One autumn day in 1963 I was roughhousing with some boys after gym class. I was a fourteen year old freshman at a Quaker school, just beginning my adolescent rebellion, frustratingly still one of the smallest boys in the class. That afternoon a much larger boy wrestled me to the floor and sat on me. There was no escape. I was stuck.
I finally said “Let me up.” He laughed and stayed on top. I said, “Allan, let me up.” He wiggled his butt as though grinding me into the floor. “Get off me, you fat Jew!”
Today’s lectionary is about forgiveness. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t talk about the number of times we need to forgive those who sin against us, or perform exegetical gymnastic equating the forgiveness of debts with the forgiveness of sins. What I have for you today is an unfinished and unsettled search for complexities of the forgivable and unforgivable missing in today’s readings.
In that gymnasium moment sixty years ago, my tormentor Allan did get off of me. He and I were classmates for nine years. Although I don’t remember any conversations, I do recall that his mother was close friends with Rosa Ponselle, one of the greatest operatic sopranos of the twentieth century. I never forgot that moment of helplessness and rage, how I tried to hurt Allan. I can assure you I never forgave myself. Why not? I mean Allan was fat and he was a Jew. The sin was not in my words. It lay in the bodily feeling powering those words. That truth is my truth, and to
mine own self I will be true (as Polonius wisely advised), and why I remain unforgiven. It’s true I don’t feel the same intensity of anger and shame, but I won’t fool myself it didn’t matter. It mattered then; its still does. That matter is complicated. In a way I don’t understand, I went through a form of mourning, in which I let go of the crushing feelings, without losing touch with the memory and its implications. My hippocampus shoved it into a cranial mausoleum, where it is shelved along with all the other stupidities and failures of my life. It’s quite a library.
I want to transport the sense of the personally unforgivable out onto the public stage, by using two poems by Adrianne Rich, whom I introduced to you in my last homily. in order to experience something of the fact if not horror of systemic sexism. I was nudge on to this by thee recent death of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. I read her poems not as an answer, but as a cry. Listen. Let her take you there.
This apartment full of books could crack open to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag even the best voices have had to mumble through, the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—the desert sand. Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types; yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind, Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide, and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake, centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half world.
. . . . . . . .
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall behind the poems, planks of books, photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
—Adrienne Rich, from The Dream of a Common Language
Can the sexism of the last 10,000 years be forgiven? Can racism? They feel so utterly and abysmally unforgivable—not because they happened, but because they keep happening, on and on and on, now embedded in our imperial capitalist democracy.
When I say these imperial sins are unforgivable, who am I addressing? Who exactly are the unforgiven in all this horror? Are they in this room? Or does Moloch only start rampaging out on Hwy M? I cannot speak for you. I only speak for myself.
As I care for Jody, clean house, do laundry, mow lawn, fix meals, all day, each day, every day I throw out twenty pieces of plastic, my share of the growing mass of deadly micro-petrochemicals. I fill our SUV tank twice a month. While working for an international relief organization, I flew a million miles just on Northwest/Delta. My carbon footprint is deep. While I say I despise the empire I also hope it holds together my retirement accounts, Social Security, and Medicare. I do not have purity of heart, singleness of heart; I am what Kierkegaard calls double-minded. In my theological system I remain unforgiven. One of St. Paul’s few claims I can certainly agree with: All sin and fall short. All.
And yet, all is not despair. Where the Black poet Terrance Hayes praises Wallace Stevens’s genius with words and criticizes his explicit racism in the same poem, he writes, “I too, having lost faith / in language, have placed my faith in language. / Thus, I have the capacity for love without / forgiveness.” The capacity for love without forgiveness. That’s what I’m reaching for this morning. And not just love, but joy, a joy to be celebrated. Poet Lucille Clifton invites us to her celebration:
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself? i made it up
here on this bridge between starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Celebrate with her. Lucille Clifton, like Terrance Hayes, can love and rejoice without forgiveness. That is the key, and the point I am trying to make today. What I celebrate with Terrance Hayes and Lucille Clifton, with Adrianne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, is their capacity not to forgive but to live joyfully beyond bitterness. To let go of, to disconnect from, the poisonous effects of resentment—to separate the idealized wish from the bitterness and resentment that the ideal doesn’t exist. To let go of the poisoning effect of resentment—the bitter poison you want the offender to drink you end up drinking yourself, poisoned by your own bitter resentment. Not all of us can be so willfully joyful. Many still prefer the blame game.
My forty year old son has struggled through his adult life to claim a pot of gold at rainbow’s end he feels owed. He blames the outworld for causing his suffering. I think his enduring bitterness is the lead actor in a self-fulfilling prophecy of disappointment and despair. He is unable or unwilling to forgive. His is a world of entitled resentment. Sadly he has a massive propagandizing fantasy culture now backing him up. Sometimes when I listen to him it can feel like that needle in my eye I get every two months to reduce the swelling of a leaky capillary beneath my right macula.
I don’t think forgiving will help my son. His freedom lies in mourning the loss of the idealized images he has of himself and the world. In some way we all need to do that. Not because idealizations are wrong (though they usually are inaccurate), but because they distort his view of the world while the real one is passing right in front of his nose. Yes, son, the world can be heartless. You can sit there on the pity pot. Or you can struggle with a modicum of dignity, in the joyful suffering of trusting yourself.
As I was working out this homily, I had a vivid dream. In it I am on a long flight of earthen steps descending into darkness. As I move deeper into the dark I turn to gaze back up at the entrance where a man is silhouetted against the bright daylight.
Between him and me is a wild animal, a cross between a baboon and a jackal. I hear its guttural breathing. I see the leather thong around its muzzle and realize there is no way that strap will keep its mouth shut. As it draws near I start repeating “No, no, no,” louder and louder. I shout it as I dive at the beast reaching for its throat. That final “NO!” wakes me as I lunge out of bed, frantic to protect Jody who is sound asleep
beside me. But protect her from what? My imagination? My intimacy with a life without any certainties?
I learned later the baboon and jackal were two Egyptian gods who guarded organs removed during mummification and were buried with the dead. It was a dream about death, a descent to the tomb or back into the womb. I was searching for something. I wonder if the dream was an effort to bury my unforgiven self. Bad move. All three dream characters were part of me. The man at the tops was a part of me.
The animal he sent down to stop me from splitting of an unforgiving part of me descending. Our reunion assured me I can still attend to the log in my own eye instead of the splinter in . . . well, you know that story, perhaps to be rehearsed on a different day.
I’ll be in the refectory after Mass, conversing with anyone interested in memories, monsters, meanings, and other mysteries.
Please join me in prayer.
You, Mystery, are present here within us, you are everywhere, in everyone, in every creature and bolder and galaxy, every quark and boson. Help us to believe and live that, we pray …
Everyone in this room have been hurt by someone or something. Help us to forgive if that be possible; and help us to pass on the cup of bitterness, quaffing only the living waters of infinite love. This we pray …
We have desires, doubts, needs, hopes. Help us to trust ourselves and your presence within all our struggles, we pray …
Aloud or silently, we offer prayers for those we know in need. We pray … Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Let us greet one another with a gesture of peace.
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