What kind of person forgives?

Themes: Forgiveness

I’m doing some thinking about the foundations of our practice of forgiving others, what I’m calling forgiveness’ ‘material conditions’. The practice of forgiveness occurs within relations between persons. As such it is derivative upon (although not completely determined by) the material conditions that enable personal existence. These conditions can be really quite fundamental things, like temporality and spatiality: conditions of our environment without which the concept of ‘relation’ (let alone ‘person’) would be unthinkable. Temporality provides an obvious case in point: the practice of forgiveness appears be a response to the irreversibility of the past. The past can’t be rewound and past wrongs uncommitted. If it could, the practice of forgiveness would not arise. And yet, the practice of forgiveness is not mandated by temporal irreversibility: other responses are possible and do exist. The practice of forgiveness thus also responds to various features of personal sociality that are founded upon these fundamental conditions: capacities like communication and memory. In some cases the limits of these capacities will also place limits on the practice of forgiveness. Memory might be a good example of this relationship: can something be forgiven that isn’t remembered somewhere in some fashion? But even here the relationship is more complex than it first appears. The physical, neural structures through which human memory functions may not only prescribe the limits of the practice of forgiveness, but also provide conditions that influence the shape of the practice. For example, if certain kinds of memory are laid down and recalled in temporal/narrative structures in the brain, forgiveness may be understood as a response to these structures and itself function as a form of narrative recontextualisation.

But then I ran into something interesting… the heritage of thinking about forgiveness, influenced by Christian and Jewish theology, has always assumed that the class of ‘persons’ who might engage in the practice of forgiveness would include divine persons as well as human. And (obviously) the material conditions under which these different kinds of persons operate are themselves (wildly!!) different. (Or are they?)

This then throws up a tension I keep struggling with in my work: the relative priority of divine or human practice for the study of the concept. I keep find myself pushing up against the limits of philosophy, wanting to cross over into theology, and facing the choice to self-censor.

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Forgiveness: Heads of Discussion

Themes: Forgiveness

Questions about how, when, why, and what to forgive have provided a staple of philosophical, theological, and practical moral inquiry ever since the Western cultural tradition developed out of the twin inheritances of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman thought. In fact, at a later stage in my project I hope to demonstrate that some of these questions are endemic to the Western tradition, and are generated by tensions within it. But while answers might seem difficult to settle upon, the questions most of us ask about forgiveness are fairly predictable and straightforward. I’ve attempted to summarise them under five ‘heads of discussion’. The first and second focus upon the nature of the practice of forgiveness, i.e., what sorts of things have to be done, said, believed, felt, etc., for forgiveness to occur? The third and fourth take us into the conceptual ecology of the practice, i.e., what other sorts of concepts does forgiveness relate to and depend upon? A fifth set of questions relate to the whether there is one particular practice which we can authoritatively label ‘forgiveness’ or are there a number of variously related practices which all lay claim to the name.

I’ve summarised these various heads of discussion as: Conditionality; Necessity; Teleology; The nature of wrong; and Conceptual plurality. Initially, I’m going to try to take you on a tour of the conceptual ‘zoo’. We’ll look at the discussions and theories that cluster around these five questions without seeking to come to any particular conclusions about which sets of answers might represent a normative version of forgiveness. Later, I’m going to make an argument that the first four of these questions are related to each other in such a way that a person’s answers to Q3 & Q4 will determine the shape of the practice of forgiveness described by someone’s answers to Q1 & Q2. But that’s for later…

1. Conditionality.
Conditionality is the ‘ur-question’ of forgiveness. I’m sure you’ve had to face it in some context: a friend who comes to you with the question, ‘can I really forgive someone who hasn’t expressed any remorse or repentance?’ The question has roots right back in the Biblical tradition: Peter asks,  ‘How many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?’ Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Should forgiveness be granted only on condition of the offender’s repentance? If so, doesn’t this weaken something in the concept, something most of us would acknowledge is noble and admirable, even if practically very difficult? Related to the question of conditionality is the problem of forgivable and unforgivable wrongdoing. Are there certain conditions under which forgiveness must not be granted, or in which forgiveness simply cannot be granted (for whatever reason)? We’ll go into more depth about the dimensions and proffered solutions to these puzzles in a later post.

