Forgiveness 3: Postponing Blame
“Why can’t we learn our spiritual lessons over a box of chocolates instead of through suffering?” a friend once asked me. Unfortunately this fallen world is thick with pain, especially relational pain, but there’s a flower in the nettles: it’s the hard stuff that grows me personally in patience and courage, and it’s the tough stuff that deepens and strengthens my friendships. When we brush up against others, our tender nerves jangle us alert to something in our interaction that needs tending.
If I feel the arrows, I snatch up my shield to defend myself, which is natural and healthy—self-protection by flight or fight—but it hurts me if I use that to dodge rather than pursue growth in myself and my relationships. My emotions yelp when some wound needs my compassionate attention, a wound that may be decades old. My friend (or enemy) may be the occasion for my pain without being the cause of it. Her soft words may strike against a sharp emotional edge in my past. On the other hand, her innocence does not invalidate my pain. My feelings are what they are regardless of her role. They carry within them their own legitimacy and don’t need outside validation. They speak the truth, not about her but about me, about the cuts and bruises on my soul.
When I am hurt in some interaction, I need to slow down and pay attention to the ache, and I need to provide enough emotional space to tend to my injury. Sometimes, at least initially, this may get messy for the relationship. I may withdraw for a time or push back, but the goal in padding my emotions is not to avoid, but to embrace this opportunity of self-discovery. So when I have cleared enough emotional room, I slowly disentangle my pain from her actions and take ownership of my pain. I do not mean that I blame myself for my pain! If I barge accusingly into my soul, it will duck for cover. The wounded need compassion, not condemnation. By taking ownership I mean identifying the agitating source inside me and not outside me (so I can take charge of the healing process). The diagnosis starts with a caring “Why?” Why do I feel bad, especially if my feelings are more intense than others would be in this situation. If I try to fix the relationship before I understand my own heart, things are apt to get more twisted.
I am slowly learning, but I still habitually jump past this necessary groundwork when I feel stung. I quickly assume blame—either he’s at fault for hurting me or I’m at fault for feeling hurt. But if I blacken the other guy in order to justify my feelings or in order to get him to take responsibility, I overlook what my wincing heart is telling me about my own wounds and need for support, compassion, and healing. I’m not suggesting that we should deny our feelings about the other person. That anger, doubt, and fear is the very emotion I must identify, feel, and discern, but I make sense of my feelings by listening to them with gentle care, not by blaming the other fellow.
When I make the other person’s behavior the focus of my attention, I undermine my own self-support, even when he is clearly at fault. He has leveraged power against me by his hurtful acts, but if I continue to focus on what he’s done, I keep myself his prisoner. Even if I induce him to apologize and make amends so that I feel better, I will be worse off for it because my good feelings are still dependent on his response, and so I am still under his power. Whenever I make someone else responsible for my feelings, I lose control of my own emotional life.
I don’t mean to suggest that I have to sort out my own stuff by myself. We often need the help of a friend who knows us well and accepts us as we are… not someone to “side” with us against the other, but someone who helps us understand ourselves better. If the issue is not a powder keg, then I may be able to talk it through with the person who upset me, but the focus should really be on discerning my own wounds and needs, not on venting or “correcting” the other person. The apology I want so much to hear may dull the sting but will not heal the lesions in my heart. My heart needs comfort, acceptance, embrace—love that is enduring, unquenchable, unconditional, inescapable, unbridled, and passionate.
Forgiveness II: Other options
My friendships are sprinkled with boredom and surprise, tinged with ambivalence and enthusiasm, stuffed with doubts and hopes, fears and triumphs. They wander through gardening and coffee and politics, with rants and laughs and confusion. Relationships are so rich and complex and rewarding. And they are painful. That’s the part we’d like to cut out like a tumor. We commonly assume that pain in friendship is a bad thing, a sign that something has gone wrong, a malignancy. It certainly feels bad, and so we naturally want to avoid it or resolve it as quickly as possible. I know I do. Berly quietly mentions my lateness or messiness and it feels like a bee sting. My emotions jump, swatting and dodging to protect the softer parts of my soul, sometimes with clenched words, sometimes in the silent safety of my mind, working out feverishly a plan to escape future critiques.
