I watched the television show about our Unitarian Universalist sex education program last Wednesday night and it occurred to me that the story offered many opportunities for forgiveness.

The explicit film strips used in the "About Your Sexuality" class outraged three parents of teenagers at the Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts. These parents accused the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, of committing child abuse by showing pornography. They were so upset that they took their complaints to their local chief of police and to the district attorney.

Apparently the parents wanted the authorities to file criminal charges against people in the church. When this approach failed, the offended parents went to the press. Most journalists who were approached felt that the story was not newsworthy. However, the three parents were successful in getting CBS to broadcast their complaints to the entire nation.

Frankly, when I watched one of the accusers start to cry on television last week, I could feel my own rage well up inside me. We live in a time when people who claim the role of the victim often come out the winner in a public power struggle. This mother, crying on television, appeared to be the victim of insensitive and irresponsible actions by Unitarian Universalists. Her tears gave power to her charges, and they made Unitarian Universalists look bad. The program did not show other victims:

• CBS did not interview any crying teenagers who became pregnant or were HIV positive because neither their church nor their parents taught them about human sexuality.
• CBS did not interview any crying gay teenagers who are ridiculed by other teenagers, teenagers who were not taught by their church or by their parents to show respect for the different manifestations of human sexuality.
• CBS did not interview any crying teenage girls who have been raped by boys, boys who were never taught by their church or by their parents to treat young women with respect.

Instead the three parents who were shocked by the photos claimed victim status. Their attack on Unitarian Universalism has had a negative impact on the religious movement I believe in and to which I have devoted my life.

Can I forgive these people who attacked our religious movement last week? Is forgiveness a healthy response to such an experience?

For Jews this time of year includes religious rituals in which they ask for forgiveness. Following the afternoon service of Rosh Hashana, Orthodox Jews visit a body of water and recite Biblical verses expressing repentance and forgiveness of sins. One verse includes words from Micah: "Thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea" (Micah 7:19). The ritual at one time called for Jews to feed bread crumbs to fish to symbolize the wiping out of humanity's past sins. Today, Jews sometimes reflect this custom by turning their pockets inside out and brushing small particles into the water.

Forgiveness also is a popular theme in Christian sermons. In the late 1940s, James Luther Adams was teaching Unitarian ministerial students in Chicago. Adams 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 through "God's forgiveness" would win $10. It was a good deal of money, the equivalent of more than $100 today. Nevertheless, no one ever collected. The radio ministers used the phrase "God's forgiveness" every Sunday.

What Adams was suggesting is that forgiveness is an overused word in traditional Christian sermons; for many people it has lost its meaning. Tony Larsen is the Unitarian Universalist minister in Racine, Wisconsin. Tony, who grew up Roman Catholic, talks about the overuse of the word forgiveness. He said:

A Unitarian Universalist layperson, Dwight Wolter, makes 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 trivializes the real hurts suffered and makes personal growth more difficult.

Still another person, quoted in a book called Forgiveness, 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."

Because of these negative reactions, I am tempted to change the title and the direction of this sermon. I want to take a step back from the word forgiveness. For a moment I do not want to focus on forgiveness. Instead, I want to talk about the word understanding.

In my experience, if I better understand people who have hurt me, I may be better able to heal the pain inside me. If I understand the people who have harmed me, I can wrap up my unfinished business and put the hurt behind me. In other words, I try to understand people who have hurt me, not as a favor to them, but so I can let go of the past and get on with my life.

How do I understand people who have hurt me? I look on it as a research project. I look at the history and patterns in their families. I explore my memories of the relationship to grasp what happened. I read books about human behavior. The books may help me gain insight into the people who have offended me. I 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?" I can weigh and sift through all the information I gather, trying to make sense of it.

I have discovered that I can understand others only as far as I can understand myself. If I work hard at it, the attempt to understand someone who has hurt me 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 discuss 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 can understand myself, understand the sources of my feelings and my motivations, the better I can understand others.

As I learn about what is going on inside me, I am better able to use my imagination to put myself inside the person who harmed me. I try to experience the world the way she or he does. With this understanding, I am less likely to repeat the same patterns in new relationships.

