We know that Christianity emphasizes the necessity of forgiveness for those who have wronged us. But what about being forgiven by those we have wronged?
One of the most familiar lines concerning forgiveness, often mistaken for a biblical reference, is about 300 years old and from the poet Alexander Pope. Over five hundred lines into his poem An Essay on Criticism, Pope writes,
To err is human, to forgive divine.
This is certainly true - to err is human, and forgiveness is exemplified by God - but there is more to say.
You don’t have to be very familiar with Christianity to know that forgiveness is central to belief and practice. We are forgiven by God, being mindful of this, and appreciating the depth of this forgiveness, we are to forgive others. Forgiveness may be divine, but we humans are to partake as well. It is a commandment, in fact, repeated often …
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Ephesians 4:32)
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (Colossians 3:12-13)
(… and many parables … and so on and so on …)
Forgiveness is recommended to us outside of the church as well. It is a step away from bitterness and resentment and offers some freedom from bondage to past hurts.
This all sounds wonderful in the abstract and impossible in real life. Accounts of this impossibility become the subject of articles, stories, movies, podcasts. When the Egyptian widow of an Coptic Christian killed saving others from a ISIS suicide bomber offers forgiveness to the terrorists, both from herself and from God, we marvel. When family members of victims in Buffalo and Nashville and Charleston offer forgiveness to mass shooters, we pause. Something about that may seem beautiful. At the same time, if we are honest, something about it seems naive, or even unjust. But, contra those outside the church, we do not have the legitimate option, inside the Christian community, to deny forgiveness to those who have brought us harm.
But let’s talk about the other side of that coin.
The process for legal forgiveness in Minnesota, via the Board of Pardons, is outlined in a recent New York Times article. Here is how it begins -
The supplicants clustered outside the enormous closed doors. They paced the hallway, fidgeted on benches, knitted their hands and waited, waited, for their 10-minute chance at mercy.
A tall man in a sharp blazer, caught a quarter-century ago with 127 doses of LSD. A pony-tailed Navy veteran who critically injured someone while driving drunk in 2008. A burly man twice convicted of assaulting his wife, now sitting beside him. A former addict once found unconscious in a car, syringe jutting from his arm. Others dogged by the past.
They had come to the Minnesota capital of St. Paul on this steamy summer day to be forgiven. Restored. Redeemed.
The doors opened to reveal Minnesota officialdom personified: the governor, the attorney general and the state’s chief justice — the three members of the Board of Pardons. They sat, unsmiling, at a long table facing a much smaller table that featured tissue boxes and a digital clock set at 10 minutes.
Ten minutes: the time allotted the supplicants to prove that they were worthy; that, like St. Paul, they had traveled their own rutted road to Damascus. This buzzer-beating pressure intensified a raw pardon process unlike those in most other states, with the powerless beseeching the powerful in public, and the decision rendered in the moment.
Among the powerless would be Jim Lorge, convicted in 2005 of manufacturing methamphetamine. Now a well-respected drug counselor and program director, he had been in recovery for 16 years, was engaged to be married and feared being forever defined by distant mistakes.
A pardon can mean better job and housing opportunities, the restoration of gun rights, the ability to chaperone school trips. But it can also offer something more intangible: the formal return to society’s good graces.
“Do I have to carry this burden for the rest of my life?” Mr. Lorge, 48, asked before his hearing. “I want to be forgiven. I just want to be forgiven.”
Dan Barry - The New York Times
He just wants to be forgiven. Do we?
It might seem obvious that, faced with our wrongdoing, we just want to be forgiven. But we are pretty good at avoiding the “faced with our wrongdoing” part. Progressive Insurance has a series of “replay review” commercials where people, having first denying their wrongdoing, have to admit it after an official review. This is not a thing in real life. For those before the Minnesota Board of Pardons, their wrongdoing was official, evidenced, recorded, documented. They were not pleading their case - they were pleading for forgiveness. These people wanted an acknowledgement that they had served their time, made restitution, rehabilitated themselves - and that they had been forgiven of their crimes by the state. As Mr. Lorge said, “I want to be forgiven. I just want to be forgiven.”
In order to be forgiven, I have to recognize the reality that I have done wrong - that I have harmed in some way the person I seek forgiveness from. I have to accept the responsibility for the wrong and the harm - mitigating narratives are not terribly helpful here. I have to name the harm done. I have to humble myself before the person from whom I seek forgiveness. I have to recognize that I have put myself in debt to them - I seek forgiveness from them, they do not have to give it. And, I have to accept the gift if it is given. And all of that is pretty hard. And all of that requires a fair degree of emotional health, self-awareness, and humility - especially if I am not going to turn my need of forgiveness into something I am the victim of. I have only myself to blame.
