Unitarian Universalist
Meeting of
“Forgiveness
and Peace”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
I’m a
bit off-schedule today – I just flew home from
They tried to help parents
“let go”, and to give us some tips on surviving the sea changes happening in
all of our lives. Their advice, like any
good advice, from “what I learned in kindergarten” all the way up, was
universal. ‘Don’t try to live your sons’
and daughters’ lives for them – they have to make their own decisions.’ Every adult
has to choose for themselves, it’s true.
‘The main goal here is not to prepare for a career, but to learn, to
explore, to grow.’ That should always be
a goal all our lives. ‘Continue to
support and show your love for your sons and daughters in tangible ways, no
matter their response, or lack thereof.’
Of course.
And finally, ‘it’s okay if
they fail.’ ‘Give them permission to
fail.’ This kept coming up. The students need to take risks, they said,
and they will fail at something, sometime, and it’s all right with Stanford –
it ought to be all right with us parents.
We all fail sometimes. When
failure happens, acceptance and forgiveness are so important. Now that I’m almost expecting failure, and
not worried about it being a big deal, it will simply turn into a great
learning experience – that’s how the university advises us. I figure it works in our lives too – it’s
guaranteed we’re going to fail sometime, but we can accept, forgive, learn
from, and move on.
Later this week begins the
High Holy Days of Judaism, a time when the close of the Jewish year is marked
by forgiveness, prayer and renewal. We
are especially reminded to go to those we have wronged and ask forgiveness. One of our ministers, Kaaren
Solveig Anderson, tells a story for these days in her
new meditation manual, Glad to Be Human. She honors this season of forgiveness and the
chance to begin life afresh and at peace for the new year. She is a UU minister who did not come from a
Jewish family, but, like many of us, is grateful for our chance to grow through
the Jewish traditions that we celebrate all together.
Kaaren tells the story of when she
was ten years old and visiting family friends.
The father was a Lutheran minister, Rev. Burkum. He showed her a tiny Bible that fit easily
into her hand, which she could look at, but had to give back. She writes, “Well, I took it. Okay, I stole it. I put it in my pocket and stole it. Later, I’d take it out to admire it, and
honor would grab me and shake me. As if
it were on fire, I would thrust it back in my desk drawer. I was a thief, of the Bible no less.”
After a while, she forgot
about the little Bible, then found it again a few years later and was so
ashamed that she threw it away. She knew
she should have returned it. Recently
she saw that minister at a family gathering and he told her how proud he was of
her in her calling. She wanted to
confess, but she couldn’t admit that she was actually a “Bible thief”.
Kaaren was amazed at how much this
small incident had cost her over the years, how powerless she’d felt, and
wrong, and yet how surprisingly hard it was to make it right. Just reflecting on it made
her admit that she’s wrong a lot of the time. The High Holy Days reminded Kaaren to look at the truth of herself, even the “deepest
darkest yuck”, as she calls it, and to ask for forgiveness, human and
divine. She said she wished the first
name on her list of folks to apologize to didn’t start
with a “Rev.”
I can imagine Kaaren when she first reflected on her childhood theft, and
wrote about it. Perhaps it was a journal
entry, or a story for a sermon, like this one, and then she must have sent it,
along with a contrite note, to Rev. Burkum. Or maybe she just waited for the book to come
out, and sent him a copy. Did she need
his forgiveness? No. I’m sure she realized he probably knew and
had forgiven her about 5 minutes after it had happened, so many years
before. The forgiveness she was seeking
was different – “divine and human” she named it. She didn’t elaborate, but I’ll tell you what
that means to me.
To begin with, our sacred
task is to forgive ourselves, and that is what Kaaren
did, a process that takes time. First we
face what we’ve done. Not making
excuses, not rationalizing, not pushing down shameful incidents into the back of
the drawer of our memories. Important
to her and to the process of forgiveness is facing the truth, naming it
clearly. To touch the immortal, ineffable
Truth is to embrace the divine. The fire
of Truth illuminates our human nature letting us see clearly that we are wrong
plenty of times. That same divine spark
is fueled by the contrition it calls forth, and we are truly sorry. And that Holy Spirit of Truth and Love
consumes the pain, purifies the heart, and opens a
spaciousness for new beginnings.
