“Between Faith and the Un-forgiven Feeling”
Rev. Greg Ward
Unitarian Universalist Metro Atlanta North
October 9th, 2005

Meditation:
On New Year’s eve, 1995 Everett Worthington Jr.’s elderly mother was murdered in her home by two young burglars. 

“Something terrible has happened,” was how the conversation with his brother began.  Then the details.  The ransacked house.  The strewn body.  The blood on the carpet and walls.  It all seemed too much to face. 

As Everett began preparing for the trip from Richmond to Knoxville with his sister and her husband, he hustled to and fro, throwing things in a suitcase, numbing his feelings with the narcotic of action.  It wasn’t until he sat down, and listened to his wife read to his two daughters from a book that ‘nana’ read to them when they were just girls.   He struggled, but maintained his composure.  Until he caught sight of his preteen daughter awash in tears, and then he broke down and wept. 

On the drive down to Knoxville, Everett and his sister reflected on the good and bad times they’d had with their mother.  Everett recalled a few months prior when he was a guest on a radio talk show.  As the show was winding down, the interviewer cut in saying, “I think we have time for one more caller – but this is a special one.”  Everett recalled the voice that came on – the slow, soft, East Tennessee drawl of his mother.  “Sonny,” came the familiar sound of his childhood nickname – “I’ve been listening to you,” she said.  “I just wanted you to know, you’re a good boy, Sonny.” 

Everett returned from the nostalgia of the story to the car they were riding in, to the sound of his sister crying … to the inescapable reality they were both driving toward.

He had his body pointing in the right direction.  He even managed to get his head and hands to steer.  But his heart was still breaking.  At least his heart was hitting the breaks – trying to hold him back - for the same reason ours does when we’ve been hurt.   When he knew the next thing we would have to do is to accept what we can’t imagine.  Let go of what we can’t lose.  So we hold on to whatever we can.  Sometimes a figment of the real thing.  And we don’t let go.  We don’t let go of the person.  Or the love.  But we also don’t let go of the hurt.  The resentment.  Even the rage.  Some of what we don’t let go of are the very things that allow us to move on.  And we don’t let go because we don’t know if we can. 

Later, as he listened to the investigating officers speculate about the circumstances, Everett Worthington, Jr. convinced himself it was okay to rage.  He listened to them say that their mother had been struck with a crowbar.  “Probably burglars who she surprised,” the officers guessed.  Again, he struggled, but maintained composure.  Until a barely audible whisper escaped his lips.  “I’d like to have him alone for 30 minutes with a baseball bat…”  He was a quite rational man and  reticent about letting himself rage.  “I’d beat his brains out,” he continued, not even aware he could be heard.  Until his brother chimed in that he would only need 10 minutes.  His sister said she’d take two hours – to make it last longer.  It takes a different amount of time for all of us.

That night – and for many nights which followed – the rage continued.  It came with questions of revenge – and whether that would bring satisfaction.  A deep alienation with youth, with the city, with trust in general began to creep in.  And with it came questions of the world he lived in – his relationship to it.  Questions of acceptance, forgiveness and whether he could he really ever find peace – or sleep – again.   Images continued to flood his brain that made him wonder.  What if they found the killers?  Would he ask for the death penalty?  Could he even listen to their explanation?  Try to understand them?  Let go of the resentment.  The anger.  The pain.  Could he forgive?  

Could you?  Could we?  What would it take? 

Sermon:

Let me cut to the chase and tell you how this sermon ends.  Everett Worthington, Jr. forgave the young boys who murdered his mother.  He never let go of the love he had for her.  Or his memories of her.  But he did let go of the rage.  The callousness.  The distrust.   He found peace without having to close his heart.  He found solace without having to stop reminiscing about what his mother meant to him or protect himself by suspecting all similar looking young people of ill intent.  He isn’t kept awake by questions of ‘why?’ or ‘what if?’ or by images of that evening.  Everett Worthington, Jr., despite being deeply hurt by a horrible crime, turned out just fine.

