In his column on August 9, 2016, Michael Gerson of the Washington Post reflected on the "ritual of apology and forgiveness" in public life, and cited this talk by Dr. L. Gregory Jones at the November 2013 Faith Angle Forum.
"Spinning Sorrow: The Uses and Abuses of Forgiveness in the Public Sphere"
South Beach, Florida
November 2013
Speaker: Dr. L. Gregory Jones, Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School and Strategic Director of the Laity Lodge Leadership Initiative
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice-President, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Click here to listen to an audio recording of this event.
SUMMARY: The failure to forgive has profound personal and interpersonal consequences that affect us more permanently than we realize. Though repentance and forgiveness are individual processes, these key expressions of grace must also play out in community and public contexts if they are to resonate and endure. In this deeply meaningful talk, Dr. Gregory Jones points to a trend in American culture: political manipulation of the public’s capacity to forgive. Politicians who have made grave mistakes regularly use insincere public apologies to bolster their images and further their careers. On the converse, he cites powerful examples of real forgiveness throughout the world, from South Africa to Rwanda to Yugoslavia to Nickel Mines, telling the stories of individuals and communities. This discussion teaches readers important lessons about the human need to live with clarity and compassion.
KEY QUOTES:
“In American culture, we have this phenomenon where forgiveness is often used as a way to excuse the past and to spin sorrow, largely as a PR way of managing a crisis, which has very little to do with any kind of changed behavior, or ultimately any accountability for the past.”
“It is often the case that when we are wounded and we harbor bitterness and vengeance, we nonetheless let our own souls get eaten away.”
“What forgiveness is about is learning to remember differently and well in a context of a story, and the confessional culture that we’re in in this exhibitionist kind of way is disconnected from any narrative where you could learn to remember well.”
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Michael Cromartie[/caption]
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 23rd Faith Angle Forum. We've been doing this since 1999 and this is actually number 23. We hope you all will come for the 25th anniversary in a year or so from now.
Now, Dr. Jones -- you have his bio in your packet, so I am not one of those who reads the bio back to you. I think you have already read it, but Eerdmans Publishing was kind enough to give us a copy of his famous book on forgiveness, so you have a copy there called Embodying Forgiveness. And when I wrote Dr. Jones, who is Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School, where he did his PhD in Theology, I told him about the fact that we would not talk only about forgiveness, but talk about it in a political context.
The invitation came at a time when Mark Sanford was running for Congress, several men in New York were running for mayor, several presidential candidates had made some mistakes in their past and were oftentimes using theological categories to advance forward, and so I thought, what better person than Dr. Gregory Jones, who has written two books on forgiveness and reconciliation, to address this.
I gave him a generic title and he came back with this wonderful title, "Spinning Sorrow: The Use and Abuse of Forgiveness in the Public Sphere," and there is not anyone better in the country to address this question than Dr. Gregory Jones of Duke University. Dr. Jones, welcome.
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Dr. L. Gregory Jones[/caption]
DR. L. GREGORY JONES: Thank you, Michael. It's great to be with you. I loved being here in March as an observer and am glad to be with you today.
This is a huge topic to take up. When I teach courses on it or when I speak on it I note that -- when I first wrote Embodying Forgiveness I thought I was just getting one book out of my system, and realized it's a topic that actually cuts into all kinds of issues -- personal, political, cultural, social, religious -- and so I am going to be barely skating the surface in the comments that I'm going to offer today.
And I'm happy to entertain questions. If you happened to scan Embodying Forgiveness at all, you'll notice a number of footnotes at which I punt on big issues and say that would take another book which somebody else, hopefully, will write.
But it's an important issue because it touches on some of our most intimate, personal relations, as well as some of the largest public issues.
I want to begin by just describing a cartoon from one of our -- the last generation's great thinkers and theologians, Charles Shultz. He frequently had insightful things to say and one of his recurring strips was when Lucy and Charlie Brown were playing baseball. They may be the only team more hapless than my beloved Chicago Cubs, and that may be because Lucy was the star outfielder and Charlie Brown was the manager.
In one particular strip -- I'm embellishing the actual strip a little bit in the story -- but Charlie Brown pitches the ball, it's hit out to center field, and Lucy is in perfect position to catch the ball, and then it hits her on the head, falls to the ground, and the batter gets a homerun.
Lucy brings the brings the ball back up to Charlie Brown, and she says, "I'm sorry, manager, I really wanted to catch it this time, but as the ball came down I started thinking about all those other times." As she hands him the ball, she says, "I guess you could say the past got in my eyes."
“The past got in my eyes.” That seems to me to be one of the ways of talking about why forgiveness is such a haunting issue. Even when we become interested in change -- as I'm going to talk about forgiveness being inextricably linked to a commitment to change the behavior that would lead to a different way of life, and hopefully not repeating the event -- the past gets in our eyes.
It haunts us whether we're the perpetrator, whether we're the victim, or some complicated set of dynamics thereby. You see this in all kinds of political contexts.
In the former Yugoslavia you had people who had been living next door to each other, who had been marrying their children off to one another, who all of a sudden, in the midst of conflict, erupted into violence, where people started saying, "Your people killed my people five hundred years ago or so."
Similar kinds of things between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. It is part of the animating challenges of the Middle East conflict. It's the sense of a long history that can be mobilized for vengeance often at the drop of a hat.
And yet, in American culture, we have this phenomenon where forgiveness is often used as a way to excuse the past and to spin sorrow, largely as a PR way of managing a crisis, which has very little to do with any kind of changed behavior, or ultimately any accountability for the past. So I'm going to talk a little bit in a moment about what forgiveness is and how it's connected to redeeming the past.
But this phenomenon of spinning sorrow is so prevalent and recurring that it has become its own trope in American culture.
I coined the phrase "Spinning Sorrow" during an interview after Pete Rose had come out and finally confessed, largely because he was wanting to get into the Hall of Fame and the number of eligible years of voting in the regular process were about to disappear and he was not going to get in, and so he came clean. But he made it clear that he didn't really think that there was any problem that he needed to correct or any behavior that needed to change. He just said, "Well, yeah, but it wasn't really any big deal."