Forgiving ourselves is one
key to inner peace, and as we know, inner peace is needed to help create world
peace. It is only when we really forgive
ourselves that we can begin to forgive others, just as forgiving others helps
us to forgive ourselves. For the
forgiveness process exposes the truth that each of us is capable of good and of
evil. I remember the
ah-ha experience of this truth many years ago when I visited prisoners
who had all killed someone, and who were mostly both kind and ordinary
guys. I enjoyed being friends with
several of them. I knew that they were
capable of good and evil, and I knew, just as surely,
that I was too. To know this deeply
about ourselves and the world is to know the acceptance that brings peace
within and among. With inner peace comes
inner strength and calmness, so that we will not need to fight, like the king’s
rooster in the story we heard today.
Does all this inner peace
and forgiveness talk mean that we must dispense with holy rage? By no means. Rebecca Parker reminds us that we bless the
world when we meet injustice and evil with “a holy disturbance, a benevolent
rage, a revolutionary love.” This blessing goes along with the
easier-to-take ones of gratitude and beauty and grace.
Of course, anger and forgiveness can go
together. Forgiveness is not all gentle
and sweetness – its heart is the sacred fire of love. As Reinhold Niebuhr
says, “we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” The passion of love is often angry – it is
because we love the world and feel compassion for its beings that our holy rage
flares up.
But playing with fire is
dangerous, especially alone. Anger
rarely remains righteous, but borrows from our baser motivations, our human
vulnerabilities. To spend our passion,
our holy rage in resisting evil, without being sucked into the evil ourselves
along the way, we almost assuredly need to do so in
community. We can seek out the Truth
together, be ashamed and contrite as a community, and fire up hearts and minds
for holy renewal all together. This is
part of the task of religious community, as Mark Morrison-Reed said in today’s
reading. The religious community widens
our vision and renews our strength, because we act through our connectedness.
This community-centered work
of anger, truth, and forgiveness is best embodied and known in the religiously
inspired, but state-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission in
Dudu Chili was a victim, as well
as a member of the Commission. Her house
had been destroyed and her niece killed.
Her sons had just escaped by going into hiding and she was safe only
because she’d been arrested that day and was in jail the night her home was fire-bombed. She said she hated the perpetrator, wanted to
kill him. Instead, with the help of God
and the Truth and Reconciliation process, she was healing, and had reconciled
with the perpetrator.
Just as we are called to ask
for forgiveness during the coming High Holy Days, we are also called to extend
forgiveness. We don’t have to wait for
folks to show up at our door, or to receive letters of contrition, for us to
begin the process of forgiveness in our hearts.
Some of the folks we need most to forgive are people we’ve never met
anyway. So whether you have a hard time
forgiving President Bush or Osama bin Ladin or Ariel Sharon or Yasser
Arafat or Saddam Hussein or certain Senators, Administration leaders and
Supreme Court Justices, or apathetic citizens, or corporations who put profit
before all else, or whoever is on your personal list of those who make you so
angry that your blood boils, it’s time to work on forgiveness. Keep the anger, forgive anything you need to
in yourself, and forgive them. The
resulting inner peace, joined together with “benevolent rage” shared in
community, will make a fire of renewal so bright that we really will bring the
world more peace.
Today is the International
Day of Peace, the only day in which the entire world is called to
celebrate. Begun by the United Nations
in 1981, this day is set aside each year for ceasefire, nonviolence, and
creating peace. Over a billion people
will celebrate a day of peace today in some way, perhaps within their religious
communities, as we are doing. Many have vigiled, prayed, sung, and hoped today for peace in our
world. If we ever want to achieve
anything, we must first dream of it and long for it. Once a year, that is what the International
Day of Peace encourages the whole world to do – begin to achieve peace by
dreaming of its real possibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “It is not enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One has to work at it.”
One way to work at peace is
to continue the process of forgiveness, beginning with the self. May all the Earth come to know forgiveness
and peace.
Amen.