Forgiving the Unforgivable: Betrayal, Sept. 11, and a Navy Shipyard

As fate would have it, I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness in the past few months. I finally reached a point where I was ready to write about it, and it was already the subject for this week's post. Then I remembered it was the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Then tragedy struck yesterday as a shooter went on a rampage in the Washington Navy Shipyard.

I've had to think about forgiveness after quite a rift with a friend in the last year. "Personal betrayal" would not be too harsh a label to put on it. At the time, I was so upset and hurt that I quickly wrote the person off as somehow other - not a rational, normal person like me.

But after a bit of time you wonder about the Christian message of forgiveness. You begin to think that the Seventy times Seven principle doesn't exclude you and your own relationships after all, however unfathomable your situation must have been to Christ at the time he made that ridiculous rule. (Insert sarcastic font here.)

A very natural response is anger. It's so easy. It's easy to feel angry at those who thoughtlessly hurt us or hurt others or at the leaders who refuse to do the hard work of compromise and change so that these tragic events don't continue to happen again and again and again.

And trust me, I have more experience with anger than most. My first experience writing for an audience was authoring letters to the editor and later editorials for my college newspaper. I quickly developed a reputation as the guy who was always going off on something (always for an egocentric worthy cause, of course). This became apparent after my friends starting inquiring what I would write about next by asking me, "So what are you upset about this week?" Play that game long enough and you'll learn - one way or another - that anger is very seldom productive, let alone healthy.

Being the victim is quite nice for your ego. It lets you feel wronged, superior, and untouchable all at the same time. And like me, you may have been genuinely abused by something. But as soon as you realize you sort of like being justified in your anger and your hurt, the game is up; you see your own flawed nature is taking it too far.

The attacks of September 11th certainly warranted a response. But where did we turn? We waged a war in Iraq that did not meet any of the criteria for a Just War by Catholic theological standards. Yet how many Catholics opposed it? How many Christians? It didn't even meet the standards of rational thinking since Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But we were angry and forgiveness is not the way of a successful political establishment. And if our country weakly forgave our enemies, how could our national pride ever live with that? Anger needs an object. Forgiveness seems to need nothing.

Now we have a fresh tragedy: a gunman shot dozens of people at a naval shipyard. It's unforgivable. Isn't it? What does forgiveness mean?

"Forgiveness" as Not-Caring is Impossible

I've come to think that forgiveness as I was taught forgiveness to be is impossible. If we think of forgiveness as a "forgetting" or "getting over" or "sweeping aside" of something, then who among us can really do that? "Forgive and forget" as the saying goes. But who can forget? Logically, you can't. We humans don't have the capacity to select and delete our memories short of repression. And how do we stop caring?

If there's a way to somehow sweep under the rug what once deeply hurt you, I'm not sure I know it. And that's not forgiveness. Instead, forgiveness must be an expanding of your view to see holistically, to see things and people as they really are, to see them as God sees them.

Do you think the victims' families of the shooting yesterday see that young man as Aaron Alexis or as "the shooter"? Does Alexis' family see him as the shooter or as the person they knew and loved? Now, we have stories of the good this man did and also the ways in which he was so troubled. We learn that he was both "sweet" and "angry." He sought out healthy practices like meditation and yet suffered from PTSD and violent outbursts. One acquaintance described, "He’s a 13-year-old stuck in a 34-year-old body." The picture of "the shooter" of our 'enemy' starts to become more recognizable and more human. He shares something with us, and that's a very hard thing to admit. But it's the only way to forgiveness. We have to find acknowledge our shared commonality, even if it's only in relation to the Imago Dei. 

If you can expand your view from seeing merely this one event at the shipyard to the totality of who this person was, then I think forgiveness is possible. It doesn't make this event any less tragic. It certainly can never excuse what Alexis did. But it also doesn't demonize him as a no-good, evil, unforgivable man. If he is created in God's image like the rest of us, then God doesn't see him through such labels. And though it's tempting, neither should we.

This was the conclusion I finally had to reach for myself concerning my own friend. That person isn't a terrible person (quite the contrary). They don't deserve terrible things or to be written off as something "other", someone less worthy of love or consideration or care. It's not an excuse but it's a way to forgive. Seeing all of this person, their good qualities as well as their shortcomings, gives you a way to understand and to naturally let go. And maybe that's the beauty of it: it's natural and almost effortless. It's a right way of seeing that once you've done it, doesn't demand much work at all, and certainly never an attempt to forget or excuse.

Without condoning or condemning, a holistic view of the depth of any person can help us see them realistically and find a way to forgiveness, a way of letting go. It's the way out, and the way to "love your enemies." And I think we could all use that kind of escape.


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The Real and True Enemy

What is "Evil"?