In spite of my fears and doubts, I’ve come to realize that the hard patches in our togetherness are quite often the most vital for our well-being and richest for our relationship. They uncover something important about me, about her, and about us. They open the way to deeper understanding, connection, and love, greater trust and security with one another. But this path requires the courage to face into the storm and work through the feelings together, not find ways to side-step the mess or slap up quick fixes.
Pain in relationships can come from so many sources–differences of perspective, personality, priorities, or preferences, unavoidable circumstances and pressures, misunderstandings, bad timing, sensitivity, stupidity. Notice that none of these things are culpable offenses, not even stupidity, so forgiveness is not the answer. Close neighbors to forgiveness come into play—patience, humility, acceptance, and benefit of the doubt when the behavior is irritating or problematic or inconvenient to us. But I think forgiveness uniquely addresses the issue of wrongdoing. There is a big difference between excusing or making room for someone’s behavior and forgiving them.
Forgiveness is only relevant when someone is to blame, and such a turn must be taken with care since that exit for dealing with relational pain bypasses other options, perhaps better options. For instance, if the major problem is miscommunication, we prefer seeking clarity rather than blame, at least in our calmer moments.
When one of us feels hurt, it’s best to slow down, breathe, get some emotional space, and try to sort through the feelings, seeking mutual understanding. This is far easier if we can leave aside blame for the moment. A rush to judgment sets one against the other, obscures the truth, and slows progress personally and relationally. I know how hard it is for me to move in a healthy direction when I feel defensive. In the end, if one of us needs to choose a better course of action (repent), why not start from a place of insight and love rather than coercion and shame? In our marriage, when seeking understanding is the goal instead of deciding fault, we find that forgiveness plays a much smaller role.
Forgiveness Part I: Framework
Forgiveness is a small portion of how I respond to others when I am hurt, and this in turn is a small part of the much bigger framework of human relationships. To understand any piece of this jigsaw puzzle requires me to know its connection to the other pieces and to have a general grasp of the whole. So let’s peek at the box top.
This is a profoundly social cosmos. A pro foundly conversational cosmos. In a social cosmos, a talking cosmos, a muttering, whispering, singing, wooing, and order-shouting cosmos, relationships count. Things can’t exist without each other. And the ways things relate to each other can make them radically different from their fellow things. –Howard Bloom, The God Problem
Everything from the dance of electrons and protons to the gravitational pull of the Milky Way finds its place in the universe by its connection to other things. As part of this social cosmos, we humans are profoundly shaped by our relationships–our families and communities and cultures. We largely understand ourselves and our place in this world based on the input we get from others. This is both wonderful and awful, for our greatest joys come from love and belonging but our worst wounds come from separation and rejection.
We don’t really have much choice about this fundamental social reality. We can’t invent our own language and still hope for connection. We speak our mother’s tongue or stay mute. In the same way, our thoughts and actions are channeled by the perspectives of our families and cultures. Our whole world is organized and explained to us from one specific vantage point so that even to argue with it, we have to speak from that context. We can’t disagree with our English-speaking mom in Hindi. We are inextricably tied to our relational ecosystem. We may be able to switch contexts, but we always have a context, and we always crate our past along with us (ask any married couple).
Life is a web of relationships, and so to discover who I am in distinction from others, I must understand them and how I relate to them. I soon realize that although there are individual strands in this system, they’re all interconnected. When I put my hand on any one relational dynamic all the rest vibrate. Anger is connected to shame and fear, shame impacts perspective and motivation, motivation informs decisions, focus, resources, and a hundred other elements. It is not only that I am connected to my brother, but that I am tied to him in a thousand complex ways. Each interaction sets the web twitching, and before I respond, it is best to understand myself and my brother and the relational dynamics between us. I should not have a default response, not even forgiveness. Trying to fix every problem with forgiveness is like repairing a house with just a saw.