It was all staged and planned by his PR consultants to manage public perception, and as Michael was referring to in the political sphere, it seems like we have it almost monthly that somebody spins sorrow in a carefully managed way.
We have it also in religious traditions. You remember Jimmy Swaggart and others who have very well-staged and sometimes dramatic apologies that seem disconnected from any particular practice of forgiveness and repentance.
I think one of the problems we have in the public sphere has to do with the fact that a lot of the characters who spin their sorrow are actually narcissists, and the problem is that narcissism makes forgiveness and repentance exceedingly difficult because the person lacks the capacity for empathy.
In order to actually apologize in a meaningful way, to repent, to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, you have to have a capacity to understand things from the other's perspective. And so when you have a narcissist for whom the world revolves around "me," as is often the case -- and so, you know, when you think they're going to engage somebody else, they say, "What did you think of my latest book?" Then we have a problem with even the capacity for the individual to understand what repentance and forgiveness might look like.
But there's a broader issue, I think, that afflicts American culture and probably Western European culture as well, particularly in the British context, and that is an image that comes from Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who in a book that was published in 2002, called Lost Icons, he makes an argument that in Western culture we've lost some background languages that actually are really important to the well-being of any society or culture.
This was a book without any explicit religious argument; it's really about just what he calls the background languages that are important to sustaining culture. The first one he talks about is childhood, an interesting phenomenon on how we've politicized childhood and not given the kind of space away from the spotlight for children to experiment. The last one he talks about is the loss of the language of soul and how it impoverishes our culture to lose that.
But the third one that he talks about -- the second one is about charity and the kind of carnival gatherings designed to relativize inequality and distinction through public celebrations.
The third one he talks about is remorse, and he argues that we've actually lost the language of remorse as a serious practice in our culture, at all levels.
So, you know, to talk about Mark Sanford or the candidates in New York City -- or in the religious sphere -- or Lance Armstrong -- all the kinds of big celebrity environments. You have it also occurring at the local level in communities where politicians and fairly public figures also engage in the same kind of spinning of sorrow that lacks that genuine sense of remorse and that genuine sense of accountability, but also not really an authentic offering of forgiveness on the side of the victims who will say, "I forgive you," while nonetheless arming again for the next battle -- that we've lost that sense of what are the practices that are necessary to be sustained in local communities.
I think this is actually what undermined South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was notable in the 90's for being the first time when a Truth Commission actually explicitly had reconciliation as a part of its aim. And so it was focused explicitly on the goal of reconciliation, which included amnesty for people who confessed, and there were some very moving and dramatic confessions that were offered in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But in talking with both commissioners and people in local communities, what really seemed to undermine it was that in the original planning stages of those who envisioned it, it was to be a national commission that was then replicated in local communities throughout the country because what was needed was ways of acknowledging the brokenness and the difficulty in local congregations, in town halls, in communities all across the country.
And what happened instead were a few very celebrated national examples with the commission at the national level with Desmond Tutu as the head -- and it failed ever to get into the lifeblood of the local communities. And so what you had in the local context was this seething sense that -- and the past getting in their eyes without any vehicles, without any real rituals and practices to engage in -- something that I think people in Rwanda learned from, but it's still been imperfect because it's very hard to plan and coordinate something at that many levels down.
But ultimately we're talking about -- when we're talking about forgiveness -- is something that has to be contextualized often outside the public spotlight in the ongoing hard work of conversation, repentance, forgiveness, that is engaged between and among diverse peoples.
Well, what would it look like then if we were to say forgiveness was to be not so much used and abused for self-interested purposes and political purposes, but what would an authentic practice of forgiveness look like? I think actually that, as Williams suggests about remorse, there is a secular way to articulate what religious traditions understand forgiveness to be.
Religious traditions -- and there's more overlap between particularly Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, I think, than divergence -- but I think those religious traditions articulate and name it in a more fulsome way that are necessary to sustain the account more broadly, but I'm not one who believes that you have to believe in God or it requires convictions of a particular sort in order for forgiveness and reconciliation to work.
At its deepest -- and this is part of what I mean when I'm talking about what has to happen in local communities -- forgiveness has to be understood as a way of life. It's not something you put in your hip pocket and pull out when you want to. In the New Testament, Peter asks, "How many times do I have to forgive my brother or sister? As many as seven times?"
You think that Peter is expecting to be patted on the head like a teacher's pet because -- I don't know about you, but I'm good for maybe one, occasionally two, but you mess me over twice and I'm ready to end the relationship, if not bring bodily harm to you.
So Peter says as many as seven times, and he's ready to be patted on the head. And Jesus says, "No," -- depending on how you translate the Greek -- either 70 times seven, or 77 -- the actual number isn't the issue. What Jesus is saying there is you have to be prepared to do it always. It's a way of life. It's not something that you can count.
Back in the old days there was this movie, Billy Jack. I don't know if you remember that movie from the early '70's, but Mad Magazine had a thing -- because Billy Jack was supposedly in this Native American reservation that was all about peace -- and Mad Magazine had a thing where Bill Jack said, "I don't ever use violence. I count to a thousand instead," and then about two thirds of the way he's going, "998, 999," and then he hauls off and wails on everybody.
There's sometimes you think that, okay, if it's 77 times, I'm going to keep notches on my wall and when I get to 77, then I can wail away. That's what he's talking about. It's about a way of life, and that way of life means that you've got to shape not just what you think or what you do or how you feel, but all of them bound up together.
So a commitment to forgiveness is a commitment to a way of life that involves tutoring your thinking, your feeling, and your living in their interrelations. So it's not something you can just -- that's the problem with the way we do it in politics: We think it's something you have in your hip pocket, that your PR has a way to manage, when it's really something that requires habits and practices that have to be cultivated offstage. It's a lot like trying to come up to bat in the 7th game of the World Series and you haven't been taking any batting practice beforehand. It just doesn't work coming out cold.
