#MeToo - What of Forgiveness?

Source:hellogiggles.com

The easiest way to deal with the wounds of abuse – any abuse – is to think nothing, (never mind say nothing), either of the past or of the present. You just ‘deal with it’, a very apt expression, but one which, if acted upon, can be toxic. For one thing, it is a lie. You never ‘deal with it’, so why, at any point in history, do we pretend that this is possible? 

The #MeToo movement is epoch changing, not only because it goes some way towards validating the suffering of the victims of abuse, but because it gives us all permission to re-connect with and, in some measure, own, our pain. We do this privately, in our own dark corridors of remembrance, and in solidarity with others in the #MeToo movement. We also do it in solidarity with other generations.

Abuse, as we well know, is not an emerging phenomenon. It has been around for centuries, so it helps, I find, to try to place one’s own pain in the continuum of the abuse suffered by the perpetrators and by those who preceded them. This does not exonerate the abusers. Neither does it oblige, still less enable, me to forgive them. As if forgiveness was purely a matter of understanding contextuality, cause and effect, and thereby accepting the abuse as inevitable. But this is how women, and I think many men who may have been physically abused in childhood, try to come to terms with what a generally abusive childhood or youth still does to them.

There are two serious flaws in thinking that we can ‘deal with’ abuse and the effects of abuse. First, it tends to ignore the fact that abuse is not limited to the sexual and physical. Sexual abuse, for women, is more often reinforced by what seems at the time a natural and ‘deserved’ shaming of the person concerned. Perhaps it is the same for men. If an adult implies that we are ugly, stupid and to be laughed at rather than with, we accept it as a given. ‘Put downs’, the many chance remarks deemed as OK, but deeply wounding, enforced compliance with how we should look or behave, all in the context of dishonest and manipulative relationships, build a toxic mix of shame, anger, fear and self-loathing.

Very few sexual predators will genuinely want their victim to feel that they are beautiful, intelligent, unique and loved. On the whole, they will either intuit, or possibly know, that their victim has been conditioned to believe none of these things. This makes them fair game. It gives the abuser ‘permission’ to behave as he or she does towards them. Furthermore, and as we all know, abuse is not limited to the sexual. Emotional abuse will, often as not, occur between members of the same sex, first in family contexts and later in social and professional life. By then, it is more commonly known as bullying.

As Christians, each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we ask to be forgiven as we forgive those who have sinned against us. To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pray these words when I think of my own abusers, as well as of the hundreds of women coming forward in the #MeToo solidarity movement. What does forgiving actually entail for us? As I have never really found an answer to this question, I tend to mentally ‘bracket’ the words Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us as I am saying them, and hope God understands, but I don’t just leave the people concerned in a kind of limbo. Later, I ask God what he thinks those of us who have been sinned against are supposed to do with our recurring memories, with our feelings about these people, and with our own anger and shame.

There seems to be no answer to such questions. But I do believe that we pray to a God who not only understands but shares the feelings which prompt them. There are many ways we could visualise this sharing. Being present to the words Why have you abandoned me? spoken from the Cross is one of the most obvious, although not always the most efficacious when it comes to having our negative feelings about forgiveness validated in the moment.

Perhaps a better way is to see the wounds we still carry, because they are far from healed, as part of our transfigured inheritance. They become what makes us worthy of honour in the presence of the Lamb (Rev.14:1). In them we share in Christ’s glory, beginning with the shame and agony of his dying and death, but moving with him to his embracing of us in his risen life. This is not a pious metaphor, or some kind of mental cop-out. It is something which can take a life-time to learn, or it can be learned in a single revelatory moment of understanding.