On my way to work tonight I turned from our winding, unlit street onto Hawkins Mill Rd, and an oncoming car flashed its brights. I looked down, saw the blue square on my dash, and flicked off my high-beams while responding with a surprised, “Oh, thanks!” to no one in particular. My mind flipped back two nights to our drive home from a school play. The guy behind me had on his brights, too intense even for the night-time position of my rear-view mirror, so I shoved it up against the roof and leaned right to avoid the glare in my side mirror. In less than a mile I was so irritated I wanted to pull off, get behind him, and power up my highs… just to teach him a lesson. I didn’t mention this to Kimberly.
My grace period for dumb driving is short. If the nuisance behind me had dropped his floods within a few blocks, I would have been grateful; within a quarter-mile, my “thank you” would have been sarcastic; after that, the dumb stamp would stick fast. Notice that I am even-handed. If I had kept my highs on tonight for another 15 seconds or a second flicker-reminder, I would have said, “Oh, sorry!” instead of “Oh, thanks!” And if I accidentally went a mile as a high-beam tailgater, I would have slapped my forehead with an idiot label. My good Christian conscience insists that I treat everyone equal before the law. It’s the golden rule in reverse: I only disparage others to the extent I disparage myself. Perhaps we could call it the iron rule.
Kimberly likes to keep things fair too, but her scales are those of grace rather than justice. She sees mistakes as a daily, inevitable occurrence and wants us all to live in acceptance of one another’s shortcomings. Wow, I think, no societal norms, no expectations, no standards? Ignore the stop signs and traffic lights; it’s every man for himself. I’m going to need an SUV. No, she says, just lowered expectations… sometimes people are late for meetings or forget to return a phone call or leave their high beams on, and that is okay. No one shoots 100% of their free-throws (she didn’t actually use the b-ball analogy). I agree with her. So how do I reach this new high standard of grace? After all, a 50-year rut is not overcome quickly, even by a perfectionist… especially by a perfectionist… or maybe ever by a perfectionist. Now that I think about it, perfectionism seems to have a Teflon grip on grace–the harder I squeeze, the quicker it squirts away. Grace falls into the open hand of acceptance It’s a gift, not a conquest.
Such wise sounding words, but what do they mean? Like those twisted metal puzzles I got as a kid–it looks simple, but I don’t see how to solve it. I can either work at being more gracious or not work at being gracious. So I set goals and standards and work hard to be nice and patient and accepting. Now I have a new standard by which to judge myself and others–instead of criticizing the late and forgetful, I criticize the impatient and demanding. Wait, something went wrong. So I stop working at it and just keep living as I’ve always lived, as a curmudgeon… hmm. Why can’t my spiritual journey be as uncomplicated as everyone else’s seems to be? I’ve sorted out this grace puzzle before, but it seems I have to re-learn it every time I stumble on another facet of my deep-seated legalism. So here we go again.
It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
What has not been done has not been done;
Let it be.
My wife Kimberly had a headache today and in misery went to make herself lunch. “Tell me a funny story,” she groaned, So I started a tale about a clown that went to a nearby school to make balloon animals for the kids. I thought my clown would add humor, but he did nothing to make us chuckle. Okay, mistakes make good jokes, so my jester ended up making balloon animals that no one could recognize… and the kids criticized his work. I paused and said, “I’m clearly no good at telling funny stories.” So the inept clown naturally got depressed over his rejected creations and made them all commit animal-balloon suicide.
Kimberly chortled, “Wait till I tell my girlfriends that I asked you for a funny story and you told me about a depressed clown that performed balloon animal suicides for children.” I said, “Well, you have to know your audience,” and we both burst into laughter. “Why don’t I horrify our friends on Facebook with our bleak sense of humor,” I gasped, and the very thought sent me into paroxysms of laughter, howling and shrieking till the tears streaked down my face and my stomach cramped. If folks only knew! [Yes, I linked this to my Facebook page ;-)]
“Grace… [is] the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
“It is amazing. I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” –Anne Lamott Traveling Mercies
Kimberly and I have been reading together Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. She is funny and gently provocative, mostly by relating her own shortcomings. We just read a chapter on forgiveness that sparked memories of a story I want to tell, a story of my own failure and awakening. But I’m only a mediocre writer among so many great authors, why do I want to add more words to that crush of voices? If I want to inspire, why not simply point folks to the riches I’ve discovered in others?
