What Does it Mean to Forgive?

"Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude". Martin Luther King Jr.

The following is passage from Jean Vanier's book, "Becoming Human". This section is taken from the final chapter on, "Forgiveness".
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To forgive is to break down the walls of hostility that separate us, and to bring each other out of the anguish of loneliness, fear, and chaos into communion and oneness. This communion is born from mutual trust and acceptance, and the freedom to be ourselves in our uniqueness and beauty, the freedom to exercise our gifts. We are no longer contained and held back by fear, prejudices, or the need to prove ourselves.

So the sense of belonging that is necessary for the opening of our hearts is born when we walk together, needing each other, accompanying one another whether we are weak or strong, capable or not. This belonging will not bring feelings or superiority if we are walking towards inner freedom. It will not seek to exclude but to include the weak, the needy, and the different, for they have a secret power that opens up people’s hearts and leads them to compassion and mutual trust. This belonging becomes a song of gratitude for each one of us.

Of course, all this takes time. But are we not all called to take this journey if we want to become fully human, to conquer divisions and oppression, and to work for peace? If each one of us today begins this journey and has the courage to forgive and be forgiven, we will no longer be governed by past hurts. Wherever we may be-in our families, our work places, with friends, or in places of worship or of leisure-we can rise up and become agents of a new land. But let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviours of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, Forgiveness, Pages 162-163.    

The Path to Freedom

"Being human is difficult. Becoming a human is a life long process. To be truly human is a gift." Abraham Heschel

The following is a passage from Jean Vanier's book, "Becoming Human". This section is taken from the chapter, "The Path to Freedom".
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To be free is to know who we are, with all that is beautiful, all the brokenness in us; it is to love our own values, to embrace them, and to develop them; it is to be anchored in a vision and a truth but also to be open to others and, so, to change. Freedom lies in discovering that the truth is not a set of fixed certitudes but a mystery we enter into, one step at a time. It is a process of going deeper and deeper into an unfathomable reality.

In this journey of integrating our experience and our values, and of what we might learn we listen to others, there may be a period of anguish. We need to find links between the old and the new, links that will permit the integration of new, consciousness-expanding truths into what we already know and are living-our existing certitudes. As human sciences develop and the world evolves, we are called to grow into a new and deeper understanding of the source of the universe and of life. As we participate in this, our sense of the true expands. Freedom is to be in awe of this source, of the beauty and diversity of people, and of the universe. It is to contemplate the height and breadth of all that is true.

Freedom is to accept that when we belong to a group, a race, a tribe, a family, a community, a religion, that none of these are perfect, that each has its limits and weaknesses. Every community of humans has its light and its darkness. We are all part of something greater than ourselves. We all flow from a source that is unfathomable and we are all journeying towards it, carrying with us the light of truth and love. Each of us is called to be in communion with the source and heart of the universe. The infinite yearnings of our hearts are calling us to be in communion with the infinite. None of us can be satisfied with the limited and finite. Each cone must be free to follow the Spirit of God.

And this freedom is for love and compassion, to give our lives more totally and more freely to others. It is the freedom to be kind and patient. This freedom does not seek personal honours; it believes all, hopes all, bears all, and endures all. Freedom does not judge or condemn but understands and forgives. Freedom is the liberation from all those inner fears and inhibitions and that we need to ask forgiveness of those we have hurt.

There is a freedom that I sense exists but that I do not have. I cannot always describe it but I do want it. I sense I still have a long road to walk in order to reach this freedom. I see the goal but I am not yet there. I love and want it but sometimes I am frightened on the road I must take.

I am frightened of the disappearance of my walls of defense, sensing that behind them there is an anguish and a vulnerability that will rise up. I see that I still cling to what people think of me and am fed by the way people love, want, and admire me. If all that fell away, who would I be? But that is where freedom lies, the freedom to be rejected, if that is the path I am to take in order to live more fully. Is that not the freedom that Jesus announces in his charter of the Beatitudes, when he says, “Woe to you when people speak well of you”?

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, The Path to Freedom, Pages 117-119.

Belonging

The last entry looked at how we as humans can use strength and weakness to live with others. Becoming human is a struggle of finding your strength in weakness. For the following entry I would like to look at belonging and what it means to belong. Living in Canada this can be a difficult task because of the multicultural environment we find ourselves living in. Toronto is culturally the most diverse city in the world. What does it mean to belong?

Belonging, like anything else, can be a place of opening up as well as a place of closing in. It is a place where we discover what makes our humanity. Family, language, humanhood, culture, food, communication, love and respect for others sums up this notion of belonging. If we accept this then we must accept that at the heart of belonging, is the fact that, we have received our existence from others and need to grow and develop as individuals, physically, psychologically, and humanly.

