be 'ineffective'.
better to regret our error and see our ignorance then ask for forgiveness. but who wants to admit to ignorance we would rather feel guilt then admit to our ignorance. ie ego thing.
free will, guilt, and culpability are the stuff that religion is make of.
Irrational conviction in a fabricated deity leads to transcendental injustices. Maybe if humanity stepped back from the widespread, arrogant belief that it was created special by a celestial dictator, we could finally make moral, intellectual, and societal progress.
It's all too convenient that those who label others as "sinful" are the same people who have the cure.
Keep thy religion to thyself.
Yogananda-In your heart must well that sympathy which soothes away all pains from the hearts of others, that sympathy which enabled Jesus to say: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” His great love encompassed all. He could have destroyed his enemies with a look, yet just as God is constantly forgiving us even though He knows all our wicked thoughts, so those great souls who are in tune with Him give us that same love."
Bitterness eats away at our hearts and deforms our personalities. And film critic Roger Ebert
wrote the best definition of resentment I've ever read-'letting someone else use your mind rent free'
But forgiveness is only valuable if well-considered and genuine.
Works for me. I heard Oprah quote someone as having said that years ago, and it resonates.
Wish the resonating would land on those of power. Washing their greed away and making injustice, justice
Do we, Americans, take responsibility for being citizens of a nation that invades another nation without provocation, or one whose military policies are guided by demands from mercantilists that their economic interests must be protected, or for violence that is committed simply because we have the superior power to do it with little harm to ourselves, or for any of the other reasons of convenience? Who can forgive us for the blood on all our hands? No one.
this is very difficult to follow. we are not culpable, but we are ignorant or unaware. those folks that flew through the twin towers were very unaware of their connection to the infinite. their killed their fellow brothers and sisters in the name of god. that is unaware.
ask yourself over and over and over why would someone choose such ignorance; the only answer is they are unaware, be it they have yet to overcome their ignorance. yes we would rather blame others and even ourself then see our ignorance. we would rather feel guilt than be called ignorant. ie ego thing.
religion lives off this take responsibilty and guilt beliefs, and of course free will. guilt hinders transformation and spiritual discernment, contrary to what the world teaches but then do we really think all that much of what the world teaches?
go deep judge not by appearances which was and is profound teachings.
our beliefs are given to us by our Creator !!!!!!...in our beliefs, we celerbrate the gifts given us 24/7/365 not on a whim...our beliefs encompass so very much more than can be written here.
Ways of the Ancestors
Like all successful shamans, Smohalla could predict the arrival of salmon runs, direct hunters to the best herds, and tell root-gatherers where to find the most fertile fields. But he also had a reputation for being able to foretell eclipses and earthquakes (including one that shook the Columbia Plateau in 1872). Several skeptical whites claimed that his seeming prescience was based on an almanac, which he had obtained from a railroad survey team at some point and learned to use. Smohalla insisted that all his information came from the spirit world.
Earthquakes, he said, were a sign that the spirits were angry, and the only way to appease them was to obey the laws of the ancestors. Indians should not work as white people did but live instead on the fish, game, and plants that nature provided. "Men who work cannot dream," he said, "and wisdom comes to us in dreams." He conceded that Indians had to work hard during the fishing and hunting seasons to get and preserve food for the winter, but that was "natural work" lasting only a few weeks, while "the work of white man hardens soul and body" (Huggins, 213).
Smohalla repeated the same themes to both: Indians should reject white culture and all its trappings; by doing so, and by participating in special dances and other rituals, they could hasten the day when the world would be restored to what it had been before the white people