After brief reflection I realized that my impulse is not to share information, but to share life. It is personal and communal, a desire to reach out to others who can identify with my own experiences. Eloquence is much less important to me than honesty. So let me encourage those of you who write, even to an audience of two or three–keep gifting your friendship. Numbers don’t matter. And as readers let’s interact with those who write, share personally and make a connection in our comments. It will complete the circle of relationship offered and make our reading richer, more meaningful.
Kimberly and I have had rough weather for the last few months, not only in our individual souls, but in the soul of our marriage. We have wanted to sort it all out and have tried, but we’re still baffled, unable to do anything but cling to our seats as we ride out the turbulence. In spite of the conflicts that keep popping up, I want her to know that she is precious to me, and sometimes words of appreciation ring truer when we overhear them, so let me share with my friends here the treasure she is to me.
She is gentle. She is accepting. She is courageous. She is true and genuine. She is self-reflective and in touch with her soul as few people are. She is determined and tough in spite of setbacks. She is vulnerable and open. She naturally believes the best of others, and stands up for the underdog. She is empathetic and understanding. She is a great listener. She is wise and insightful and talks for hours about deep things. She is welcoming of the weak and broken and marginalized. She is responsible and capable. She calls out the best in others by being okay with their faults and foibles and valuing them for who they are, not what they do or fail to do. She is a woman of grace, even when it hurts her. She shares her true self with others even when they have crushed her spirit, but she is also good at keeping healthy boundaries. She never gives up on herself or on others.
She accepts me as I am and makes room for my weaknesses, encouraging me to support myself even when it is hard on her. She has an incredible commitment to personal growth and wholeness, and though she started out far behind others in her childhood environment, she has far surpassed most others in becoming her true self. She welcomes all of who I am, even the broken parts, and loves me as I am, and so she has taught me to love myself. In other words, she is for me the truest experience of the gospel with skin on. When my insecurities and weaknesses break out against her, she does not retaliate, but hangs on through the tensions until we work it out.
She is not perfect, and I wouldn’t want her to be (how intimidating would that be!). She has her own hangups, insecurities, and weaknesses. But we have discovered that the deepest and truest bonds come through our frailties more than our strengths. I’ve never met anyone like her, and we do life together in extraordinary fashion… even our stumbles seem to add something beautiful to the rhythm of the dance. We’re still figuring out the steps to this new rumba, and we often as not step on each other’s feet, but we’ll keep swinging till we get it down. It is in the hard times that love proves its character. Ours is a tough love.
I grew up the son of a preacher. We went to Sunday school, Sunday morning service, Sunday evening service, and Wednesday prayer meeting. We had daily family devotions with Bibles and hymn books, and all six kids, without exception, prayed out loud. But we looked on liturgy with suspicion. A real relationship with God was spontaneous, not circumscribed by rituals like all those unsaved Roman Catholics. I never even heard of Lent until I was an adult, but we lived Lent all year long–self-examination, repentance, discipline, sacrifice. The problem is that we never got out of Lent.
By the time I discovered grace, I had enough Lent practice behind me to cover several lives over. Last year was my first participation in Lent, and I approached it with the eyes of grace–to bless my soul by releasing it from some burden that weighed it down, to sacrifice a problem not a pleasure. I decided to sacrifice busyness and embrace rest. It was so good for my heart, that after 40 days I made it my spiritual emphasis for the year. I have planned another year-long Lenten emphasis for 2013–sacrificing my need to figure things out (and so a reliance on my acuity), in other words, I am embracing ignorance.
I did not come to this point willingly. I begged and pleaded for insight, thought myself into and out of a thousand speculations, tried to pry the lid off that sealed box of truth, and finally gave up. Learning to trust God with a confused mind is a bit crazy and doesn’t feel very safe. I was just now reminded that learning to trust God last year was pretty tough too–expecting more from doing less? That doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense either. I don’t know if my brain needs a break, but I’m pretty sure my reliance on it is false security. I have enough faith to take this path, I need more faith if I am to find peace along this way instead of turmoil and fear.
Janathan Grace Reflections 