That, in my experience, is pretty rare. It is rare especially if the wrong that I have done sprang from some harm done to me or some wound that I have not reconciled - which is so much of wrong done - at least in our own estimation. Even if it is ultimately our wrong that brings us unhappiness, we can self-righteously blame-shift our own unhappiness away. As long as I can, in my wrong, blame you for my unhappiness, even for my feelings of guilt, I may never admit the need of forgiveness. And if I can manage to feel self-righteous in doing so, I get to keep my self-righteous unhappiness forever. In return, I can tell myself I don’t need forgiveness. I never need to put myself in that debt.
But relief from that debt is exactly what Jim Lorge knew he needed. When he tells his story publicly, he begins by saying “I’m a retired meth cook.” In what must seem like an age ago to them, the Lorge family ran a well respected business that made transformers in North Branch, Minnesota. Their son was introduced to meth and, in his words, it “took him over.” Soon, he was cooking meth clandestinely in the family business with access to a facility fit for the purpose and access to all the right chemicals.
On a cool July afternoon in 2003, law enforcement officials descended on the Lorge family’s business at shift change. Officers in hazmat suits were soon removing drug paraphernalia from a work shed — Pyrex coffee pots, hot plates, batteries, glass tubing — and laying it on the driveway to photograph.
Jenny and Marvin Lorge had been planning to retire to Florida, where he could enjoy the water and she could concentrate on her painting and assemblage arts. All they could do was watch their business become a crime scene and their handcuffed son be shoved into a police car.
…
Instead of retiring, she watched her husband sell the family business and lose the proceeds in a motorcycle company that he thought, wrongly, would engage Jim enough to end his addiction. She nursed her dying husband while their son smoked meth in the basement, felt ostracized in her community and lost her home to foreclosure. At times she considered suicide.
Now, at 74, Ms. Lorge was selling real estate. The seashells, horseshoe crab molts and other mementos adorning her overcrowded condo hinted of the Florida life she might have had. “This wouldn’t have happened if Jim hadn’t gone off the rails,” she said.
Mr. Lorge’s addiction had upended the lives of his parents, his sister, his son, his family’s employees and so many others. Remorse defined him.
He got sober. Paid his debts. Became a recovery coach. Worked to repair his relationship with his son. Lost his father, moved in with his mother. Facing his wrong meant he had no one else to blame for the damage he had caused himself and everyone who cared about him. And so, all his legal obligations met, he wanted to be forgiven. For practical reasons: better housing, more job opportunities. But also for reasons less practical. One of the costs (or benefits) of looking at the wrong you have done and the damage you have caused is you recognize your need for forgiveness. Also, it is honest. The alternative is to live dishonestly, the victim of your own choices and actions while managing to rage against the world that has, in your mind, wronged you.
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Jesus - Luke 18:9-14
Parables like this one follow a pattern. One person is recommended to us as one who responds well to God and another is given as an example of a wrong response. And … the roles are not expected, there is often a twist. The tax collector (even more despised as a cheat and thief and collaborator with the oppressive Romans than tax collectors are now) is recommended to us. This is how you go home justified before God - by humbling yourself, by knowing you need mercy, by mourning (he beat his breast) - and by asking for mercy. The Pharisee, the teacher, the one with the correct theology - he exalted himself. His humiliation will come - in God’s grace may it come quickly, before more damage is done.
Forgiveness is given to those who recognize their need of it. Early in His Sermon on the Mount, in the section we call the beatitudes, Jesus tells us that it is the spiritually poor who are blessed. Or, since we all have a spiritual poverty, it is those who recognize their poverty of spirit. He says blessed are those who mourn - and at least part of that mourning comes from the recognition of our own brokenness and need of redemption.
Part of Jim Lorge’s journey included a commitment to a newfound Christian faith and as part of his expression of that faith, a commitment to a 12-step recovery program. These 12 steps are sometimes viewed with suspicion in the Christian community. But I wonder if those who harbor such suspicions know what the 12 steps are.
Admitting powerlessness over the addiction
Believing that a higher power (in whatever form) can help
Deciding to turn control over to the higher power
Taking a personal inventory
Admitting to the higher power, oneself, and another person the wrongs done
Being ready to have the higher power correct any shortcomings in one’s character
Asking the higher power to remove those shortcomings
Making a list of wrongs done to others and being willing to make amends for those wrongs
Contacting those who have been hurt, unless doing so would harm the person
Continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when one is wrong
Seeking enlightenment and connection with the higher power via prayer and meditation
Carrying the message of the 12 Steps to others in need.
It is remarkable how prominent a clear-eyed assessment of wrongs done and the damage of those wrongs are. As is a dependence on a higher power to take control, to redeem, and to transform.
Mr. Lorge’s pardon letter from the State of Minnesota.
Jim Lorge walked away from the Minnesota Board of Pardons with his official forgiveness. His first step in that journey being brutally honest with himself and others on his need and his desire for forgiveness. “I want to be forgiven. I just want to be forgiven.”