I can’t tell you how Everett Worthington, Jr. did it exactly – how he managed to get through the hurt and pain of his life without becoming bitter or resentful.  If you’d like to know the details, he has written a number of books which describe what went on for him that night and the weeks and months that followed.  He has many more books about the ideals and the process he followed on his way to healing and forgiveness.   I didn’t read a lot about his approach or his experience.   You’d think I would have.  Since today I’m talking about forgiveness.  But this sermon isn’t about Everett Worthington, Jr. and how he got past his hurts.  It’s about us - and how we get past ours.

I don’t think it’s essential to learn exactly how Everett Worthington, Jr. got through his ordeal.  It could simply be character.  Or it could be the years of training and clinical experience that Dr. Everett Worthington, Jr. had as a psychologist.  Or perhaps it was his years of study in reconciliation counseling as a couple’s therapist.  Or it might just be the half dozen articles and books he had written on forgiveness even before that fateful night.  But I thought that if we knew all this about him, we might conclude that his ability to heal and forgive was more understandable.  Or less relevant.  All his training might let us off the hook.  Give us permission to stop feeling inadequate – for him only taking a year to forgive two young boys for murdering his mother while we still spend most of Thanksgiving Dinner each year harping on resentments with our siblings about who granddad said should cut the turkey next year – and granddad’s been dead for twenty-eight years!

But it might do us well to know that, even with all his background and training, Dr. Everett Worthington Jr. still struggled with forgiveness in the days that followed.  It may help to know that he still questioned every study, every anecdote, every bit of wisdom he’d learned when it came down to his own time of testing.  Nothing was automatic.  Nothing routine.  He still had to push himself to do what he didn’t want to do.  He still, in the end, had a hard time sticking to his principles and living them out.

During his struggle, he knew that no one could see in his room tossing and turning in his sleep.  He knew no one would know what he was thinking in his head as long as he kept saying what he’d taught himself to say.  He knew that no one was looking at what he was writing on his heart, only what he was writing in his books.  But as someone famous once said, “Character is forged from what we do when no one is looking.” 

So maybe it was simply character.  Or maybe it was the principles that character forces us to stick to.  It’s hard to say exactly what it is.  But it’s easy to see that no matter what it is it’s hard to do. 

I became aware of just how hard during my recent sabbatical.  It had been more than a year – almost two – since the breaking off of my engagement.  And the hurt – and resentment – was still there.  I realized I had spent that time since it happened numbing myself with the narcotic of action – keeping busy.  And when the reason for all that busy-ness stood aside, the pain I had tried to ignore was still there.

All of us have been hurt.  Had our heart broken, our dreams stepped on.  Had our image of ourselves sullied – sometimes by a careless passerby who wasn’t even aware of doing it.  Sometimes where the intent contributes to the pain.  Creates betrayal beyond embarrassment.  Anyone who has lived long enough experiences it. 

We are all asked to ‘get over it.’  Find a way to return to a belief that it is all worth it.  A place where we are ready to start reaching out again.  Being vulnerable.  Take a chance with the same circumstances, the same world – sometimes even with the same people – that had once hurt us.  We all – no matter where we come from or from where we forge our values – are familiar with some principle that calls us toward forgiveness.  And we all have the character to listen to those principles.  But just like Everett Worthington, Jr., we all spend a little time holding that imaginary baseball bat.  And just like his siblings, the time we feel we need to hold on to that bat may vary.

The time it takes varies for different reasons.  Sometimes it’s a matter of not knowing how.  We don’t know how to let go of the big hurts because we never took the time to practice very much with the little ones.  So the big ones seem too much to face.  It’s like C.S. Lewis said, “If you want to learn about forgiveness, it’s usually better to start with something easier than the Gestapo.”

But most of us usually know what it takes.  Some of what forgiveness requires.  We know that it involves listening.  It requires understanding.  It means we cultivate a certain level of compassion that can only be born out of extending ourselves to imagine – even experience – someone else’s circumstances.  Face their choices the way they would face them.  We know that it’s really about making time, making room for empathy.  We know it’s ultimately about love.