Let's use the example of a child to see how a child can become a product of the society that we build around ourselves. Belonging is not an individual act but involves an entire group. The child goes to school, shares in the life of the community, and discovers a wider sense of belonging with others from the same city, region, country, religion, language and culture. Sometimes the child meets people who are different, strangers, people with disabilities, immigrants, people from different religious backgrounds etc. The child will quickly pick up, through the adults attitude whether such people are to be accepted and loved or ignored, or even ostracized because they do not belong. And so from a young age we learn, without realizing it, that those who are different, those who standout, are either acceptable or dangerous.

When a child acquires a language and learns how to relate to adults, to friends, to God, when he learns the customs and values that have been taught to him through his culture, how to deal with death, pain, sorrow, he cannot but think that what he has been taught is the only way of being and living. As children we learn that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. We do not ask questions instead, we obey. As we grow to adulthood we begin to questions the values learned during our childhood. This is why many adults and youth go through a crisis of faith and of trust. Belonging begins from day one. We must constantly seek to grow our humanity by accepting everyone as a human being. "Differences" should never be a factor in accepting others. Let us cultivate a society that nurtures the ideals of love and acceptance no matter how one looks, talks, or eats. To be a human is to belong and to belong is to love all without any pretext or conditions. Love is at the heart of belonging and once we belong to a community we learn to love unconditionally.

Strength in Weakness

The last entry looked at the humanistic approach involved in Chaplaincy. I would like to expand this and speak on what it means to be weak and how this relates to becoming a human being. Becoming human is a title for many books written in the last century. Authors like Jean Vanier, John Behr and Olivier Clement have written on what it means to become a human. Becoming human, I can define from reading these books, is based on the idea of constantly seeking the good and beautiful in all that we do. In order to seek the good and beautiful we must however understand that, in order to find beauty and goodness, we must come from a place of weakness.

The paradox of weakness and strength can be difficult to understand. One can say, "How can I find beauty and goodness when I am lying in a hospital bed and I do not have control over the condition that has taken a hold of me?" People are infuriated by weakness that sometimes even the beautiful cry of a child can be a distraction. Weakness awakens hardness and anger in all of us. Equally dangerous, sometimes less obvious, weakness can lead people to a possessive love. However, in this mystery of weakness it can open our hearts to compassion; the place where we are concerned for the growth and well-being of the weak.

I see this on many levels in the hospital. The nurse, doctor, physiotherapist, occupational therapist and many more constantly seek to help others who are in a position of weakness trying to restore them to a position of strength. To deny weakness as a part of life is to deny death, because weakness speaks to our ultimate destruction of not being in control which is death itself. To be sick or dying is a stage of weakness and as that weakness becomes more apparent we begin to deny it all together.

If we deny our weakness and the reality of death by constantly seeking to be powerful and strong, then we deny part of our being creating a space of illusion, a bubble that becomes harder to break. To be a human being is to accept who we are, this mixture of strength and weakness. To be human is to be bonded to each other with our weakness and strengths, because we need each other. Lastly, weakness that is recognized, accepted and offered back is at the heart of belonging, which brings us together as a community of love.

I leave you with the beautiful words of Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier published a book called Becoming Human, inspiring me to write this post. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in wanting to understand and grow their knowledge of what it means to become a human being.

Weakness carries within it a secret power. The cry and the trust that flow from weakness can open up hearts. The one who is weaker can call forth powers of love in the one who is stronger. Do those who are stronger respond with love because in an unconscious way they identify with the one who is weak? Do they, in some way, know that one day they too will be weak and will cry out for help, recognition, and love?       

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, 40. 

Christ and the World

The world cannot be served from a place o f power, but it can be served from the cross. On the cross the world stabs its own heart, but the cross is a school and to run away from it is to run away from the future. Fr. Bishoy Kamel

Fr. Alexander Schmemann famously said that Christianity is not a religion but a way of life. We have failed to understand this statement because of the way Christianity has engaged the world. Christianity has engaged itself in "bigger" churches "more" activities resulting in the reduction of the church. The church is meant to give life to all who seek it. The church is the place where one learns how to become a human being. Church activities are good and Sunday School is great however, if these acts are done in isolation of Christ and what it means to live in the body of Christ then the focus has turned away from the body of Christ to "things" that need to be done to satisfy the needs of the individual. Father Matthew the Poor during one of his sermons said that the church today is dead because Christ is not present in the church. We must learn to be engaged with the world as Christ was engaged with his community. The church must move away from being "another" institution and become the place where true life is given to all. The church never seeks to serve those who serve it best but rather the church seeks that which is lost and to bring it back to the body of Christ. When Christ is not present in the church the church becomes nothing more than activities done in order to find meaning in this life. The true meaning of life lies in the person of Christ and if we move away from making the church the enterprise and making Christ the goal then and only then can we truly live a life in Christ.    

“When theology is false, then Christianity is reduced to activities.”