… Thought Balloon

Initially it can appear odd that, while we find a diversity of answers among different groups of people (some will say a clear ‘yes’ in situations where others say a clear ‘no’), with many of the problems raised by the ‘conditionality’ of forgiveness for any particular individual or group the answers appear to be relatively unambiguous. But this is unsurprising, when we consider that people reflect upon the operational conditions for forgiveness by relying upon answers generated by a different (deeper?) set of moral commitments. Forgiveness is a derivative moral practice. It does not have a first-order moral authority, i.e., it is not something that appears to people as self-evidently right or wrong simply on the basis of its own appearance. Forgiveness is always a practice resting upon more deeply embedded ‘constitutive goods’ (to borrow from Charles Taylor). The process of reasoning from these prior moral commitments to a particular practice of forgiveness can be relatively straightforward, what matters more, for anyone wanting to achieve some broader consensus about the nature and conditions of the practice, is investigating these prior moral commitments themselves.

But here’s a thought: the fact that forgiveness is a derivative moral practice also makes it a communicative moral practice. Forgiveness captures the dimensions of its underlying constitutive goods in a particular way and communicates them, preserved in their distinctive inter-relationship,  to the recipient of the practice – the person forgiven. And it does this is a fashion that, under the right circumstances, is remarkably persuasive. Forgiveness is the communicative practice through which a particular moral vision transmits itself.

We have much more thinking to do about this…

Image by Alex E. Proimos

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Forgiveness: Concepts and Stories

Themes: Forgiveness

So I’m having another conversation about forgiveness. It’s a bit of an occupational hazard when word gets out you’re researching the topic for a PhD. The girl sitting across the table from me wants advice. I’ve never met her before but a friend put us in touch.

She wants to know how to forgive.

She doesn’t want to give me details. I don’t want to know. She’s upset. And frankly, I’m hopeless. We sit there, wrestling with the chasm that suffering has fixed between us. The only proper response to what she’s feeling would be to try to shoulder some of the burden, at least to give her a hug and acknowledge the reality of what she’s feeling by sitting there and listening. But she’s come to consult me as an expert, not as friend or counsellor. She wants the principles that, when appropriately applied, will provide a clear course in the sea of storms, through the cloud of unknowing and moral perplexity toward the island of forgiveness. What she needs is peace. What she wants is a programme.

And of course, I can’t provide it. In the first place, if you want a clear answer to a question, there is hardly anyone worse to talk to than a PhD student in the first years of their research. My whole time is currently bent towards uncovering the ‘questions’ of forgiveness rather than constructing answers. I sit in my thinking-chair with a giant ball of wool in my lap, the whole of human social experience, and I try to isolate the (sometimes) bright thread of a single practice we (sometimes) label ‘forgiveness’. And I feel my way along its knots and the places where it is intertwined with other threads, and I wonder whether this skein is a scarf or a dust bunny. The process of unpicking knots inevitably makes the ball grow bigger. I discover more connections between this practice of forgiveness and other human social practices. I’m more and more interested in the picture of the universe required to sustain a practice of forgiveness. The universe is quite large. Hard to get an accurate picture. Even harder to work out someone else’s picture. So people ask me, ‘forgiveness?’ and out comes an unset slurry of words, images, concepts, connections. Somewhere in that slurry may be an answer to ‘how?’ Maybe.

There’s another problem, however. It’s one that besets the social sciences in general. Namely, that human behaviour looks quite different when described from an ‘outside’, theorist’s perspective compared to an ‘inside’, actor’s perspective. Something inevitably seems to be lost when I try to take the experience of forgiving or being forgiven, and write it up as an abstract description of ‘forgiveness’. This is not to say that the experience is incommunicable. A story, a personal narrative, even a poem, may capture those lost, ‘non-abstractable’ aspects of human experience and transmit them remarkably well. But this is the genius of that sort of description: it allows us to enter into the concrete specificity of another person’s experience. In a somewhat mysterious double act of imagination, we are invited to step into another’s footwear, and to respond to the invitation by allowing our awareness, attention, affects, beliefs, and dispositions to take on the form suggested by the author. You come out of the cinema after having watched a great movie with a sense that your perspective on the world has been shaped, altered. You listen to the personal stories of victims who have engaged in forgiveness and you’re moved: attracted, repelled, inspired, disturbed. In some way, in this experience of ‘indwelling’ the story of the person, something about the nature of forgiveness has been communicated to you. But here’s the thing: these modes of communication use imagination to give us the ‘inside’ perspective, mediated certainly, but not through a process of abstraction. Telling stories, focussing experiences in poetic language, singing, dancing, shaping, all these media enable your experience of forgiveness to become, albeit briefly and with limitations, mine as well but without going through a process of deliberate de-contextualisation, of being given in abstract, before being translated back into my experience.