If I work on gaining self-understanding and if I use that self-understanding to understand the person who has harmed me, perhaps somewhere down the line I can write a letter or say face-to-face to the person who has harmed me, "I know you did the best you could. If you could have done better, you would have." I 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 we often define it. To explain how I am using the word, it helps to say clearly what forgiveness is not. In a book on this subject, Suzanne and Sidney Simon give a list of what forgiveness is not:

• Forgiveness is not forgetting. Past experiences and even the pain they cause have a great deal to teach me, so that I do not repeat the same pattern in my next relationship.
• Forgiveness is not approving. By trying to understand others, I am not saying that their actions were acceptable. True understanding cannot occur when I am in any way denying, minimizing, justifying, or condoning the actions that harmed me.
• Forgiveness is not absolution. When I try to understand others, I am not absolving them of responsibility for their actions.
• Forgiveness is not a form of self-sacrifice. In truly trying to understand others and what happened in the relationship, I do not swallow my feelings. I try to get in touch with my feelings and learn from them.

When I say forgiveness, I do not mean forgetting, or approving, or absolving, or self-sacrifice. I mean understanding. Being able to say "I know you did the best you could; if you could have done better, you would have," without the words getting stuck in my throat is what I call forgiveness.

To return to the example that I started with, for me to forgive those three people who have brought such negative publicity to Unitarian Universalism, I need to try to understand them. This is hard because I do not know much about them. For some reason, they are uncomfortable with their teenagers seeing pictures of explicit sexual activity. I can only speculate as to the reason.

Perhaps their parents taught them that such pictures were evil, bad, dirty and that no teenager should be permitted to see them. Perhaps in the past, these three adults have lived in such a sheltered world that they are unaware that today many teenagers can see far more explicit pictures watching cable television. Perhaps a family member or a friend or a stranger has abused them, and therefore they have a heightened sensitivity to issues involving sexuality. Thus when they heard their teenager describe the pictures they had seen, the description was like waving a red flag in their faces. Any one of these reasons could explain the intense anger these parents felt and led them to cry sex abuse to the chief of police, the district attorney, and eventual to national television.

If the people around me had taught me that such pictures were evil, if I had never seen anything like them before, or if someone had abused me, I can imagine that I might have reacted the same way these three adults did. Knowing that this might be behind their actions, I can imagine saying to them, "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 my throat is what I call forgiveness.

Of course, some of you may be thinking: "I have studied people who have hurt me. I know that they did not do the best they could. I know they could have done better." I have thought these thoughts myself on more than one occasion.

Whenever someone else hurts me, I go through a process of grief. What am I grieving? What I have lost, and what I grieve, are the expectations I had inside me. I expected this person to be different than they turned out to be. I imagined that they see the world more like I do. I imagined that they would be more reliable, more reasonable, more trustworthy, in keeping with my definitions of the words reliable, reasonable, and trustworthy. When I say "I know they did not do the best they could," perhaps I am really saying, "I refuse to let go of my expectations!"

Forgiveness is the act of understanding myself and others well enough that I can let go of my unrealistic expectations. For example, I expect parents of teenagers taking the "About Your Sexuality" class not to be shocked by the photos of people engaged in sexual activity. I expect that if they have a problem with the 25-year-old class, they would work out the problem in conversation with the church leadership. I would not expect them to go to the police or the press crying child abuse. When I say, "They did not do the best they could!" I am really saying, "I expected them to be different persons than they were." However, it turns out that my expectations are unrealistic. Forgiveness requires that I give up my unrealistic expectations of others.

When I study the life of other persons, as I learn more about them, as I learn more about their relationships with their parents and their brothers and sisters, as I learn about their dreams and their struggles, I gain greater understanding of who they are. Gradually I replace my naive expectations with expectations that are closer to reality. Forgiveness is the act of gaining knowledge and developing realistic expectations of others.

I think this is a goal worth trying to achieve: to understand others so well that I can 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 I have reached this point, I can move on with my life, having learned from the past. I am ready to risk living my life again, without carrying inside me the baggage of anger from a previous offence.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, traditional Jews ask and accept forgiveness from each other for past offenses. Obtaining forgiveness from others signifies God's forgiveness. During the Yom Kipper service, praying together, the congregation acknowledges God and asks forgiveness for sins they have committed. Having given and received forgiveness, they can enter the new year free of the baggage of the past.

In the same spirit, may each of us forgive and be forgiven so that we may let go of our unrealistic expectations of ourselves and of others and move forward with our lives. We make mistakes, we hurt others, and others make mistakes and hurt us. However, each of us is trying to do the best that we can do. Knowing this, may we forgive ourselves and each other for our faults and imperfections.

Source:
Forgiveness, by Dr. Sidney B. Simon & Suzanne Simon, Warner Books, New York, 1990.

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