+ Fr. John S. Romanides

"Nowadays, especially in the U.S., the Church is perceived as an enterprise, an activity. The priest constantly harasses people to do something for the Church. And their activism is measured in quantitative criteria: how many meetings, how much money, how much “doing.” I’m not sure it is all necessary. 

What is dangerous is not the activity itself, but the reduction of the Church, the identification of this activity with life in the Church. The idea of the Church, the sacramental principle of its life, lies in taking us away from activity (“let us put aside all earthly cares”), in making us commune with a new life, eternity, the Kingdom. 

And the idea of the Church, the principle of its life, also demands that we would bring into the world this experience of a new life so that we would purify this world, illumine it with the non-worldliness of the experience of the Church. Quite often the opposite happens: we bring activism into the Church, the fuss of this world, and submit the Church, poison its life with this incessant fuss. What happens is not that life becomes Church, but the Church becomes worldly."

+ Fr Alexander Schmemann, Journals, Thursday, February 18, 1982

"A group of Orthodox seminarians came to visit the mission...One of them very upset commented that there is no point in what the mission was doing, unless we made people became Orthodox. Later reflecting on this father commented that this future priest difficulty comes from "his anthropology. It is not patristic." God's love for us humans has no agenda. What a privilege it is that we love and exist in the same way God does."

+ Memories from an Orthodox Urban Mission

"The first thing that must be said about acquiring this spirit of service is that it will not happen by simply reading about Christ’s acts of service in the Gospel and trying, with no preparation, to imitate Him.  The fact of the matter is that the Lord did not simply perform acts of service; rather, His deeds of love flowed naturally from His gracious character.  His deeds reveal His identity.  If we try to analyze the activity of Christ in the Gospel with a view to implementing a programme of Christ-like service to others, we will fail.  Acts of service that do not have their origin in a gracious character are not credible and are often undertaken for the wrong reasons.  Unfortunately, the wounded human heart is capable of sin even in performing good deeds if it is not being purified, enlightened and strengthened by the Holy Spirit.  We come face to face with a fundamental problem: we cannot act as Christ acts through observation and implementation alone.  We cannot acquire the spirit of service as we would a skill or a discipline.  We must instead receive Christ’s life and then struggle to allow His character to emerge in us.  This is why the Orthodox Church carefully distinguishes between the imitation of Christ and the life in Christ.  The former allows us to learn about Christianity; the latter allows us to become Christians."

+ Very Rev. Maxym Lysack, Serving Through Outreach

"We are taught that we must seek success individually, for we are in a society where we must compete, or die. This means that we are obsessed by efficacity, by work and by recognition. We want to be recognized, not necessarily for the value of what we are doing, but rather to be promoted. This is success. Success is evaluated in money and power. This is what we are continually being taught right from childhood. Thus, in every field, we are all pushed by the sense of promotion. We must get on, must have success, power and riches....

We...have the cult of liberty and of liberalism, with some innate and phobic fear of anything that might smell of socialism and of community in the larger sense. We are told that we must have the signs of success in the quality of our houses, cars and various other ornaments or furniture inside our houses. The whole aspect of prestige and recognition by the neighbours is very, very fundamental in our society which has pushed us to a very individualized culture.

It follows that very quickly the family is fragmented. What I mean by a fragmented family is that old people must be put in old people's homes; mentally handicapped people must have their own residences and physically handicapped people must too. Delinquents must have their place also. All those who are the marginal ones are categorically placed together in residences where necessary specialists can be hired to provide programs to govern their existence, and this permits the nuclear family, husband, wife and two children just to be together about their business.

The children of the family are taken up with children's activities, clubs and youth movements. The wife can join a bridge club, take a part time job or do volunteer work at the local hospital or for meals on wheels. The husband frequently becomes obsessed by this idea of promotion which is very deeply ingrained. He must go up the ladder or he just might go down, and this can be very serious, particularly when they have bought a lot on credit without any money. What if he should lose his job? So, he has to become a slave to the system because everything has been bought before he had the money. Sometimes the husband and wife will be so divided in their activities that there is an even greater fragmentation....We are taken up in a world of activities; we have to do and we have forgotten how to be. And because we are always doing, we get into a vicious circle, with the result that relationships begin to break down....

When there is despair, I begin to throw myself into activity in order to forget my pain. I do and I do and I do and one day, I retire. Then, having nothing to do, I fall sick. This is the story of many people who are caught up in the world of doing, because in reality, to do, can be to flee. Doing should flow from my being, but frequently I do, because I am frightened that I do not really exist sufficiently. Maybe in this world of intense noise, I am running away. Maybe I'm terribly frightened of silence, frightened because in silence I meet myself, and I confront myself. Maybe also in the silence I meet my God.'"

+ Jean Vanier, Excerpts from Monograph No. 4: Learn to Live. 

Edited by Sue Mosteller. (Richmond Hill: Daybreak Publications/PrintOne, 1978)