So it requires tutoring of the ways you think, the ways you feel, and the ways you live, which is why it has to be learned in local contexts in families, in communities, in churches and synagogues and mosques; that it's a way of living where you learn that the aim is toward the restoration of relationship.
Now, what I would say is that that way of life is rooted in a sense that I think -- in a way that would be shared by the monotheistic traditions, the Abrahamic religions -- is that forgiveness is the means by which God's love moves toward reconciliation in the wake of sin, evil, and brokenness. So that forgiveness is the means; it's the face which love takes in the wake of brokenness and sin and evil, and so, what you're learning to do is to tutor your thinking, your feeling, and your actions.
Now sometimes -- and it depends on the temperament -- I know people for whom words come easy but the emotions and the actions lag way behind. I know other people for whom the words don't come at all, but the emotions lead and the actions lag behind. And then there are people for whom the actions may be easy, but the emotions and the words don't come. And the trouble is, if you focus only on one of those things, the other two can undermine even your actions or your feelings or your thoughts.
So, you know, when my kids -- I have two boys and a girl -- the boys are close enough in age that I can tell you Cain and Abel is an empirically verifiable story -- and there would be times when my younger son, when they were little kids, one day would just haul off and whack his brother on the side of the head for no apparent reason. And I'd say, "Ben, you need to apologize to your brother." And he'd have the words right there. He'd say, "I'm sorry," but his fists were clenched and you could tell he was about ready to haul off and cold-cock his brother again. The words were there, but the emotions were going to undermine any capacity for that relationship.
Sometimes the emotions may lead. Susan, my wife, when she was a pastor in Baltimore, had a retired Marine colonel who was estranged from his daughter. If he said two words to you when he greeted you it was an incredibly intimate moment, and he didn't know how to say anything to her, but his heart really wanted to reestablish a relationship, and he didn't know how to do it because he didn't have the language. So the emotions were there, but the words were lacking.
Sometimes it's actions that may lead. This is part of the significance of religious rituals. In the Jewish tradition, getting ready for Yom Kippur, you're obligated to go three times to those from whom you're estranged. In the Christian tradition, it's the passing of the peace during worship, or getting ready to come to the Eucharist, the sacrament in the Catholic tradition of reconciliation, penance, whatever you want to describe it.
But it's about weaving together thoughts, emotions, and actions, which means it's going to take rehearsal and practice in a local context that equips you then to be able to act gracefully in a political or public context because then it's a natural behavior.
Just to show you how broad-minded I am I'll use Michael Jordan as the example, a UNC grad. When we see Michael Jordan play basketball, what would we say? Look how graceful he is. Why? Because he had all the practices and the habits that had gone on in rehearsal, in practice, that enabled it to look natural in the public sphere.
What I think you see, for example, when John Paul II went to the prison after the attempted assassination of him. It seemed natural.
The same thing with the current Pope Francis. You see an embodiment of a way of life that's been nurtured in habits and practices, in quieter settings, that now can be drawn on.
That's dramatically different than an Eliot Spitzer, or a Mark Sanford, or a Pete Rose, or a Lance Armstrong, all of a sudden trying to do 180° and manage a new kind of perception from a narcissistic kind of perspective. So it's a way of life.
A couple of other key things: It's hard work. It's challenging. A Welsh poet put it this way: “Forgiveness involves walking through thorns to stand by your enemy’s side.” You're going to get hurt. Not just emotionally. It's going to have a cost, and so it's challenging.
One of my favorite sermons from Saint Augustine, when he's preaching just to his ordinary folks in Egypt -- he has this wonderful passage where he says to the parishioners, "Friends, you see that Jesus says you're supposed to pray for your enemies, and so I noticed that you do. You pray they'll die." He says, "I don't think that is what Jesus meant."
It's hard work, and we don't really want to be involved in that work of either apologizing or offering forgiveness.
It's not only hard work and challenging, it's timeful. The process takes time. C.S. Lewis, in one of his letters to Malcolm, “chiefly on prayer,” says this: "Last night while at prayer, I finally discovered that I had forgiven someone after 30 years of praying and trying that I might." Thirty years. Ronald Reagan was President in his first term 30 years ago. You just think about that, and then you think, okay -- and C.S. Lewis actually had habits and practices that, I don't know about you, but I would say were far more virtuous than my typical habits and practices, and yet he said it took 30 years of praying and trying that he might.
So it's a timeful process and the ways we sometimes short-circuit -- I'll come back to the Amish community at Nickel Mines. Susan and I had the privilege of spending an evening with them before I spoke at the 5th anniversary of the school shooting. And one of the things that was striking was the guilt that some of the Amish parents had, that the world thought that forgiveness comes easily and quickly because that's how it was presented to the world during that week.
And they actually talked about having gone down to Virginia Tech to be with people in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, and a father at Virginia Tech said, "I don't think it will be as easy for me as it was for you." And that's when he said, "Oh, my goodness. What kind of message is out there?" Because one of the couples told us that it took them 22 months before they laughed. Twenty-two months to laugh. And when they finally laughed -- we actually had an interesting experience of them sharing with us inner Amish humor, which was quite enjoyable -- but 22 months to laugh gives you a sense of the timefulness that is involved in this work.
And yet forgiveness is also necessary. You probably know Annie Dillard's wonderful line that "refusing to forgive is like taking a poison pill yourself and waiting for the other person to die." That it is often the case that when we are wounded and we harbor bitterness and vengeance, we nonetheless let our own souls get eaten away. There's a poignant --
MR. CROMARTIE: Say that again? Annie Dillard?
DR. JONES: Annie Dillard. "The refusal to forgive is like taking a poison pill yourself and then waiting for the other person to die."
