“I thank you, God, for most this amazing day.”
I pray with E. E. Cummings and look through the morning window to see snow blanketing the ground in Fayetteville. I walk to the front door in my pajamas, open the door, and stand barefoot on the cold concrete of the front porch. A winter chill is an exhilarating thing, a thing that reminds me that I am alive in the wide, wild world.
The flakes are small—spit snow, I’ve always called it—but they are falling fast and hard and are piling up on the ground. A white blanket stretches across the neighborhood, into the town, and out into the rural areas. It stretches onto mountains and into valleys, covers the banks of the Illinois watershed, the sides of the Boston Mountains. I imagine the view from Hawksbill, how the valleys below are filling with an iridescent beauty, how the elk are craning their necks upward in their morning calls, how their breath is swirling upward. It is sure to be the only sound in the wild Ozark valleys this morning. I imagine them as living shofars trumpeting praise to the maker of these mountains.
The new morning snow deadens the sounds of the world. I hear no cars, no dogs barking. It is a still, silent morning. The snow blows across the porch in spirited gusts, and a tiny drift covers my toes. I dust them off, the stinging of the ice setting in, and I turn back into the house.
On my way to the coffee pot, the burn of thawing toes sets in. It’s a prickling heat.
I pour coffee from the pot. Pain, whether great or small, is the reminder that we are not inanimate, plastic things. We are not machines meant to go about in numb, metallic, programmed action. We are not fungible goods, items that when broken can be replaced with other unbroken items. We are meant to feel the pain of our un-thingness.
Pain is inevitable; it’s the irrefutable evidence of life.
It has been seventy-five days since my last drink, and sobriety has not come without much pain and effort. There is a constant throbbing, an ever-present stinging. This is the sting of living in a mysterious world, of being broken by it, of being broken in it.
There is a salve for this, though. There is a way to make peace with the God of the past, present, and future. Accepting the mysteries of God, his decision not to heal—this is only the starting place. From there is pain and confusion and bitterness. Going through it and taking a forgiving heart with me—this is the trick.
Yes, I forgave the faith healer at my son’s own anointing for healing. But if the falling into addiction is a slippery slope of a process, then forgiveness must be a process too. I am learning forgiveness is not often a single, shining event but a continual, repetitive act. A letting go, followed by another, and another. And I must learn to keep at it.
Forgiveness, both its extension and receipt, requires a lower, humble position before both God and man. Forgiveness, both its extension and receipt, is not the natural inclination of man, and I must fight for it.
It requires that I go into the past, that I relive histories again and again until I am able to release all wrongs wrought by the frail humanity of others. I know now what the therapist means when he says I must relive the pain, I must learn to master it. He means to say that I must learn to forgive it all.
The act of forgiveness, true Christ-based forgiveness, is an extension of love; it is seeing my accuser as a human, as one who acted from his own broken understanding of the world, who just did the best he knew how. Forgiveness, true godward forgiveness, is the extension of unmitigated grace, the adoption of the prayerful hope that our enemies might receive no suffering from their imputation of suffering; it is the hope that they find a better hope.
Lord, forgive me, as I forgive my enemies.
It is a simple prayer. It is not difficult, but it is hard.
It is the first week of Advent, the season of Christ’s coming. Emmanuel, God with us. I repeat it this morning and consider the coming of Christ. Fully God, he came more than clothed in flesh and bone. He came, instead, unified with flesh and bone, his inextricable godness woven into tingle-toed human experience. This, I think, is the hope of hopes.
Through the garden he went, bending his will (“not my will but yours be done”) to the will of God. Into the pain he went, into the crowd of men who ripped out his beard, who thorny-crowned him the low-caste king of the Jews, who scourged him, who mocked him for the blasphemy that he claimed to be both man and God. He walked straight into the heart of the pain of having his identity, the essence of who he was, attacked by men with rigid, systematic notions of God.
Defenders of the faith, of right theology, the Jewish leaders considered themselves.
Quellers of an insurrection, of uprising, the Roman guards were.
And Jesus was the middleman, the garment stretched to ripping between two peoples with very different axes to grind.
Jesus, subjected to the worst of humanity, hung, and in his last words prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
He could have prayed, “Father, forgive them their sins.” After all, he forgave others their sins. Had he meant, “Forgive them their sins,” though, he would have prayed it. Instead, the connotation seems different, gentler. Jesus recognized that they were unknowing. Instead, I wonder whether the phrase may be read with more human intuition: Father, forgive them; they are doing the best they know how.
Jesus, God with us, endured the worst punishment that men’s black hearts could conceive. He bent his will to the mystery of suffering and walked headlong into the painful persecution of men, even men who knew not what they did. He suffered them, though he could have reached back into his Old Testament book of tricks, could have unleashed the death angel or turned them all into pillars of salt. He did not cry a mumbling word, and as he hung crucified, his parting shot to his accusers, his dying request to the Godhead, was simple. “Father, forgive them.”
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Unify my flesh with your Spirit so that I might extend your forgiveness.