Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

When We Need Forgiveness

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
October 1, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

John Holt, the teacher and education critic, once asserted at a lecture that there was no school subject that was essential to learn. A student in the audience asked him, "But surely there must be something important enough that everyone should learn it?" After reflection, Holt replied, “To learn to say ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘I was wrong’.”¹

Whether everyone needs to learn history, math, biology, etc., is an interesting question for future discussion, but Holt’s grasp of the basics is unquestionable. Everyone needs to learn to acknowledge wrongdoing and make an apology. Recognizing when we need forgiveness is one of the fundamental skills of being a human being in relationship with other human beings. Without it, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes and undermine our most valued relationships. With it, we can fulfill the potential of being human: to learn, to grow, to become a better person with each passing year and each mistake we make.

Several months ago I gave a sermon about forgiving those who have hurt us. What about when we are the ones who have hurt someone else? In small or large ways, we do it more often than we would like, and the skills Holt talks about can be as difficult to learn as Greek grammar or differential calculus. When we are the ones who need forgiveness, we turn to the practice of atonement.

I would sum up the point of atonement in this twofold way: it repairs broken relationships and tunes us up for a new, and we hope improved, way to live. It is the key to healing and to change.

Some religions focus on atonement during a set period each week or each year. They have practices of confession and contrition, acknowledgement and apology. Many are practices we Unitarian Universalists shed as we changed our structure of worship from its Protestant origins, and they are skills that we can ill afford to forget. They are what you might call the tools that help us make our repairs and do our tuneup. So today, as part of our churchwide theme day of atonement, we, along with the children in some of their classes, and the attendees of Family Chapel, are learning how to use a few atonement tools from the toolbox of world religions — mostly Judaism, here on the eve of the Day of Atonement, but also Islam and Christianity. They are:

• the apology;
• the acknowledgement of wrongdoing known as confession;
• and the release of our sins that allows us to stop doing what we wish we had not done.

The apology. In my family, we walked to Yom Kippur services, since we observed the prohibition against driving on the Jewish holidays. We lived just under a mile from the synagogue, on the same route I walked to school each day: not so long as to be tiring, long enough to permit contemplation and a sense of companionship. Both were a help at Yom Kippur, when one is supposed to apologize to everyone one has hurt. I hate having to apologize. Looming ahead of me, the task weighed on the heart like an overdue and unpleasant homework assignment. It was on that walk alongside my parents and sister, during our daylong fast, under the brightening leaves of a New England fall, that I usually found the courage to say to each of them, “I’m sorry.” Sorry for the many failings over a year of life as a sister and daughter: sharp words, selfishness, impatience. Invariably, in these exchanges, whoever received the apology would accept it, and then say, “And I’m sorry too — do you forgive me?” Forgiving and forgiven, we walked on feeling brand new, no longer even noticing our hunger in the new lightness of our bodies.

There’s been a rash of fake apologies in the news recently, and I can’t imagine they make either the person who gives them or the person who receives them feel lighter. Has anyone ever “apologized” to you this way?:

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I’m sorry you took my words the wrong way.”

Do these declarations make you feel apologized to? Or do you feel as if they’ve not only failed to acknowledge any wrongdoing, but put the blame for what they did onto you?

I’ve read two articles in the past several weeks that claimed in the headlines, “So and so apologizes,” yet these are the statements I read quoted in the fine print that followed:

“In no way was [my statement] meant to demean him, and I'm sorry if he was offended.”²
“I am deeply sorry for the reactions … to a few passages of my address … , which were considered offensive.”³

The first was Senator George Allen supposedly apologizing to a man of Indian origins whom he singled out in a mostly-white Virginia crowd and called “Macaca,” a word that, in a language Allen speaks fluently, is a racial slur. But he did not apologize; he did not acknowledge having done anything wrong, nor offer amends. What he did was to blame the man he insulted for feeling offended. “I’m sorry I said something to offend him” would have been an apology and a repair of the breach that had been created; “I’m sorry he was offended” added insult to injury.

The second example was Pope Benedict XVI supposedly apologizing to Muslims for using Islam as an example of a religion that does not value reason. He has not acknowledged that he did anything wrong, saying only that these parts of his statement were “considered offensive,” which is undoubtedly the case. He has not offered an apology for his words, only expressing regret for others’ reactions to them.

Once you begin listening for these non-apologies, you hear them everywhere. The key is the subject of the sentence. “I’m sorry” sounds like the subject is “I,” but if it’s followed by “you,” watch out. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “I’m sorry you reacted the way you did.” The problem with such statements is that, being criticisms instead of words of apology, they pour gasoline on the flames instead of oil on the waters. They don’t accomplish one of the two main goals of asking forgiveness, which is repair of a relationship that has been strained. And they don’t accomplish the other, which is for the person who’s done wrong to make a positive change in him or herself.

