The Freedom Of Forgiveness

Summer, 2014

Last night I listened as the prosecuting attorney in Ferguson, Missouri, read the report of the grand jury's findings in the shooting of a young black man by a white police officer. This morning I watched video of businesses and cars burning to ashes in a city that was coming undone. Again.

I try to process these images and try to relate somehow to what I am seeing. They remind me of similar images I watched at the tender age of ten when Watts burned in Los Angeles. This inexplicable lawlessness frightened me then and it still frightens me now. How can anyone feel safe when the cover is ripped off of such a dark well of bitterness and hatred, allowing its unrestrained anger to roam free?

Now we witness the violence done to those who had no part in the original tragedy. Will these new victims in turn add their anger, their desire to punish and get revenge, to the monster in the well? When, and how does something like this end? Decades after the Watts riots - sparked by rumors that a police officer had beaten an elderly woman - the area is still in bad shape, as is the city of Detroit, the sight of an even worse 60's era riot. Those who could, fled. Those who couldn't remained in cities without businesses and jobs and access to medical services and hope, for themselves and their children.

And then I remember forgiveness. 

We may secretly think, hope even, that withholding forgiveness provides a way to punish the one who has harmed us. But the truth is, unforgiveness becomes an insidious evil that slithers its way into our mind and wraps around our heart, tightening and squeezing until we, too, take on the darkness and our soul becomes a bitter cesspool of hate.

Martin Luther King once said: Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. And then he proceeded to show us what can happen when people decide to walk in light and love instead of darkness and hate, at the ultimate cost of his own life. He was a man who chose to imitate Jesus, the One who paid the ultimate price for 'poor, ornery people like you and like I'.*

So I contemplate the faces of men and women lit by the fires of this dark night, human beings created in the image of God busy smashing their neighbors' windows with baseball bats. And I think:  this is no answer to the difficulties of life.

Love is the common denominator required for community life. And, as Mother Teresa said, if we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive. 

How does a community such as Ferguson learn to love? Desire to forgive? To build and not destroy? How do any of us learn that the basis for a good and decent life comes not by taking, but by giving? 

     

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is discord, harmony;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, 

grant that I may no so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to 
eternal life.+

*From the Appalachian carol "I Wonder As I Wander"

+Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (13th century) but actually traced back only to 1912, in a small French magazine called La Clochette (The Little Bell).