And because all of us in the room are smart, we usually come to this realization very early on.  We know it’s ultimately about love very early on.  Even when we pick up that imaginary bat.  And most of us knowing we are ultimately being called to empathy and understanding often say, ‘To hell with that!  I’m going to swing this bat a few times and see if that works!”  It doesn’t.  But we feel better.  For a little while, anyway.

And then eventually the bat starts to feel heavy.  And we get tired of swinging.  So we set the bat down.  And yet we still feel tired.  And thinking its from all that swinging, we figure that we’ll just wait awhile.  Give it some time. 

But it doesn’t seem to go away.  We then begin to rationalize, saying to ourselves that getting hurt is just the price of life.  We have to live with it.  That can prompt many of us to go back over to the bat rack, return to step one and take a few more swings.  “Dirty, no good, rotten… if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t be…”  And we return to the resentment all over again. 

For some people it can take lifetimes before we realize that we’re tired not because the person who hurt us is still hanging on to us.  But that we’re still hanging on to them.  In all likelihood, they let go a long time ago – if they ever held on in the first place.  It’s us who continue to carry them around like little invisible baggage we carry them around in our lives.  And all the swinging and fighting and cursing with them doesn’t get us anywhere because the problem is not ‘out there’ at all.  But we play games with ourselves to help us think it is.

One of the best ones is a game described by Jack Handy.  We imagine the person who hurt us and as we do we light a stick of dynamite.  Then we call them on the phone and hold the burning fuse to the receiver and say, ‘Here that?... That’s dynamite, baby!’”  We find this strangely satisfying.  Usually for much longer than it would seem necessary, until it becomes clear that we are the ones who are taking the brunt of the malice.  It’s like they say, ‘Holding on to resentment is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

And the price we pay for this is time.  Time of living with hurt.  Time that could spent in better ways.  We often think we’re managing just fine – with all this invisible baggage strapped to us.  We don’t even seem to realize that it’s getting in the way.  But we also can’t quite explain why we can’t seem to ever get as close to people as we want to.  Why when we reach out to people, when we want to pull them close to us, there is something in the way.  Sometimes, for some of us, it can last a lifetime.  All on account of one hurt we allowed to go unresolved years ago. 

It’s like composer William Walton once said, “Refusing to let go of our unresolved hurts is like getting stung to death by one bee.” 

I know some of us have experienced this in a religious sense.  Some of us feel like we were stung by our religious upbringing.  We were hurt by what we feel was guilt or shame that was imposed upon us at a very young age.  And we’ve carried it around for years since - even to the point where we work it in to our new religion.  I’ve even heard, over the years, a few people who think that part of what it means to be Unitarian Universalist is to nurture and carry a healthy disdain for other religions.  It’s sometimes possible to identify them at general assemblies because they are the ones with the buttons on their shirt saying, “I’m a recovering Catholic… or recovering Baptist or other religion. 

But Suzanne Meyer, one of our prominent UU ministers points out that “when you ask them how old they were when they left the Catholic or Baptist church they will say something like, ’16.’  And when you ask them how old they are now they will tell you, ’54.’”  At some point we have to admit that we’ve given up on recovery and just learned to live with dis-ease.  But we don’t always realize the price that we pay.

“When we [continue to resent our] enemies,” Dale Carnegie reminds us, “we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our resentment is not hurting them at al, but it is turning our days and nights into a hellish turmoil.”

Most of us came to Unitarian Universalism from other religious denominations were very happy to find us.  Most were grateful for the freedom to choose from a number of faith stances instead of the single stance offered by their previous tradition.  But the drawback is that in coming to UU it is sometimes easy to drop the discipline of faith for the benefit of freedom.  The drawback is that we sometimes forget is that it is not the freedom which we ultimate use to make sense of our hurts and choose to love again – it’s the faith.  We get lost in the freedom of exploring so many different faiths, instead of going very deep into any one.  As critics of our movement sometimes say, ‘we are a mile wide and an inch deep.’