Please don’t hear me saying that these forms of ‘thick’ description enable an unmediated process of experience sharing. Communication, even non-verbal communication, requires that we employ discourse conventions that are prior to, shared, and constitutive of, our experiences. Communication requires ‘communion’ in something existing independently of either of us. In order to swap stories, we need to share a language; in order to share a sculpture or painting, we need to have some shared understanding of the rules of the artistic discourse. Mediation is an irreducible aspect of communication. I want to distinguish, however, between this inherent ‘generalising’ involved in communication, and one of the specific uses to which we put verbal-linguistic communication: namely conceptual abstraction.

Well, so what? If something about the experience of forgiveness is invariably lost when we move from imaginative discourse to conceptual abstraction, why bother with the abstract?

But then, why do we tell each other stories about forgiveness? Lots of reasons probably: aesthetic, performative; but among them is the possibility that these shared experiences will provide guidance for future and further acts of forgiveness. Come back with me for a minute to the conversation we began with: the girl who wants to know how to forgive. Imagine that she had begun by telling me her story, the situation of harm that had provoked her question, her feelings, her struggle to know what to do and how to move on. It would have been appropriate for me to respond in kind: to tell her about times when I’ve been hurt, how I felt, what I did to respond; in short, to tell her my own story of forgiveness. Part of our attempt to move toward an answer to her question, ‘how do I forgive?’ would involve us both in a process of swapping and comparing experiences in the form of personal narratives. But here’s the thing: as we swap and share, we inevitably begin an informal process of abstraction. We work together to understand what elements of my experience were not essential to the practice of forgiveness, and therefore, not essential to the practice she will engage in, if she chooses to forgive. We work together to strain out the elements of my story that were ‘just me’, and work out the elements of my experience that seem to shed genuine light on what is essential to an appropriate practice of forgiveness in her time and place. We are working together to make my experience of forgiveness ‘portable’. But the more portable we make our experiences by removing the specific details of my time and place and incorporating relevant elements generalised from other people’s experiences, i.e., the more abstract we make the concept, the less our conceptual description has the quality of an ‘inside’ perspective. And the further our conceptual description moves from that inside perspective, the harder it becomes to move back from the portable, abstract concept to the concrete things that have to be said, done, felt, or believed, in order for forgiveness to have occurred in our particular time and place. So, here’s the problem: the more we make our account of forgiveness applicable to everybody and every case, the less it gives us to work with when we want to know ‘how’ in any particular case.

Do I give my conversation partner a set of principles, thinking that this tells her how to forgive? But principles without a story aren’t much help. We need that inside perspective. Do I tell a story about forgiveness? But then, how do we know whether my story (or hers) is a story about forgiveness without a set of principles to check it against?

Image by TheeErin

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Love in Inconstant Times

Themes: Forgiveness, Love, Selections

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI)

The young love to fall in love in spring. It’s not hard to understand why. One hundred million tons of sap leap into the air, erupting into leaves and flowers. Pulses quicken, sleepers awake. There is an ozone in the atmosphere, like the afterburn of lightning, the smell of resurrections. The intoxicating madness of it all masks the madness of falling in love. It is a seasonal form of Dutch courage, a pull from the whiskey flask before barrelling out of the trenches and into the discriminating exposure of bullets. Spring is when Kings march out to War. Spring is when the froth in his blood just might make a young man risk a blushing rebuff to hear himself say the words, “So…
…”
Or reach across the acres of armrest in a darkend theatre, the outstretched finger of faith, to discover a hand that says ‘yes’. And in that touch, in that minutest square millimetre of epidermis, to discover one hundred million tons of sap rushing, leaves and flowers leaping, suns dying and rising, a hail of bullets and a surgeons knife. And he sits there in the dark with his barest fingerhold on love, and shakes and shakes and forgets to breathe.