In Christianity alone you will find numerous definitions. For some it is "Satan" or "sin." For others it is defined by its contrast with Good as "what is not God's will" or "what goes against the natural order". Other traditions use other language but I think we're really all talking about the same thing, even if we disagree on which things fall under such a category.

The Latin, diabolicus, from which we get the English, "diabolical," is probably one of the best words to use for Evil because it originally meant "to be thrown into two." This fits perfectly within the Christian tradition, as seen in Scripture when we're told the sinner is one who "walks a double path" (Sirach 2:12). I experience a mini-enlightenment when I hear that definition just like I do when I'm reminded that sin in Greek is simply "missing the mark."

A lot of churches don't talk about evil or the Devil these days. And some Christian communities like the one I grew up in talk about them too much. But the worst manner in which to talk about evil is when we apply it to people, something our egos and shadow selves seem to have an insatiable desire to do. Even Christ was accused of being evil and performing miracles by the power of Satan - casting out demons through demons. Anyone who is "other" or against our own ideas of how and who we should be usually gets branded as "evil." Call to mind Indians, papists, Jews, communists, feminists, Muslims, and George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" countries and you'll see it's a pattern in our nation's history. The irony here, though, is that we often try to do exactly what Jesus was accused of doing: we try to cure ourselves and others through "demons", which takes the form of a desire for power, control, security, purity, and "fixing" others. We think if we can achieve one of these things, the world will finally be set aright. That mentality is an illusion and what God calls a "false idol."

So are there any real enemies?

There are three classical enemies of man in Christianity. These are 1) the World, 2) the Flesh or Self, and 3) the Devil. In my very humble opinion, these are wonderfully named! But I've read and experienced enough to suspect they are not well understood.

The second enemy, "the Self," is really the only one I ever grew up knowing and the only one Christianity in America seems to explore at length. If you bring up sin with a Christian they're either going to start thinking of their own personal self-sins or the self-sins of others. Mention the 7 Capital Sins of antiquity - Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath - and you can't help but think of how the self is envious, gluttonous, lustful, and so on.

Rarely do we apply sin to our governments or movements or societies, which we would name, the World. And rarer still do we call sinful the supreme systems and power structures that all countries buy into, the things that supremely rule the world's sin. These things we should call the Devil. They are the underlying systems that include us (and necessarily exclude others) and that we need to feel superior.

We are missing something very important when we fail to call our idols of nationalism, "the free market", war, and unjust power structures by their proper name: sin. Pope Leo XIII brought these to light in his encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope St. John Paul II gave us the language of "structural sin" and "societal sin." That we can sin collectively through the systems and structures we support is a belief not often found outside of pastors blaming natural disasters on homosexuals.

If you lust, God doesn't strike you with unemployment. If you lie, God doesn't remove your sense of sight. The actual punishment is self-inflicted: you become more lustful, more deceitful. And the same is true with our structural sin. The problem is that these structures persist and are reinforced. They become more. The sooner we learn that we have culpability in these societal sins, the sooner we'll have social justice, equality, and an end to poverty, three things Christ expressly admonished his followers to seek.

Okay, so systems can be evil. But can't people be evil too?

No, I don't think so. People are never the enemy. Jesus said to love your enemies and this shows us not only a way of being that is good and true but also what is real.

People are not evil. People are the image of God! How can we call an image of God evil? If we believe in redemption and God's love for all, then that includes the worst people you could think of. I think the most we can do is call others "diabolical" - people who have been thrown into two. And even then, haven't we all?

We like to personify realities, and that's really the problem. In the history of western art we've seen personifications of traits, the 7 Virtues for example - Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, and Love. There's a reason these are so often painted as beautiful women. Not only does it reflect what is desirable in a male-dominated society but it's also how we get a handle on them. (Isn't it interesting how often these are names for women and how seldom they are given to men?)

And we do the same with "evil". We personify evil as people groups like minorities and lower classes, or as individuals like Hitler, Stalin, or Osama bin Laden. Dante was a master of this personification but he wasn't the first. It's not that these individuals are great or even good and therefore don't deserve the "evil" label. Saying they are created in the image of God has no bearing on their personal development. But if you believe that all people are created in God's image, do you really think they deserve to be mentally separated from the rest of us? Do they deserve a category that is less than human, that is somehow other?

The hateful deserve our pity, the ignorant our compassion. We are called to love those we think of as enemies. But wouldn't it be beautiful if we could go a step further? Can't we recognize that we don't have any human enemies? "Other People" are not included on our list of 3! Yes, we have sin and sinful individuals. But we need to recognize that personal sin is only 1/3 of what we need to oppose. We need to oppose the World in its unjust structure and societies. And we need to oppose the Devil when he appears to be a supreme "good" that of course runs the world and cannot be altered (capitalism, war, human selfishness). If we can start, as a Christian community, to see the other 2/3 of evil, we might actually experience the Reign of God here and now.


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