Stranger than Forgiveness
Sunday evening I attended a screening of the first part of Helen Whitney’s new documentary, Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate.
I admit that it took a bit of time for me to get into it. The first segment was a telling of the oft-repeated story of the shootings in an Amish school and the community’s seemingly instantaneous forgiveness of the perpetrator. Then the movie headed into the story of a woman who managed to live a happy life despite an abusive childhood and being infected with HIV. I can’t remember much about that segment.
But the next two segments really intrigued me. The first dealt with Terri Jentz, the author of Strange Piece of Paradise, who survived a brutal, anonymous attack. After the attack, she lived through 15 years of torpor and depression. During that time, when someone would ask her about her feelings about her attacker, she would say, “Oh, I’m above that. I’ve forgiven him.” It wasn’t until she started to dig into her case, trying to track her attacker down, that she came alive again. She says near the end of the segment that her 15 years of “forgiveness” were unhealthy for her.
The last segment was about Katherine Ann Power who, during an armed bank robbery to get money to support her Vietnam War protest, was complicit in the killing of a police officer. She managed to evade the law for 23 years, and probably would have done so indefinitely, except that, being overwhelmed by her conscience, she finally turned herself in.
As Whitney told us before the screening, the meaning of forgiveness is under intense debate right now. But I saw an interesting definition arising from these stories. It’s best illustrated with a scene from the movie Stranger than Fiction, where Will Ferrell’s character realizes that he is a character in an in-progress novel. In the middle of the movie, Ferrell decides that if he remains immobile, he can derail the plot and get his life back. So he sits in a chair for hours until his apartment wall is suddenly knocked in by a crane. The plot has come to get him. After that, he becomes a very active main character, tracking down the author and taking control of his story.
As Frances Menlove wrote in the most recent issue of Sunstone, “We all know that the universe isn’t made of atoms; it is made of stories.” Each woman spent a lot of time hiding from her life story. The woman infected with HIV turned to addictive behavior to avoid dealing with her life’s plot points. Jentz pretended that a major character in her life’s story didn’t matter. Power, like Ferrell, hid from the sad stories she had set in motion. They were passive main characters, letting other forces run their lives. And, of course, if you relinquish the story of your life, your soul is bound to start fading. Life seemed to regain richness and meaning when the women actively re-entered their stories.
So perhaps forgiveness is when you become an active protagonist in your life story. It’s when you say, “Here are the pieces of my story. I’m not going to ignore them. I’m going to make something new out of them.”
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February 1st, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Great post! I have learned that when we forgive, we may first experience great suffering from an offender. It may take time to process the pain, but eventually we can choose to be the protagonist in our own life and no longer assume a victim mentality.
Forgiveness allows us to move from being a victim to a survivor and a victor. It empowers us to find peace amid suffering. It makes us whole.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:47 pm
I recommend a recent New Yorker article by Jared Diamond that discusses the human need for revenge. He tells a heartbreaking story of the consequences from his father-in-law failing to take revenge when it was offered. An abstract of the story is smooshed up where my website is supposed to be
February 1st, 2010 at 3:16 pm
I love Stranger than Fiction. Great flick.
February 1st, 2010 at 10:34 pm
[My apologies in advance for the long, rambly comment, but your post struck a chord...]
This part of your post resonated with me:
I had an experience a few months ago where I realized that I’ve never fully faced some of my experiences from my teen years…so I started taking some active steps to recover the pieces of my story so I can pull a narrative together. This process of staring down the past is both cathartic and completely unsettling. And now I can’t wait till the story takes on a more cohesive form (as an example, here’s a blogpost about part of that process: http://pilgrimgirl.blogspot.com/2009/10/on-photos-and-synchronicity.html )
I don’t know if I can claim that my life is “regaining richness,” as a result of my efforts but I can say that it’s quite therapeutic to face those old hurts and comfort the little girl inside of me who’s still afraid. Additionally, much of the changing nature of my relationship with the LDS church has revolved around challenging the rather passive script for my life that I adopted for many years, and that’s been hugely enlivening for me. And one more example: in the past few years I’ve encountered many people within the disability community who are using written (or spoken) narrative to ‘talk back’ to a society that continues to devalue them–another way in which story functions to add richness to their lives. (I also just last week saw Rafael Campo speak about his work with illness narratives and was terrifically moved by his work on medical poetry: http://www.rafaelcampo.com/rc_lit_med/rc_lit_med_index.html )
A few weeks ago I sat in the audience of a panel of old-fart writer-historians and they all spoke about how their work–though not at all autobiographical–was really about making sense of their childhood demons. So now I’m beginning to wonder how much of all literary writing (even academic work) is about this desire to “actively re-enter” our personal stories. There’s certainly some sense that an author can control a narrative in ways that s/he can’t control real life, and that can be a therapeutic process.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Love this! Sometimes by pretending to “forgive” someone we are really just ignoring the problem. Real forgiveness is an engagement with the problem and then active steps to make the results of it right. For most small things this means we forget them and ignore them. But for larger things sometimes it means we remember them and document them, and do our best to fix them in our own lives. And then eventually we move on to the next thing. In the end if we can’t become more than what has happened to us, this is the tragedy. I have seen people who have become more than their tragedy and so have transcended it. And that is the ultimate victory in life.
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:55 am
This reminds me of “Till We Have Faces” by CS Lewis. The boiled down point of the story was that until we have a face, until we know ourselves and our story we cannot possibly stand face to face with God. I love that.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Great post and comments. Wonderful exploration of forgiveness. There probably are well-meaning people who simply avoid dealing with serious issues when they think they are forgiving.
This struck me: “They were passive main characters, letting other forces run their lives.” This can be about those sins of omission, that no one knows but us. The promptings we receive but ignore.
February 6th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
You made a good point, but have you really thought about how it’d affect other people? I do not say you’re wrong, I just need to point out that there’s more than 1 side to this story.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
In the same sense that mercy cannot rob justice, forgiveness cannot remove consequences. When we seek forgiveness for our misdeeds, we must still face the consequences. The three “R’s” of repentance (Recognition, Remorse, Resolve) must all be experienced as we seek forgiveness.
A person may consort with a prostitute, then repent and receive forgiveness from all concerned (prostitute, family, church, God) but still live the the consequences of a disease.
A victim may also initiate the extension of forgiveness. You may recall the case of Robert Kleason who killed two missionaries in Texas in 1974.
http://en.wickipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Elmer_Kleason
I recall reading about one missionary’s mother visiting Kleason in prison to extend forgiveness to him (sorry – I cannot find a link to this report.) Kleason was given forgiveness but still had to pay the demands of justice. (Unfortunately, it got derailed on earth but I expect he is serving time elsewhere.)
I like the message of the last paragraph of the post, that, like the missionary mother, we must confront our problems lest we wallow in self pity. Then, we can find forgivesness.
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