Such an understanding gives us the greatest freedom. This does not mean that we are given permission to indulge, even momentarily, in gratuitous hatred and desire for revenge. It means that we too are forgiven for finding it impossible to ‘forgive’. But such freedom brings responsibility. We are now ‘responsible’ for our abusers, lest they fall into the abyss. This means that we must be willing to receive what is needed for us to have a transfigured way of seeing them, so that we can ‘hold’ them. It does not mean persevering with, or reviving, destructive relationships. It means allowing ourselves to have deep compassion for those who abuse us, or for their memory. We ‘hold’ what we know of them, as best we can, in the ‘safe space’ of the mercy and forgiveness of God, a space which we ourselves are also occupying. Even if the feeling of compassion only lasts for a moment, it will never completely go away, for His mercy endureth for ever.

Are We There Yet?

Within half an hour of setting off on a long car journey – from Wales to the South of France, for example, a small voice from the back seat would be heard asking the question we parents dreaded. “Are we there yet?”  I’ve often wondered if this is more of a philosophical question than one which has to do with mileage and the hours yet to be endured. For a child, a twelve hour car journey is a significant chunk of her remembered life. I also wonder if it’s not a question we are all asking in regard to all kinds of things – politics, the economy, a solution to environmental melt down, or even in regard to the end of our own lives – the latter, especially. Are we there yet?

Children are particularly interested in things pertaining to life and death. So 'Are we there yet' leads quickly to other questions. What happens when you die? Where do you go? And does such a place or dimension permit you to pick up where you left off in regard to relationships, human or animal, which were suddenly terminated by death? Happily for most children, death is, in a sense, a kind of continuation of life as they know it, but better.

If they are right, it is still quite difficult to gauge what the meaning and purpose of life now might be, especially given the very vague demarcation line which exists between life and death as children often perceive it. Life is still open-ended for them, less finite, more infinite, so they can see far greater distances, on the eternity spectrum, than most of us can until, perhaps, we reach a very old age. Then, we are returned to the conceptual space remembered from childhood, perhaps without realising that this is what is happening.

In the later mid-life years, before we reach this stage, a picture starts to emerge from what until now might seem an incoherent, and often disconnected, series of life events. The questions now being asked are not so much to do with what happens when you die, as what is the meaning of life? What is its purpose? Looking back over the years, it seems that on the whole, we have been far more anxious about purpose than we have about meaning. Purpose has concrete implications. It has to do with ‘making something’ of oneself or even, in today’s parlance, of ‘getting’ a life. But unlike purpose, meaning is something that simply has to be allowed to happen to us. It is a given.

Underlying our aspiring for purpose lies a considerable amount of anxiety. Anxiety is another word for fear. So when it comes to the purpose of life, we are afraid that we might have ‘failed’. The people we fear most in this regard are usually parents, then our own peer group and all those significant others who in some way exact standards of achievement, even if these expectations only live in our imagination. Furthermore, we often imagine that these particular fears will vanish once those who have instilled them in us die, but this rarely happens.

On the other hand, insofar as we live and die in Christ, we are already on the other side of the demarcation line between life and death, meaning and purpose, and between time and eternity. We are already partly in the other dimension. Far from being frightening, this dual-time state of ‘existence’ ought to be a sign of hope for us in the present. For one thing, it cuts into our ideas of linear time, especially in regard to our earthly life-span. When it comes to eternity, we are in the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We depart from linear time into a time-frame in which the meaning of life as we know it, has nothing to do with purpose in the ordinary sense of the word.

 In Christ, and in the context of eternity, meaning and achievement bear no relation to each other. We do not need to achieve, or to purpose our life now with a view to fulfilling someone’s expectations, or our own. In God’s economy, the meaning and purpose of our life comes in any given moment when a thought or action is purposed for the good of others and for the good of the earth God created. But, as I said earlier, it is the allowing which is important. Allowing is not the same as striving for something.

Allowing God’s purpose for our life is a little like the biblical concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, the living Spirit of God, has been around for eternity, ‘dancing’ with God. We are invited to enter into that dance. But we have to listen carefully for its measure, for the things which allow Wisdom to be danced through us in our earthly life time. When it comes to what happens when we die, the person who is wise, and who has taught others wisdom, will, as scripture promises ‘shine for all eternity’.  (Dan. 12:3) We’re nearly there.