There's a poignant episode in the book Dead Man Walking. The movie is well done, too, but the book is much more powerful because it actually portrays two different fathers and two different sets of dynamics, but one father you empathize with all along the way because he's rightly wanting justice against the perpetrator of the murder against this man's step-daughter. And the killer is unrepentant and he's a real jerk. He actually spits on the father during one of the pretrial hearings. And the father --so you empathize with him all along the way. And when the guy is finally executed, the father feels empty, and he says, "I have become a shell of the man I used to be."
Even though you empathize with his concern for justice, and even -- in my case I kind of felt like he was right to want some vengeance -- he became a shell of the man he used to be. And so, you see that it's -- we're made to want reconciliation, even though it's often challenging.
The next thing I'd say is it requires a rich interior life. It requires a rich interior life, both to apologize and to offer forgiveness.
This is the problem of narcissists: They lack that kind of interior capacity to empathize with another, to take the perspective of another, to listen to another, to feel what another feels in those sorts of ways.
The most compelling tale on this topic that I would commend to you is Kazuo Ishiguro's book, The Remains of the Day, and the book is ten times better than the movie in this case because the butler in the book is trying to come to terms late in life with the fact that he had been serving the wrong lord -- with a small "l" -- the lord in England who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer.
But the trouble and the pathos of the book is that the butler can only speak of himself in the third person. He doesn't have an interior life that is capable of absorbing that sense of remorse and regret and thus repentance. He lacks that interior life.
Now, in the Jewish and Christian traditions this would be deeply connected with the virtue of humility, of that sort of interior life. The Book of Numbers, in Chapter 12, has this wonderful theme where Miriam and Aaron are complaining about why Moses is the one who has been chosen to be the leader, and the narrator says, describing God’s response, "Well, it's because of his humility" and you think, have we been reading the same stuff in Exodus about Moses? That's not the word that comes to mind, but it's about an intimacy with God that is what is at the heart of that conviction about humility, that the closer you are to God the more you are aware that you are not God, something narcissists have a hard time imagining.
And that humility conveys that sense of an interior life that actually has a rich, symbolic, and powerful political effect. Just think of the effect of a John Paul II, or now of Francis, and that sense of humility and how that is conveyed.
Forgiveness both presumes and recreates a culture of trust -- part of the problem we have in American culture -- but it presumes and it recreates so that it works when there's been a culture of trust that's now been breached. And what forgiveness does slowly over time is recreate a context of trust. And finally what it does is -- Desmond Tutu's book, No Future Without Forgiveness suggests, at its heart, it creates a possibility for the future not bound by the brokenness of the past. It enables a future not bound by the brokenness of the past. So what it does is create the context in which you can find a genuine and authentic future, though it's hard work. And it's hard work because there's a tension between forgiveness and repentance, and this is a place where particularly Judaism and Christianity have some tensions about how much forgiveness ought to be offered, even in the absence of repentance.
But the heart of the problem is that the person who is wrong and is, let's say, explicit about wanting to repent, is probably going to take longer to do it than the person who is wanting the person to repent.
So the victim expects to see a transformation overnight. The perpetrator is probably, even at their best, in a process that's going to take months if not years where there's going to be some backsliding, because in all likelihood, it's not just a one-time thing, but it's been repeated over time. And so, unlearning a bad or destructive habit is going to take time. C.S. Lewis also said he thought it would be easier to forgive a single murder than to forgive 20 years of accumulated slights.
The real problems are in relationships where you see a pattern, and the other person, even if they become sincere -- now there's the problem of the prisoner’s con, which goes back to spinning sorrow. You know, the ways in which prisoners all of a sudden get religion and become repentant right around the time of the parole board hearing, and parole boards are quite appropriately cynical about whether there's any authenticity to it. The convicts often are spinning sorrow to try to get parole in the same way that public figures are doing it to try to manage their reputation and maintain power. So how you actually can discern that the repentance is authentic is a timeful process.
When Jesus at the beginning of the gospel announces the kingdom of God is at hand -- most English translations say "Repent and believe in the gospel," which is actually a bad translation in the sense that the Greek verb there is better translated, "Keep on repenting and keep on believing in the gospel," that it's a process -- that's a daily process -- so that if you receive forgiveness it becomes a commitment to a way of life where you are going to need to repent daily, not as a burden but as a desire not to repeat the destructive and broken habits, so it's around that positive sense.
An authentic sense of forgiveness in the political or public sphere always will involve some measure of accountability. There needs to be some way that you indicate that you're serious about changing the conditions.
Forgiveness doesn't merely look backwards at managing the past, it also looks forward to changing the conditions that existed. I just happened to be reading Sports Illustrated on the plane down here and there was a story about Notre Dame's quarterback from last year who is not playing this year -- Everett Golson -- and what was remarkable about the story is a 20-year old guy who has owned that he cheated, that he was suspended from school, he's taking the autumn to actually improve both his studies and his play, and wants to reenroll at Notre Dame. He's accepted the accountability. He's accepted the wrongdoing. He's admitting it. There are no excuses, and now he's looking for the second chance.
I applaud that kind of serious sense of accountability without this kind of just spin of, "oh, mistakes were made" -- all the kind of, "I'm sorry if you were offended," -- all the ways we spin things as if there's really nothing to be responsible for.
You know, Kathleen Sebelius last week in her testimony about Healthcare.gov just said, "I'm sorry." Full stop. Now, the evidence is whether or not there's accountability and improvement and whether or not that's just a measure of competency, or whether there was other forms of wrongdoing. But there's something to the power of owning the responsibility and taking accountability and accepting that there are consequences to that that's involved in learning forgiveness in a new way.
I want to just highlight a couple of examples of communities that I think have public significance for how you think about learning forgiveness and what it means to look at that on the public stage.
The first is the Amish community at Nickel Mines. We all were transfixed when that happened -- the grandfather talking about forgiveness. They were quite clear -- if you go back to my saying, it's a way of life and it involves thoughts, emotions and actions -- they were very clear that their emotions were a mess.
