It was lunch time in London on September 11, 2001, breakfast time in New York. Elizabeth Turner had just finished chatting with her husband Simon, who was heading off to a meeting at the World Trade Center.1 Seven months pregnant with their first child, and heading out for lunch, Elizabeth was wondering what kind of baby carriage to buy. When she returned from lunch, Elizabeth discovered to her horror that the life she had known was now buried with her husband in the rubble of the twin towers. In the chaos and madness of the next days and weeks, Elizabeth endured visits from the press, the police, and social workers. Family and friends kept a twenty-four hour vigil with her, lest she go into premature labor. The birth of her son plunged her into even deeper grief, shock, and fear, as she realized that her husband had died for reasons that had nothing to do with her or her family, and that their son would grow up without his father. To save her son, she knew that she had to get beyond the cycle of violence and hatred, but she also knew that “choosing to stop the cycle is just as difficult as choosing the other path of anger and hatred.” Books, therapists, and pouring out her heart to family and friends gave her little help. Finally, through Reiki, a holistic form of healing, Elizabeth was able to empty herself of all the negative emotions, including the need for bitterness and retaliation, and find peace within. “From then on I was able to reengage with life,” she tells us, “I wasn’t normal again but I was able to laugh and be a whole parent.”
Forgiveness is difficult. Elizabeth Turner is one of several hundred people, of diverse nationalities and ethnicities, who have told their stories to the U.K.-based Forgiveness Project. All of them echo the grief, shock, fear, despair, and soul-searching that Elizabeth Turner experienced. All of them have asked, as have we, Peter’s haunting question: “When a sister or brother wrongs me, how many times must I forgive?” Peter knew he was being generous in offering to forgive seven times. So Jesus’ answer is all the more stunning, “Not seven times; I tell you seventy-seven times.” In Biblical terms, that’s an unlimited number of times. And then Jesus told a story that suggests just how difficult it is for us to forgive. And we know that. We know that we have trouble forgiving even small offenses. I think of academic departments from my former life where faculty members would not speak to each other for years. I think of families where siblings are estranged from each other, of elderly parents dying unforgiven by adult children, of church members still nursing old slights, of people unable to forgive even themselves for sins of the past. For most of us, it is even more difficult to forgive the perpetrators of evils seemingly beyond human endurance. Survivors of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the events of 9/11, which are ultimately all of us, all testify to how difficult forgiveness is.
Perhaps one reason why we find forgiveness so difficult is that we’re confused about what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is not pardon. We do not have to waive punishment or restitution in order to forgive someone. Forgiveness is not condoning. We do not have to approve of a person’s behavior in order to forgive them. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Even if we forgive someone, some wounds cannot ever be forgotten. And forgiveness is not denial. Especially for grievous assaults and horrendous evil, we must see the assault clearly, name it rightly, and feel all the horror and outrage that it provokes in us. Ultimately, however, forgiveness is akin to reaching the place that Elizabeth Turner finally reached. She tells us, “For me forgiveness is about finding an inner peace and accepting the cards you’ve been handed in life. It’s not that the pain has gone or that things are back to how they were before. Forgiveness is accepting that we are all human beings, and that we are not separate even from those who have hurt us.”
Forgiveness is difficult. And yet we know that as Christians we are obligated to try to reach the place that Elizabeth Turner reached. Why does God ask us to do this? We try to reach a place of forgiveness, first, because, as disciples of Jesus, we strive throughout our lives to imitate him. And he has explicitly commanded us to imitate him by forgiving continually – not just when we feel like it, not just the tiny sins that we can easily brush off, but all sins, all the time. Second, we forgive, turning our back on vengeance, because we have promised to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.” On September 11th, 2001 Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was in a meeting in Trinity Church in Manhattan, next door to the twin towers. After he and others had rushed out of the building, collecting children from Trinity’s day care center on the way, they breathed in the ash, they saw the rubble, and they ran for their lives. The next day, the archbishop warned the congregation at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine that the pressure to “do something” and the rhetoric in favor of retaliation would intensify. Nevertheless he said, “I wouldn’t want to see another room of preschool children hurried out of a building under threat. I wouldn’t want to see thousands of corpses given over to the justification of some principle. And very simply: I don’t want anyone to feel what others and I were feeling at about 10:30 yesterday morning. I’ve been there.”2
Finally, we forgive in order to cooperate with God in our own salvation. We forgive because we know that we will ultimately perish – or go mad – if we condemn ourselves to living in the hell of continuing anger, hatred, and vengeance. Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of a divorced single mother in his congregation. She worked hard to support herself and her children, but she couldn’t forgive her ex-husband for leaving her and her children to scrimp and save while he seemingly lived the high life with his new wife. In his counseling, the rabbi agreed with the wife that what her ex had done was mean and selfish. But he still asked the woman to forgive the ex. “I’m asking you to forgive,” he said, “because he doesn’t deserve the power to turn you into a bitter angry woman. I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you’re hurting yourself.”3
Forgiveness is difficult. It’s been ten years. Are we ready to forgive yet? Courtney Cowart is the regional director of Calling Congregations at The Fund for Theological Education. On the morning of September 11th she too was at Trinity Church in the same meeting with Rowan Williams. Along with everyone else, she grabbed up daycare children as they all ran for their lives. In her own sermon for today, she suggests that, while honoring the memories of those lost, we might have the courage to ask this question of God: “To what would you have us re-commit, given what we saw and learned that day?” As part of her answer, later in the sermon she mentions a delegation of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who came to St. Paul’s Chapel as guests of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. “What you have done here,” the delegation told their New York hosts, “is the perfect expression of the spirit of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where so many survivors renounced revenge forever. Instead they worked ceaselessly against violence and for the world as a whole.”
Here is how I hear God answering Courtney Cowart’s question: “Your task,” God says to us, “ is first to search your own hearts. Look around you, to your own family, your parish, your community, and then the world. Let go of all those grudges and hurts, small and great, that threaten to destroy your souls and allow for forgiveness to come into your hearts. Take hold of the forgiveness that Jesus modeled for you, even on the Cross, the forgiveness that Rowan Williams and Courtney Cowart model for you, the forgiveness that Elizabeth Turner and the others in the Forgiveness Project model for you. Then recommit yourselves to the renunciation of violence and revenge. Embrace peace and pursue it with all your heart. And remember that all people, including Muslims, are your sisters and brothers.”
Amen, Lord Jesus. With your grace we can do all this and more.
1. Elizabeth Turner’s story is found at the Forgiveness Project, http://theforgivenessproject.com/.
2. Quoted by Courtney Cowart, in “An Exhortation to Forgiveness,” accessed at http://day1.org/3235-an_exhortation_to_forgiveness.print.
3. Harold S. Kushner, “Letting Go of the Role of Victim,” Spirituality and Health, Winter 1999, 34, quoted in Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4 (Louisville: John Knox, 2011), 72.
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