A few years ago, The New York Times published a front page story called "Portrait of Religion in U.S. Holds Dozens of Surprises." The first three lines of the article listed what the religion writer for The Times, considered surprises. He wrote:

The state with the highest proportion of atheists is Oregon. Most Americans of Irish ancestry are Protestant. Unitarians are more likely to be divorced than are members of other religious groups.

This caught my attention. Later in the article it said:

". . . the likelihood of being divorced is generally uniform across all religious groups. Roman Catholics, with 7.5 percent currently divorced, are only slightly lower than other mainstream Protestants and Jews, with 8.7 percent divorced. The Greek Orthodox have the lowest level of divorce (4.4 percent) and the Unitarians the highest (18 percent)."

Why do we have more divorced people in our churches? I do not think it is because we encourage divorce. Especially when children are involved, I am not a supporter of divorce as a solution to marital conflict. I believe that we who are parents have a duty to try to stay together. We share responsibility for the children we have brought into the world. At their best, Unitarian Universalist churches serve as a support system to encourage parents to stay together and work out their differences.

Still, I would never suggest that every couple should stay in a relationship, nor even that every couple with young children should stay married. Someone once said, "For every problem there is always a simple solution . . . and it is always wrong." I do not have a simple answer to apply to everyone when it comes to divorce. The fact that here in this church we try to treat all persons with respect may explain why twice as many divorced persons attend Unitarian Universalist churches than other churches.

I have a Unitarian Universalist friend who lives in another state. Years ago I attended his wedding at the Mount Vernon Unitarian Universalist Church in Virginia. About ten years later his wife left him. I asked my friend, if he were to come to church to hear a sermon on divorce, what would be most helpful. He said, "I would find it most helpful to hear a sermon on forgiving my ex-wife. I can get on with my own life, to grow and move forward, only as far as I can forgive her for leaving me. To the degree that I cannot forgive, I remain stuck."

This is my topic—"Forgiving Our Ex-Partner." I made the title ex-partner, because I wanted to include people who are single who have broken up with friends after a long relationship, and because I wanted to include gay men and women who also sometimes experience breakups with partners after long relationships.

As I started to do my research, reading and talking with people, I found that many people do not like the word forgiveness. A few years ago Unitarian Universalists held a conference on the topic of forgiveness. The Rev. John Buehrens, gave one of the talks and he told a story about James Luther Adams, a Unitarian professor. Once in the late 1940s when Adams was teaching ministerial students, he made them an offer. Any student who would listen to the most popular religious broadcast of the day, "The Lutheran Hour," and report a sermon that did not try to resolve all human problems in terms of "God's forgiveness" would win $10. It was a good deal of money—the equivalent of over one hundred dollars today. But no one ever collected. The phrase "God's forgiveness" was used every Sunday.

Forgiveness is such an overused word in traditional Christian sermons, for many people it has lost its meaning. Tony Larsen is the Unitarian Universalist minister in Racine and was another speaker at the conference on forgiveness. Tony, who was raised Roman Catholic, also talked about the overuse of the word. He said:

All my life I have been taught that you should always forgive people. When I was in a fight or an argument, my parents or teachers always told me to shake hands and make up. Never hold a grudge. . . . So I always tried to do it. Whenever I felt wronged, and I became angry, I would try to push those angry feelings away and say to myself, "I hold no grudge."

But you know, saying you hold no grudge . . . doesn't mean it's true. You can say anything you want—to yourself or to other people. But saying doesn't make it so.

. . . I think we do a disservice to adults [Tony said] when we tell them they should forgive people who have abused them. The minister who tells a battered woman that she should forgive her husband and take him back, no matter how much he beats her, because marriage is forever and good Christians always forgive, [is] wrong.

A Unitarian Universalist layperson, a man named Dwight Wolter, made the same point: "Preaching or even implying that people ought to forgive may actually do more harm than good." Mr. Wolter says that for many people, especially victims of abuse, saying that they should forgive seems to trivialize the real hurts suffered, and makes personal growth more difficult.(Quoted by John Buehrens in his paper.)