Summer is for camping out, for savouring love, watching its colours turn to deep and green, while the land and air rock and uphold you. Summer is full of the self-forgetfulness upon which love thrives.

Later, when the air is hard-edged and the truth is plain, in Winter, we put the games away because we have less need for fun, and more joy of each other. We carry each other’s love around with us: your smell in my scarf, your embrace in the heaviness of my coat, your hand in my pocket. I grow old every winter. We bed the fire down in its hearth and sit by and doze.

But how do we love in Autumn?
It’s my favourite, but the most difficult of seasons. It’s the season least conducive to love. With a great sigh, the leaves relinquish their last hold and fall. Their breath swirls through the streets, early with darkness. Those who can hear surprise themselves weeping. And a man’s thoughts turn to doubting. It’s an acquired taste I suppose.
How do we love in Autumn?
With constancy. In the season of swirling, lovers hold themselves steady. Constancy is a form of attention that resists the autumnal impulse toward introspection by turning our gaze outward onto another. In a loving constancy, we pledge ourselves to a fundamental steadiness in this relationship: to constancy in pursuit (not trying to win a woman’s heart one week and being cold to her the next); to constancy in forgiveness (when a bloke blows hot and cold to you); to constancy of seeking good (not conditional on how you’re feeling or how it is received); to constancy of receiving good (not placing conditions on how we respond to each other, weighing past rights and wrongs before delighting in a renewed attention).

What is the first positive assertion Paul ventures about love in 1 Cor 13?
“Love is patient.”
And what is the last?
“Love never ends.”

Constancy is the very essence of bravery, it makes soldiers into heroes, sinners into martyrs, and ordinary self-absorbed, crummy men and women into lovers.

But I think you can only really be constant in love when you know at the core of your being that what matters most about you is safe. You can’t be constant in love when you are constantly worried about protecting yourself from being hurt by lovers. However, the answer isn’t reckless self-disregard: martyrs aren’t suicides. Rather, they confess to us, along with the Apostle Paul, “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3 NIV). The real you, the one part you can’t afford to lose, is permanently and constantly safe. Whatever you might risk in love, you are not risking that. Whatever regard, or lack thereof, in which you are held; whatever heart-wrenching part of you might be broken when she loves you for a while but turns away; even if it breaks you so completely that it touches all your ability to ever love again – and that could happen – you are safe.

Christians are like most people in the world in that we aren’t really sure Who We Are (in the biggest sense of that question). But Christians are completely unlike other people in trusting that someone else does. Even if I become completely demented and my sense of self is utterly lost to me and others, I believe in Jesus. I believe that he remembers me, that he knows my true name. And when he speaks my name, I will remember myself. Perfect love drives out fear. “We love because He first loved us.” (1John 4:19 HCSB)

One more thing: constancy always needs honesty. Honesty gives constancy its value. Love without truth is always morally questionable. It’s the difference between forgiveness and indulgence. The constancy of God’s love for us is not that he ignored our sins, but that he forgave them. Forgiveness combines constancy-in-love with clear eyed honesty. Without the honesty, God’s love for us would always be morally questionable, or open to the suspicion that one day he might get sick of the lies and stop loving.
I think its the same for us. If constancy in love isn’t accompanied by truthfulness about our pains and delights, we will always be under suspicion that our love is just a sophisticated tolerance, or masochism, or an abuse of the other by preventing their change and growth toward the good. Constancy without honesty always leaves us doubting: if the truth were spoken would we still love the same?
And if we are to be good lovers in an Autumn season, there must be no room for doubts.

For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I will know fully,
as I am fully known.
Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
(1Corinthians 13:12–13 HCSB)

 

Image by geraldbrazeil

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29 years, 373 days…

Themes: Forgiveness, Selections

Pains tend to run much more deeply into us than our pleasures. A true pain never really seems to leave you. It can always come back, fresh and revivified, even when the details fade from your memory. Suddenly, you’re right back there again. Even the greatest pleasures only ever come back as ‘memories of pleasure’. Why did God make us like that?

It took me a long time to understand how God loves me. When I was young I had the implicit belief that God loved me because of who I am. But when I grew older I did so many awful things to others, and to myself, and had enough awful things done to me, that I couldn’t believe this anymore.
I could only see two options: that God loved me inspite of who I am; or that he didn’t love me.