Five years later one of the fathers said to Susan and me that the last five years have been a rollercoaster of emotions. He was saying that five years later, so there was an awful lot of work. But it was a commitment they made because they felt they were obligated to that -- so that there was the public statement that was acknowledging a commitment to a way of life of relationships.
Interestingly -- and here you get into the relationships of perpetrators and victims -- the shooter's mother took responsibility and was so troubled by it that she's developed a relationship with the families, with the Amish families. She goes every Thursday night to bathe one of the victims who's in a wheelchair and has significant brain damage. She goes every Thursday night to feed and bathe her.
When I talked, the mother of the shooter was sitting with the families in the front row of the hall. It's an extraordinary story of new relationships being formed, but it's hard work that's been done, largely out of the public eye. It's carried them, they said, into new vocations. So, you know, Amish folks don't like to travel, but they went down to Virginia Tech because they felt obligated in the first instance to pass on a peace quilt that had been sent to them from people in Katrina who sent the peace quilt up to them, and they felt obliged to pass it on to people in Virginia Tech. They developed relationships with the parents of some of the Virginia Tech victims. Two of the fathers and the mother of the shooter travelled in a van to go up to, I believe it was New Hampshire, where there had been a murder in a community that had divided the town, and they went there just to share their story.
Even though they don't like to travel -- they're not really drawn to being in the public eye -- it was part of what it means for them to learn a new way of life and to share that with others. It's quite an extraordinary story and much more complicated in terms of the dynamics of forgiveness and healing than we as a culture imagine because as soon as the funerals were done, people were off to other stories and other activities and other work.
The second community that I want to point to is Homeboys in Los Angeles. Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest, was appointed to a Catholic Parish in L.A. that had significant gang issues. What he has done is to create a community that's also involved with economic empowerment to try to change the conditions so that these kids don't feel like they have to be involved in gangs. He's got a wonderful memoir called Tattoos on the Heart that talks about his relationships with these young people.
They started Homeboy Industries that has a bakery, a silkscreen t-shirt, and all sorts of different activities. He says there was one business that didn't work. He tried Homeboy Plumbing and he found out that most people didn't want gang members coming into their homes with copper wiring involved, so that business didn't work so well.
But what he's done is he's called people out of a gang way of life and loved them into a new relationship. There's accountability, but he says to the kids, "There is nothing you can do that would ever make me stop loving you." And you know, for a lot of these kids, they don't believe that because many of them come from really troubled environments. But he's created a community and a culture and he does the kinds of things that involve walking through thorns to stand by the enemy’s side. He got two guys from rival gangs to both commit to drive up with him from L.A. to San Francisco to sell t-shirts at an event Boyle was going to be speaking at, and he didn't tell either one they were going to be in the car for however many hours it takes to go from L.A. to San Francisco, and they had to figure out how to get along. Now they work together.
But he's been involved in this very concrete, specific work on the ground --
MR. CROMARTIE: Say his name again?
DR. JONES: Greg Boyle, B-O-Y-L-E. Father Gregory Boyle.
There's an interesting story also in Fast Company about how -- Greg Boyle's an amazing guy and very generous; he's a horrible business man and Homeboy was about to go bankrupt, and then a guy named Bruce Karatz, who is an accountant who had gotten himself into trouble with the law, came along. He started volunteering for Homeboy Industries and actually has put it on a solid business model and actually helped reform Karatz’s life. He started out wanting to do it as a way to try to get out of prison time, but then he became so convinced of the value of this project that he stayed on and worked with it.
The third example I just want to gesture toward is the village of Nyamirambo -- I think it's pronounced -- N-Y-A-M-I-R-A-M-B-O.
MR. CROMARTIE: Spell that one more time.
DR. JONES: N-Y-A-M-I-R-A-M-B-O. It's a Muslim community in the heart of Kigali, Rwanda, and it was known as the safest place in all of Rwanda during the genocide. Ironically, it was a Muslim minority community that was the place that was the safest place for Christian Hutus or Tutsis to flee. We have talked with people who fled to their church where their priest or their pastor allowed the violence to come in -- in one case, actually, a bulldozer to bulldoze the church. We met a guy who had fallen out of the bell tower and somehow had been able to survive, and it was his pastor who was the one who was implicated as the primary person who killed the rest of his family.
But this Muslim community in Nyamirambo that was the safest place -- they took their Muslim identity to be more important than being either Hutu or Tutsi. They had cultivated those habits and practices, a way of life that enabled them in a crisis to offer a different kind of vision and relationship.
I want to just conclude by pointing to several examples of artistic renderings in the public sphere because I think there's an awful lot of power in the arts in terms of displaying the power of forgiveness in some of the themes that I'm talking about what forgiveness is, why it matters, what's at stake for it in a variety of ways. And the first is a novel that I commend to you to read during December just because it's a beautiful story and it was written by a friend of mine who died just a few weeks ago named Oscar Hijuelos.
Oscar won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," and then he wrote a novel called Mr. Ives’ Christmas. It's a beautiful story about a man learning to develop a relationship with the teenager who killed his son somewhat randomly on the streets of New York City right before Christmas.
MR. CROMARTIE: Spell his name.
DR. JONES: H-I-J-U-E-L-O-S, Hijuelos. Oscar just died I think about two weeks ago.
MR. CROMARTIE: And the book is called?
DR. JONES: Mr. Ives’ Christmas. It's an incredible story, and the scene toward the end when Mr. Ives actually encounters -- he corresponds with his son’s killer in prison, and then when the guy is released there's several overtures for him to meet the perpetrator and he doesn't want to do it, and he doesn't want to do it, and then he finally does it. And the scene, as Hijuelos describes it, is absolutely stunning because it describes Mr. Ives some decades later meeting this guy for the first time, who he's already forgiven in letters and he's developed a relationship with and correspondence with over time, and when he finally sees him face-to-face, he says his stomach was turning flip flops. Was it rage, pity, forgiveness?