And still another person said: "Teaching forgiveness is hogwash. You'll turn everyone into benign, benevolent zombies. They'll all be too blissed out to function in the real world, where you need a good, strong suit of armor to make sure you don't get eaten alive." (Forgiveness, by Dr. Sidney B. Simon & Suzanne Simon, Warner Books, New York, 1990, page 13.)

When a word has been overused, as the word forgiveness appears to have been overused, it sometimes helps to use another word. I want to take a step back away from the word forgiveness. I want to suggest that for a moment we don't worry about forgiveness. Instead, I want to talk about the word understanding.

I suggest that if we better understand our ex-partners, we may be better able to heal the pain inside us, wrap up our unfinished business and put it behind us. In other words, I think it helps to try to understand our ex-partners and our relationships with them, not as a favor to them, but so we can let go of the past and get on with our lives.

How do we understand our ex-partner? We can look on it as a research project. We can look at the history and patterns in both our families. We can explore our memories of the relationship to better grasp what happened. We can read books about human behavior and they may help us gain insight into our ex-partner. We can talk to friends and relatives who know us both, or talk to people in the church who know us both, asking "What were your impressions of our relationship? What do you think was going on?" If drugs or alcohol were a problem in the relationship, we can learn from attending a group like Alcoholics Anonymous or Al-Anon. We can weigh and sift through all the information we gather, trying to make sense of it.

In my own life I have discovered that I am able to understand others only insofar as I am able to understand myself. If I work hard at it, the attempt to better understand an ex-partner becomes an attempt to understand all the mixed-up thoughts and feelings inside me. I have to breathe deeply and let my feelings of anger and fear come to the surface. I have to write or talk about those feelings. I have to explore where those feelings come from in my history. I look again at my relationship with my parents, my brother and sisters, my friends, my teachers. The better I am able to understand myself, understand the sources of my feelings and my motivations, the better I am able to understand others.

As we learn about what is going on inside us, we are better able to use our imagination to put ourselves inside our ex-partner and try to experience the world the way she or he does. With this understanding we are less likely to repeat the same patterns in a new relationship.

If we work on gaining self-understanding and if we use that self understanding to better understand our ex-partner, it may be that somewhere down the line we will be able to write a letter or say face to face to our ex-partner, "I know you did the best you could. If you could have done better, you would have." (Forgiveness, page 197.) I suggest that we might define this statement, "I know you did the best you could," as a healthy form of forgiveness.

In calling this forgiveness, I am defining forgiveness differently than it is often defined. To explain how I am using the word it helps to say clearly what forgiveness is not. One book on this subject gives a list of what forgiveness is not:

When I say forgiveness I do not mean forgetting, or approving, or absolving, or self-sacrifice. I mean understanding.

Imagine saying to a man or a woman that you once lived with, and tried to love, and now are separated from, "I know you did the best you could. If you could have done better, you would have." Being able to say this without the words getting stuck in your throat is what I call forgiveness.

I think this is a goal worth working for: to understand our ex-partners so well that we are able to look at them and say with sincerity, "I know you did the best you could. If you could have done better, you would have." When we have reached this point, we are able to move fully into a new relationship with someone else, having learned from the past. We are ready to risk love and intimacy again, without carrying inside us the baggage of anger from a previous relationship.

As stated in The New York Times, Unitarians are more likely to be divorced than are members of other religious groups. In my experience this is not because we Unitarian Universalists are more likely than other people to mess up our marriages. It is because our congregations do a better job in treating divorced persons with the value and worth they deserve.

I am a strong believer in marriage. But if you have gone through a divorce, know that here you will be treated with the same dignity and respect with which we treat everyone else. We work hard to make this church a support system for marriages. But if your relationship ends in separation, here we will not make you feel guilty. In this we are unusual among religions in America. Our effort to respect the dignity of others, regardless of their marital status, is something of which we can take pride in as a religious community.

In a community where we are treated with dignity and respect we feel stronger inside. Feeling stronger, we are better able to try to understand ourselves. As we grow in knowledge of ourselves, we are better able to understand our ex-partners and our relationship with them. As our understanding grows, we may at some point be able to say to them, "I know you did the best you could. If you could have done better, you would have." This is forgiveness.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
Tel: 301-493-8300    Fax: 301-897-5713
e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
Sunday Services at 10 a.m.
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