But when it comes to forgiveness, the problem is that our hurts often run very deep.  And even the smaller hurts, when left unaddressed for years, sink down into hidden parts of our hearts.  We need a faith that will go deep enough to reach our hurts.  Not the freedom to run here and there trying to escape them.  We need a faith that will turn our heads and get our lives moving in a different direction.  A direction that seeks not protection.  But love.  That calls us to seek not revenge, but forgiveness.  That requires not avoidance but a new commitment.

During sabbatical, while I wrestled with letting go of the hurt around my broken relationship, I discovered that the key for me was not freedom, but faith.  Not time, but focus.  Not breadth, but depth.  It didn’t mean learning something I didn’t know.  It meant summoning the character to wrestle with the principles that were quite familiar to me.  But wrestle with them on a much deeper level than I had been willing to do before. 

And I didn’t have to look far.  It was in our very first principle.  Affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  Something I’d said a million times.  Something I taught and preached.  But something that I discovered required great character to live out when wrestling with a hurts that go to the core of our being.  In wrestling with our first principle, I discovered that two things were hard for me.

The first was not in the affirming and promoting part.  Not in the inherent worth and dignity part.  It was in the ‘every person’ part.  I kept looking for the asterisk or the disclaimer.  The fine print that would remind me that the principle was really talking about ‘every person except that no good, low-down, back-stabbing, promise-breaking person who broke my heart.’  But I looked and looked and it was no where to be found.  The more I searched – the more I studied – the more I realized that it really said, ‘every person.’ 

But that’s when it got even harder.  That’s where I discovered I had to go much deeper.  Because ‘every person’ also meant me. 

And I realized part of my struggle – a good part – had a hard time letting go of the hurt that I had incurred because part of me wondered if the slight, if the betrayal, if the hurt, was somehow deserved.  Part of me still struggled to have faith in my own inherent worth and dignity.  Part of me had a hard time offering forgiveness because I didn’t feel forgiven. 

And I began to realize a new way of looking at Yom Kippur.  Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar which asks us to find atonement – or achieve at-one-ment with God by first seeking atonement with others.  And with ourselves.  For UUs, we could say that our ability to be in right relationship with community we have to find right relationship with everyone in it – starting with ourselves. 

For me I realized that it is forgiveness that allows us to be forgiving.  Because we are, inherently, forgiving – meaning that our lives, our love, our hearts and our hands are for giving – giving to others and giving to the world.  Even when it can be cruel.  It means seeing the world as worthy of our love despite what we sometimes have seen.  It means understanding that we are worthy of giving love despite what sometimes have felt. 

That first principle is part of a covenant we are all part of.  And as our President Kirk Bogue reminded me yesterday, a covenant is different than a contract.  The difference being that when one party of a contract fails to live up to the agreement, what binds the parties together is dissolved and the punitive part of the contract comes into play.  But when one party of a covenant fails to live up to the agreement, the other part of the covenant continues to offer what was agreed to in faith that the other party will come back into relationship.  The key part is the faith.

I am sorry for the times, in the last several years – and even before – where I failed in faith.  Where I stopped giving of myself because of what some had stopped giving me.  Where I might have acted hurtfully, for the hurts I was carrying inside.  For the moments I withheld my affection, trying to protect myself from rejection, further hurt or misunderstanding.  For the times I failed to have faith in the love that is in you and failed to see your need to give it.  For the times I failed to see the love that is in me that is for-giving.

Because I am better than that.  And so are you.  Because we each have all the character and principles we need to rise up out of the hurts that come our way.  If we have faith.  And if we realize that we belong to a faith that is much deeper then what we often give it credit for.  A faith that does have the power to heal us from our own resentment and save us from squandering our time in careless ways.  A faith that, like our love, is forgiving. 

To the Glory of Life.

Copyright Wardswords, 2005