I'm learning about forgiveness

Plus a few things I'm reading, writing, listening to, etc.

Hello, friends. Happy eve of Pentecost.

I’ve felt a little off about sending you all a Lent 1 post and then essentially dropping off the face of Substack. MFA assignments and life commitments, however, had to take precedence. I turned in my creative thesis on Memorial Day (hooray!) and now find myself surfacing a bit.

The end of Lent confronted me with a call to forgive someone. I find this call difficult, even painful. I chafe against it and want to run away. When I don’t want to run away, I stare at it and tell God I’m willing to learn how to forgive while wondering how I’ll ever make progress toward doing so.

In a spiritual direction meeting on Maundy Thursday, my priest advised me that “progress,” this Lent, might just look like confessing my unwillingness to forgive and becoming willing to learn how. Now that Easter and Ascensiontide are almost over and Pentecost is about to descend, I find myself still staring at this call, offering God my feeble willingness to learn. In this particular case, forgiveness will probably be a practice that I wrestle with for most of my life. I suspect that’s why it’s so scary.

Having this conversation on Maundy Thursday meant forgiveness was on the brain when I walked into our Good Friday service. I found myself thinking about Christ’s body, His physical body, bleeding on the Cross, and maybe this is obvious to everyone but me but it struck me that His crucified body is forgiveness incarnate. All that pain. All that isolation. All that unjust suffering. All that trauma. All of it — all of it inflicted on Him, all of it willingly received, all of it felt.

If Christ’s crucified body is forgiveness incarnate and we are called to forgive as Christ forgave, forgiveness is simultaneously the most beautiful and most forbidding act of the soul to which we are called.

We are simply too weak, our loves too feeble, to forgive on our own. That thing Dorothy Day said — about only loving God as much as the person we love the least? I find that terrifying. It mortifies any sense of satisfaction I have in what I perceive as my passionate love for God. But she’s probably right.

We need to attach ourselves to Christ’s forgiveness, to ask Him to make His forgiveness our own. And then wait, open and willing, for Him to do so. As we wait, we turn our wills toward the practice of forgiveness, trusting that God will flourish its reality in our souls as we ask and we wait and we practice.

Here are a few practical points I know about forgiveness:

• Forgiving someone does not mean “everything is fine now, we can connect as if we never had a rift.” When a death or a violence happens in a relationship, that relationship will change. Reasonable, prayerful boundaries are still important, especially if the person we are forgiving has not repented.

• Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is not sweeping what happened to me into the waters of Lethe and pretending it never occurred. God made and loves me, I exist, God treasures my sorrows. He does not forget me. He is the keeper of justice. He remembers and cares. Like Him, I must take what has happened to me seriously. I must feel its full effects in my soul and body. Only then can I fully forgive, because only then do I know what I am forgiving.

• My bishop defines forgiveness this way: “Giving up our right of retribution, and giving up our need for anything to be different than it is.”

• My priest has encouraged me to pray this prayer when I do not know where to begin: “Lord, do not hold what [name] has done against me against them on the Day of Judgement for my sake. Forgive them, and help me to forgive them.”

The rest of it? An open question. For now, at least. But I wonder sometimes if, in this life at least, forgiveness is the thing, the core thing, we are called to incarnate as Christians. (If not, I’m confident it is one among the very few core things.)

And if forgiveness is Christ crucified, if it is a love so powerful and persistent it makes the lover willing to die on behalf of the beloved, if it is allowing His willing death — one of the most perfect acts of love creation has ever known — to be recreated in our souls and bodies, we can confidently trust that the death involved in forgiveness is not the end of the story. That that death does not exist for its own sake. It exists to open the path to restored, resurrected relationship.

Easter will dawn. All that is broken will be restored.

Our choice is whether we will willingly participate in the restoration. Beginning now, with forgiveness.

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Writing

• My creative thesis! I turned it in! Hooray! I feel proud and happy.

• I’ve been reviewing an essay I wrote before the MFA times so I can submit it to a literary journal sometime soon. It’s an essay I’m proud of, but there’s something lovely about returning with a more trained hand.

• I saw this on Pinterest a week or two ago and I’ve found myself writing an ekphrastic poem of sorts in response. Maybe I’ll share it here sometime.

• I began about an essay about wrestling with chastity, virginity, a disappointed crush, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and loving God over the winter. I turned in half of it for school. Last weekend, I started refamiliarizing myself with the draft so I can make an attempt on the second half sometime this summer (or fall, as the case may be).

Reading

• Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. It’s astonishing. It’s so beautiful. Go read it.

• Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, by Flannery O’Connor. Also wonderful — so far I’ve especially enjoyed her opening essay on the many peacocks she cared for (“The King of the Birds”) and an essay called “Catholic Novelists and their Readers.”

• Selections from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. I’m reading this for my final MFA residency (fast approaching in August!) and it’s beautiful; so far I particularly loved “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” by Ross Gay.

• The Life of Antony, by St. Athanasius.

• Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat.

Listening

• My sister turned me on to the podcast Normal Gossip and it is a delight, to say the least. Some of the stories are nuts. I’ve linked an episode that made my jaw drop a few times!

• Home Cooking, the podcast Samin Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway began in the Covid-times. Also so, so delightful!

• Jessica Pratt’s self-titled album. It’s nice background listening, but it also reminds me of folk artists like Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, and Joni Mitchell. I always think of driving up the California coast when I listen to it, especially the areas far up north with the redwoods. The song that got me started is “Mother Big River.”

Watching

• An embarrassing number of reels on Instagram and short clips on YouTube. Very little of substance. However this, from Dropout, and all associated clips is so funny. I’m on the verge of signing up for a Dropout account just so I can watch the full episode! (Maybe that’ll be my “crash and read nor write no thing in July before I graduate” plan.)

What about you? What are you writing / reading / listening / watching these days? What is bringing you delight? I’d love to know - leave a comment if you’re willing to share!