That's the complexity of the emotions. You don't always know when you actually come face-to-face what those emotions are going to be, and yet the habits that he had developed over time are quite extraordinary. And, by the way, there's also a beautiful description of the struggle between Mr. Ives and his wife, who have different dispositions about how to deal with their grief, and at one point the narrator says the marriage had dissolved into a partnership, a corporate partnership. It was no longer that intimate relationship, and it was because they had contrasting ways of dealing with their sorrow and their grief.
In terms of movies, I'd lift up Invictus, the story of Nelson Mandela actually “playing” the enemy. Playing the Enemy is the book on which the movie is drawn -- it's going to sound like I always prefer the book, which tends to be the case. But Invictus describes this extraordinary event where Nelson Mandela quite publically and symbolically dons a rugby jersey. Rugby was identified with the Afrikaner community, with the white community, and he quite publicly identifies with the white community as President. In the book there are also some extraordinary stories about when, in a highly charged political environment right before the election, one of the right wing Afrikaners calls into a radio show live with Mandela and just starts reaming him out. And this is a time when violence was about to erupt and it was just at its most fragile, and this guy starts just going after Mandela, calling him all sorts of names. Mandela recognizes the guy's name, and he says, "Well, you know, come on. I suspect if we got a cup of coffee and talked, we could probably find common ground and we could find a way to move forward for the sake of the country." And the guy is so disarmed by that he goes, "Uh, uh, I guess we could have a cup of coffee."
Now, that's something you can't invent on the spot. That requires practice where that becomes the natural response. Nobody was surprised that Mandela responded that way because he had developed those habits while he was in prison -- those sorts of perspectives.
In terms of musicals, here again, I like the musical better than the movie -- Les Miserables. You have this extraordinary story of the Bishop forgiving Jean Valjean, but then it takes him some time, but ultimately he becomes an agent of forgiveness that Javert can't sustain, that Javert ends up committing suicide because he can't bear to live in a world where forgiveness is that real.
There are two pieces of music that are extraordinary and they come from very different genres. One of them is a setting called “Seven Last Words from the Cross,” where the Scottish composer James MacMillan has sacred chants, that are set -- the music to those sacred chants are the background, and they are juxtaposed with Ariel Dorfman's poetry from Chile of the Mothers of the Disappeared. So it's poetry about mothers who have lost their children, and what you have is this extraordinary juxtaposition of sacred music pointing toward Christ and the cross linked to this unresolved pain of mothers, laid bare by Ariel Dorfman, the great Chilean poet and writer. It's an exceptional piece that draws that together.
And then I wanted to lift up a piece from the hip hop art world. The Canadian hip hop artist Shad, S-H-A-D, has a remarkable piece you can find on YouTube. The lyrics are called, “I'll Never Understand.” Shad is from Kenya, born to Rwandan parents, and his mother has poetry that he then sets to music and he juxtaposes it. And Shad begins with his mother saying:
The killers
You've invaded my nights
Singing your haunting lullaby
Drowning other voices
Choking, suffocating, numbing
Sending me to sleep
You've awakened me many mornings
Like an unexpected alarm
Shattering my dreams
Confusing, terrorizing, traumatizing
I've talked to you in tears and anger
Spat on you in rage
Whispered to you in sorrow
Tied you in chains
Thrown you in jail
I've pulled you out
Asked you many questions
Knowing there would be no answers...
And then Shad has this musical refrain: “I'll never understand," and he goes through it all, and then his mother has another series, and then he has another refrain, and then here's the last stanza of what he sings:
I'll never understand how people can go on and live
The miracle of finding the strength the forgive
To resurrect peace, to close up wounds so deep
They pierce souls beneath heart beats
To be a willful slave to a loving God's commands
The key to a freedom that I'll never understand
There you get out of hip hop culture an extraordinary mashing together of the pain of a woman who saw many of her family die, juxtaposed to a sense that there is a key to freedom, and he's not going to understand it and yet he yearns for it.
I suspect that the biggest problem we have is that now culturally, politically, in local communities as well as nationally and internationally, there are lots of reasons why the past gets in our eyes.
And that creates hauntings of memory, that the past gets in our eyes. It doesn't work to spin sorrow. It doesn't work to try to manage it and pretend it wasn't all that big a deal. What's a little wrongdoing among friends? What's a little brokenness?
The pain is real and it gets reanimated often in forms of vengeance and violence and destructiveness. And yet, I would suggest that the religious sensibility shared by multiple religious traditions is that we are created for reconciliation, and the great challenge and opportunity is to find ways in which we can nurture that for the sake then of finding a future that's not haunted or bound by the destructiveness of the past.
(Applause)
[caption id="attachment_14693" align="alignright" width="200"] Karen Tumulty[/caption]
KAREN TUMULTY, The Washington Post: I was sort of interested in forgiveness in the public sphere in the way that we have seen it with politicians. You know, a lot of them can't get by with it, but we've seen Mark Sanford, we've seen David Vitter. Many years ago it was Gerry Studds, the Congressman from Massachusetts, who did not show even a hint of contrition about having had a sexual relationship with an underage page, and yet keeps getting reelected.
So my first question is, is in fact what's going on in the electorate anything akin to this process of forgiveness, or is this just people divorcing public behavior from private behavior, or deciding that a flawed guy from my party is better than a perfect guy from the other party?
And the second thing I'm interested in is sort of forgiveness validators, because one thing we keep seeing in the political sphere, and something that I personally find revolting, is the sad-faced wife standing next to the politician, the message being, "I forgive him so you should too."
So how does -- is this in fact a process of forgiveness with politicians or is it something else going on?
DR. JONES: No, I think it's not a process of forgiveness, it's a devil’s bargain that we have in American culture that because we don't know how to practice it in personal, local contexts, we don't know how to understand it in public context. And so you see it -- it's largely assumed that forgiveness involves excuse, and so we actually don't think it has much power, and I think it's largely -- that's what I mean by spinning sorrow -- it's a PR staged event and the wife -- it's usually the wife -- I can't think of any notable event where it was a woman who -- maybe with financial wrongdoing, but hardly ever with sexual misconduct.