To repent and ask forgiveness of someone else, you first need to acknowledge to yourself that you’ve done something wrong. Here, Judaism’s Yom Kippur tradition has another tool for us, the prayer of confession. In Yom Kippur services, the prayer is corporate: everyone speaks aloud, together, the sins of humanity. Some are universalÑwe have all been scornful at some point in the year, I’m bettingÑand some are mercifully unusual: few of us have committed murder. But we say them in the first person plural, “We have done these things. We have been scornful, we have murdered.”

Why “we” instead of “I”? Today I won’t get into the question of whether we are in fact responsible for the sins of others. Although as citizens of a democracy that has just this week explicitly legalized torture, we might ponder the question of whether we could honestly confess, “We have committed torture” … whether the world might not be a safer and better place if we did confess it and take responsibility for the sins carried out in our names and for our supposed security. But that will have to wait for another Sunday. Today is about personal responsibility, the things we have individually done with our own hands and our own lips.

The first person plural can help us take a step toward that responsibility by allowing us to say aloud what is very difficult to acknowledge even to ourselves. Holly Near, who wrote the song “Singing for Our Lives” that appears in our hymnal,⁴ tells of being thanked by lesbians and gay men for the line, “We are gay and straight together,” and for inviting audiences to sing along. For many of them, closeted and fearful, a concert at which they sang these words was the first time they ever said aloud, in public, “I am gay.” They might not have been able to say those words even privately if the word were “I”: but “We are gay,” with everyone, of whatever orientation, singing them together, made it possible to utter the words and break through the silence that trapped them. It released them from the lies that spoke with the voice of that silence.

So we may find for the first time, in saying “We have been stubborn,” that we have been stubborn. We may find, in saying “We have told lies,” that we have not always been honest. We may find, in saying, “We have betrayed,” that there have been times we spoke behind someone’s back or let a friend down.

The words “I am sorry” are some of the most difficult to say. Sometimes, as in the story Phyllis[, today’s Worship Associate,] told,⁵ they don’t need to be said aloud. With the people we know best, a touch, a smile, a return to working side by side may speak them for us. Sometimes the loudest way to speak them is simply to change. But always, they need to be acknowledged to ourselves, or the healing cannot happen and the change we long for will not take place.

Like the Yom Kippur service, Christian Sunday services have also traditionally contained a prayer of confession, a time when, aloud or silently, individually or corporately, we search our hearts and own what we have done that we believe is wrong and do not wish to do again. And Muslims, during this month of Ramadan, say prayers of repentance daily, owning their misdeeds and committing their hearts to a better way. It is ironic that we Unitarian Universalists do not routinely include prayers of confession in our services, we who believe so strongly that we can improve ourselves. What these other faiths, some of the sources of our own tradition, teach us, is that words of confession are not to be feared and avoided, but are to be welcomed as invaluable tools toward this end. How wonderful to pause now and then and say, “Yes, I have done wrong … and I can change!”

Confession takes courage, and like any brave act, once we do it, we feel powerful, capable of anything!

So let us take some time now to silently reflect on our year and confess to the hurtful things we have done that we hope not to do again. If it makes it easier, we can say to ourselves, “we” instead of “I.” The important thing is to know ourselves and honestly acknowledge our mistakes. We will enter that space of self-knowledge with the sound of the bell. When the bell sounds again, I will say the words of a Muslim prayer of repentance.

(ring bell)

(silence)

(ring bell)

From the Qu’ran: “Oh, that I had but a second chance, that I might be among the righteous!”⁶

We have a second chance. Having acknowledged in confession to ourselves and others what we regret, we can change. And the High Holidays of Judaism have a lovely ritual for making that intention concrete, a third tool of atonement that some of us used at today’s Family Chapel. We gathered on the lawn by the Peace Pole, and Darcey led us in this practice, called tashlich. In this simple ritual, carried out by Jews at this time of year for centuries, we reflected on our sins, and then, letting crumbs of bread symbolize what we wanted to release, we walked together to the creek and dropped the bread into the water. The water carried it away.

Tashlich is a ritual of letting go of our mistakes and our sins and freeing our hands to take up better works. In acknowledging and releasing the things we have done wrong, we release ourselves from them and embrace a second chance. If you missed it, I encourage you, when you go home, to take a crumb of bread, and go to the nearest running water. Fill the bread with everything you would like to let go of, and then let it go, and watch the water carry it from you.

Confessing to ourselves, apologizing to others, and releasing our past misdeeds, we repair some of the breaches in the relationships we treasure, and repair some of the flaws in ourselves. More whole, more like what we want to be, we feel as clean as if we had bathed in wild running water ourselves. What a lovely start to the year.

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