For years I would waver between the two possibilities. Often I believed that God didn’t love me – I believed that he did love other people, and that he was good, holy, and just. That he deserved to be worshipped and glorified – I actively sought to bring other people into his kingdom, but secretly I thought I would be left outside. It was a faith without hope.
Other times I believed he did love me, but only in spite of me. I was too screwed up for anything else. But at the same time secretly I wondered whether this was genuine love. Surely you don’t really love someone, if you love them in spite of who they are? A parent who consistently told their child that they loved them like that would be nothing short of abusive. Still, I thought this way quite a lot – I believed that God’s love was real, but it wasn’t real love of me as me. It sort of slipped past me and went to an idealised target, a ‘me’ which God could see but that I couldn’t.
I don’t think that’s love, it’s just romanticism.

I learned love the hard way. I learned it by being forgiven. To be forgiven is to be cut so deeply that you think it’s gone right through your heart. Until you’re confronted with forgiveness, you’ve never had to face up to the reality of what you’ve done, of who you are as the do-er. It’s only in the light of that love, only as you look at yourself in the eyes of someone else who really knows you beyond any possibility of pretence, who knows you as their own personal Betrayer, Wounder, Sinner – it’s only in the eyes of a particular someone who is forgiving you that you can really be told who you are.
It’s only in the incredible love that your Forgiver bears for you, it’s only through the impossible sacrifice that forgiveness requires, that you can accept their witness against you as your own deepest truth.
You can’t know anything more painful than that you are genuinely and deeply forgiven.
And that’s the only kind of pain that can reach deeply enough to touch and heal all the others.

Forgiveness transforms the pains and wounds of sin. Now someone else has freely chosen to bear that pain with me and for me. In forgiving, he has said to me, “I accept your wound, not because it was right, but because I love you.”
The wounds I gave which wounded me have been carried off.
The wounds which were given me have been bound up by his bottomless ‘Yes’ to me, and ‘No’ to sin.
And now, every scar I bear, no matter how deep they run, has become an occasion in which I know his love again. I cannot feel the pain like I did. It’s not the same pain.
And now I can also accept that those pains and scars are really me, and that he really loves me as me, in those pains and scars which were and are still mine, but now are his. He really knows me, he really sees me, he really loves me, AS ME,
because his love makes me, me.
There is nothing left over.
I only wish I could live this out better.

My soul, praise the LORD,
and all that is within me, praise His holy name.
My soul, praise the LORD,
and do not forget all His benefits.

He forgives all your sin;
He heals all your diseases.
He redeems your life from the Pit;
He crowns you with faithful love and compassion.
He satisfies you with goodness;
your youth is renewed like the eagle.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is His faithful love
toward those who fear Him.

Psalm 103 (HCSB)

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Pray for Kenya

Themes: Forgiveness, Places, Prayer, Sin, St Philip's

This morning I got up early to join the weekly prayer meeting for our Church, we meet down stairs in the Parish lounge. Our Church has all kinds of struggles and difficulties, but it has some wonderfully welcoming and committed people, and, not unrelated to that, it has a small group who faithfully pray together every week. Usually I can’t make the time because I need to be on the train to college.

tangent Just on a tangent for a moment, if anyone is moving to Sydney and looking for a new Church, give a thought to joining us at St Philip’s. We have more opportunities for the gospel than we can handle with our small team. Don’t settle for dogmatic slumbers in the suburbs – go to a Church on the mission field! Having said, that probably every Church feels the same way, and if you have better reasons to be somewhere else, I guess that’s ok…
still, we really need you. /tangent

I happened to hear a report on Kenya on the BBC world service last thing before I dropped off to sleep last night, and was deeply disturbed by one particular interview. I downloaded it and listened again this morning. It is completely heartwrenching.

I’ve extracted a portion of the audio (about 20secs) here.

You can listen to the whole report here:

A number of people were praying for Kenya this morning, we support some link missionaries over there. As we sat there in prayer, I had the realisation that all around the world at the moment there are Christian men and women petitioning God for the lives and safety of the people of that country. It’s very bad, very ugly over there, but I wonder what it would be without the prayers of the saints.
The little philosopher part of me gets anxious about stating propositions that have no conditions for falsification, but as a Christian I only know how grateful I am that He has left some salt in this world.

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