But as near as I can tell, it's clearly just a kind of excuse that's reflective of the ways in which forgiveness language is a trope in our culture, but is disconnected from remorse or repentance in any meaningful sense, and so we've trivialized it.
It's not only an American phenomenon. I mean, this is not unrelated to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship in the 1930's about cheap grace. He said that's where German Christians go to have their sins forgiven in one hour a week on Sunday morning. It's completely disconnected from the rest of life.
And so I think it's the fact that we now still have the language and we've lost any sense of the seriousness of the practices or the cost that is entailed thereby, and I think the validators are there to help stage that in a way that says -- the wife says, "Well, I've forgiven him," and so then who am I not to do the same, in that same kind of context.
And so what you do is you get -- if you don't have a wife who is ready to do it then you get a couple of friends who become -- you know, it's almost like the spin doctors. After a political debate you have all the people who are ready with their talking points --
After Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah -- he didn't have a wife because his ex-wife and his girlfriend both were part of the accusers against him -- so he had a couple of friends who were ready to go out on the next morning's talk shows and try to spin his side of the story.
But it's all an elaborately staged ruse in my view. It has nothing to do with authentic practices of forgiveness.
MS. TUMULTY: And therefore you don't think that what goes on with the public is anything that resembles forgiveness?
DR. JONES: No, because it communicates to others there's no risk and there's no consequence to the behavior.
Now, I would add I do think that it's also the case of what you said about "I'd rather vote for the guy in my party than the other guy."
A good friend of mine's parents live in Sanford's district in South Carolina, and they're devout Christians, and my friend tried to persuade them -- but my friend was trying to persuade them that on Christian grounds they ought not vote for Sanford, that this was just really problematic.
And they said, "Yes, he's a louse and we don't believe anything about his character, but we'll never vote for a Democrat." So there's some of that, too -- at least in some circumstances.
MR. CROMARTIE: Tim Dalrymple and then David, and then Peter.
[caption id="attachment_14688" align="alignright" width="200"] Timothy Dalrymple[/caption]
TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE, Patheos.com: I was just curious, amongst public figures, whether there are any in recent years that you think have done a laudable job, not managed it expertly, but who have shown some authenticity in their public repentance?
MR. CROMARTIE: Could you repeat that? It was muffled at first.
MR. DALRYMPLE: Yeah, whether amongst public figures there have been some more noteworthy efforts at public repentance?
DR. JONES: I've thought a lot about that, trying to -- I suppose you could -- I'd probably give a small amount of credit to Clinton, long after multiple failed efforts, and I thought that -- I wrote a piece actually comparing his famous four-minute apology on TV to Psalm 51 in David, and suggesting that they were kind of like mirror images of each other because Clinton's was carefully worded and managed, whereas David was "Create in me a clean heart, oh, God, a broken and contrite spirit you will not despise." And I thought actually kind of the low point for Clinton.
And I think that part of the difficulty I have -- not to be too cynical -- is that we tend, in our culture, to be drawing into the public arena and featuring more and more people who bear narcissistic tendencies, and so that's a -- that makes it harder to give a positive answer to Tim's question.
That's why I ended up talking about the Notre Dame quarterback. There's a guy who took accountability and was admirable, but I don't see as many examples of it, so if there are examples, I'd love to celebrate them.
MR. CROMARTIE: David Rennie, you're next, and then William Saletan. I'm sorry, David's up, then Peter, then William.
[caption id="attachment_14695" align="alignright" width="200"] David Rennie[/caption]
DAVID RENNIE, The Economist: I'd like to ask you to explore the denominational sort of breakdown of this because -- I cover politics on four continents, and I'm back in the States for my second time.
When I see someone like Sanford, there's a very sort of born-again sort of aspect to the way that it's presented. You know, when he says, "God is a forgiving God," that looks like a very sort of American born-again kind of model.
When I was covering politics in Brussels for a few years, it was very striking that the big divide in terms of political scandals and forgiveness was around attitudes to hypocrisy. I remember an example of -- the top European official who was in charge of climate change and regulating greenhouse gasses turned out to drive an enormous SUV, and this was reported in sort of furious terms by the German, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Brits.
He was from Portugal, and the Southern Europeans just couldn't get it. They just didn’t understand what the fuss about because -- and it was explained to me by this guy’s sort of top flack that this was in his view a Protestant/Catholic divide. The Catholics take to view that everyone is a sinner, and the guy was passing good laws and regulations which were going to improve climate change, so how could it possibly matter what he drove, one car?
Whereas the hypocrisy drove Northern Europeans -- Protestant Europeans -- kind of crazy, and I think even within that you can see the difference between secular in the U.K, where I'm from. I'd say Newt Gingrich is a classic example of a politician who would have no chance of any comeback in the U.K.
The politicians who have just been kicked out of Parliament for expenses scandals in the U.K. will never come back because of the secular kind of -- originally sort of Protestant acts, Protestant tradition, there's no tolerance for hypocrisy. There are no comebacks. So tell me about the American context and the sort of denominational aspect of that.
DR. JONES: Well, I want to complicate your question. It's a great question. I want to complicate it slightly because I think there's both the cultural and a theological set of dimensions to it.
So the question about hypocrisy has cultural contexts that may overlap with religious or denominational sensibilities, but I'm not sure it is quite as clean as the notion that it's because he's Catholic and the difference between Catholic and Protestant.
I do think that there's a problem, particularly in American culture, of a kind of born-again rhetoric, where what really matters is what you say about your conversion that goes back to the revivalist tendencies across the American frontier, where it's what you say on the day you’re saved, not how you live afterwards. And so there's a peculiar Protestant problem that's born out of this notion that you don't want to talk about habits, you don't want to talk about virtues, and so -- I remember one guy once said to me, "I don't care how high somebody jumps the day they’re saved, I want to know how they walk once they land." And that's something that Protestants have a peculiar aversion to talk about, whereas Catholics actually are far more bound up with habits and practices, and you know, sacramental penance or reconciliation.
And so I think that there is something. It's not so much a question that Catholics think everybody’s a sinner and Protestants don't. I actually would have thought the sensibilities would have been described rather differently. The Protestants tend to think more about everybody being a sinner. It's more about the kind of rhetoric that accompanies it.
Now, the question of hypocrisy is an interesting one because I think there is a sense of sincerity and earnestness in a certain kind of evangelical Protestant culture that seems to substitute for actual behavior. How can I be wrong when I'm so sincere? And so if you have this kind of sincere rhetoric you can get away with other sorts of things. There are problems that would be correlative with Catholic tradition, though in terms of confession.
One of the great scenes, by the way, in Dead Man Walking is an early scene where the Catholic Priest, who is the chaplain in the prison -- and this guy goes and he finally wants to unburden himself of all of his sin and so he asks to go see the chaplain. And so the chaplain says, "What known sins have you committed since your last confession?" And the guy starts in and he says something like, "Well, rape and murder and arson, and rape, and another murder," and then the chaplain, just kind of going through the formula says, "And have you had any impure thoughts?" No, those were all pure.
But I think that the notion -- I actually think that both in the public sphere politically, and also in private life, if we don't have a certain tolerance for what hypocrisy, or inconsistency -- I mean, hypocrisy is a pretty loaded term. But all of us are inconsistent. I hold views about all sorts of things that I don't practice very well in my daily life. I have convictions about wealth and poverty that I don't live into very faithfully. Does that make me a hypocrite? Well, at some level. It also makes me human in that sense.
And so there's a greater sense of I'd say relaxed communal life in more established cultures. That would be the case, I think, in particular parts of Europe, for example, whereas we have a kind of petty moralism that is peculiar because, in terms of anybody -- Mark Sanford, or whoever -- there are only some things that really count as sins for which you might get into trouble. There are all sorts of other activities that people don't seem to have any hesitation or worry about. In America it's largely sexual misconduct that will get you into the deepest waters, although that now is changing with Sanford.
MR. CROMARTIE: I have a little dilemma here because we've got like ten people on the list and some of you want in right on something you just said just now. I get that sense from you Jennifer, but Peter has been waiting. And if you'd pull the mike up to yourself, Peter. I've got you on the list, Jennifer, and don't lose that thought.
[caption id="attachment_14687" align="alignright" width="200"] Dr. Peter Skerry[/caption]
DR. PETER SKERRY, Boston College: I apologize for my over-eagerness. Perhaps you should have a session on professional competitiveness and etiquette, and I could lead it or follow it.
(Laughter)
Well, speaking into the mike won't help that. So, Professor Jones, I appreciated your comments but I'm left a little confused because I grabbed onto what you said in the beginning about the past getting into our eyes, but it seems to me that in the United States today -- and I don't know if this is unique to the United States or it’s got to do more with advanced industrial societies, but I think it's unique to us that we forget quickly -- and you've kind of alluded to this -- and I'm not sure the past looms that large for lots of us.
Every time I see Al Sharpton on MSNBC I am struck that we are a very forgiving culture, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. In many ways it’s a good thing. So, I'm not sure whether you're talking -- I'm not sure how you would deal with that.
And then related to it is that you weave back and forth between personal stories of forgiveness and public and political stories of forgiveness, and those clearly have to have very different dynamics. I wished you would sort of reflect a bit and delineate how those dynamics are different. What everyone thinks about the healthcare rollout -- Secretary Sebelius may be guilty, but her guilt as the head of a large bureaucratic organization is a whole lot different than Al Sharpton's.
So, how do you reflect on those two sorts of dimensions?
DR. JONES: Sure. Great questions. I would say that amnesia is actually the mirror image of haunting past, that they actually are mirror images and that it's not a forgiving culture, the fact that we just ignore what Al Sharpton has said and done in the past or whomever. I don't think that's actually a sign of a forgiving culture, I think it's a sign of amnesia, which is dangerous. And so I think those are actually mirror images of each other and that we’re are still haunted as American culture in very deep ways. I haven't yet seen the movie, but Twelve Years a Slave is going to have this eruption of the haunting in a variety of ways.
I had a friend from South Africa who came to the U.S. who said, "You all pretend to keep moving on in a way that seems forgetful," and yet if you just go about six inches below the surface there's all this toxic waste that starts seeping into the public sphere.
So I don't actually think that our amnesia is a sign of forgiveness. I think it's actually the mirror image and reflects some of the dynamics of the haunting.
I think the haunting and the past getting in our eyes has more valence and power for persons, except it erupts in very public ways and it is a way in which, you know, you get initiated into particular traditions in American culture, but also around the world. And this is part of the reference to the former Yugoslavia -- or when I was in Israel and heard the Israeli guide point over there and say, "That's where we lost the battle," and somebody else said 1973 or 1967? And he said, "No, the Maccabees."
(Laughter)
But it was spoken as if it was yesterday. And so there's a certain sense in which you get initiated into traditions of conflict that are part of that haunting.
I do think that the speed at which things are happening is creating more amnesia, but I don't think it's actually taking away the hauntedness.
Yes, there are -- well, I debated even mentioning Sebelius because I think that's a very different dynamic, and part of what we have to do a lot better is spend a lot more time distinguishing forms of failure -- moral failure from incompetence, and experimental failure -- and there are different dynamics and there are different kinds of responsibility that ought to be -- but that would be a whole different set of conversations. Partly I was just trying to gesture toward somebody taking accountability in a full-stop sort of way.
But I think that there are different dynamics, I think it's not just a public versus personal because part of what I was talking about learning forgiveness is also pointing to communities that I think are really key because it's in local contexts that you're most likely to see forgiveness learned and practiced and lived in powerful ways.
And so that's why I talked about the Amish, or Homeboy, or the Muslims in Rwanda, because there are powerful examples of how it is learned and lived in loc