Forgiveness and mercy

Laurie Andrews writes about life, love and forgiveness

In a New Statesman article last month about her life as a peace campaigner, Sheila Hancock wrote: ‘As a Quaker, I aspire to be a pacifist.’ She considered whether, with a gun in her pocket, she would refrain from using it to save someone from being murdered. Would she, as she hoped, find the courage to reason with the attacker? I share her honest doubts for, as a Friend, I aspire to be a Quaker.

I was told recently that I was not a very good Quaker. What a relief! I could not bear the burden of being a good, let alone perfect, Quaker, whatever that means. I’m a Quaker – good and bad. I came to Friends as a sinner. I was not asked if I was good, or told to be good; I was accepted as I was.

The completion certificate we received at the end of our ‘Equipping for Ministry’ course at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre was headed with the words of Caroline Fox: ‘Live up to the light thou hast and more will be granted thee’ (Quaker faith & practice, 26.04). We start where we are and trust that faint light to shine more brightly. As Lorna Marsden said: ‘It is by encounter with our own darkness that we recognise the light’ (Quaker faith & practice, 21:10).

The good raised up

By attending Meeting for Worship for over thirty years I’ve found the evil in me weakening and the good raised up. But the potential for evil is always there and cannot now be hidden behind a rationalising smokescreen of self-justification. The flaws and imperfections exposed by the growing light are my gurus. I am their disciple. As someone once told me: ‘If you never have a resentment how will you learn how to deal with them?’

My wife Jenny and I have been married for fifty-five years, and never a cross word, I sometimes joke. But that would be absurd. As Kenneth Barnes said: ‘It is by our “imperfections” that we move towards each other, towards the wholeness of relationship. It is our oddities, our grittiness, the occasions when we hurt or are hurt that challenge us to a deeper knowledge of each other. Our sins have been said to be stepping stones to God’ (Quaker faith & practice, 21:07).

Jenny is still a mystery to me in many ways, but you can get to know someone really well when you live with them for half a century. Like everyone, we’ve had our ups and downs. At one agonisingly dark time our marriage hung by a thread, and, yes, it was my fault; my darkness at the time seemed impenetrable. But, as Stuart Yates wrote in the Friend (7 April): ‘If it does not overwhelm us, darkness provides the sustenance, the soil, for our journey towards the light.’

Compassion and forgiveness

One amazing and completely unexpected blessing is that through all our stresses and trials we discovered that forgiveness was factored into the marriage; it was and is a given. Of course, we have to try to put things right and, as far as we can, ‘not let the sun go down on our wrath’. But it is an immense consolation to know that even when our ‘oddities and grittiness’ have caused pain, we know we are forgiven even before the offence is committed.

With our wounds we are healed. And those emotional growing pains allow us to show each other what I call compassionate indifference, the capacity in times of tension and disturbance to detach with love.

In Stuart Yates’ words: ‘If we cannot experience compassion for our own faults and weaknesses, how can we feel compassion for others? How can we learn to love in spite of as well as because of?… An honest receiving, acknowledgment and acceptance of another’s frailty, without blame, a simple but deep “being with”, can enable that frailty to provide a way forward to greater wholeness.’ That has been our experience.

Acceptance

A well-known story by that itinerant Jewish troublemaker told how a rebellious son finally saw the error of his ways and decided to return to his father and beg forgiveness: ‘When he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be your son”. But the father said to his servants: “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be merry. For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and he is found”’ (Luke 15:20-24).

When the father saw the boy ‘still a great way off’ he ran to greet him. There’s no righteous anger – ‘So, he’s finally seen sense and come back with his tail between his legs, let’s hear what he’s got to say for himself’ – just nonjudgmental joy and acceptance.

And when the broken-hearted boy says: ‘I have sinned and am no longer worthy to be your son,’ his father says: ‘Never mind all that, I gave you up for dead, you’ve come back to life – let’s party!’ There no stern recriminations, just unconditional love.

I once heard a Friend minister on Advice 10: ‘Come regularly to Meeting for Worship even when you are angry, depressed, tired or spiritually cold…’ Our Friend said he would change the word ‘even’ to ‘especially’. Attendance at Meeting for Worship can be an act of contrition, an acknowledgment of our imperfections and limitations, and we are assured that even before we arrive, healing forgiveness is waiting, in spite of us.

---

Comments

A great article, so full of life’s rich experience.

By Richard on 26th May 2017 - 20:16

---

Oh how I concur with the final paragraph!
There have been several times, of a Sunday morning when I’ve felt that the last thing I need is a Quaker Meeting, those mornings when I’ve felt so grotty, so unspiritual and so very un-quakerly.
On occasions like that I’ve settled into my bench, done a little pranayama (Yogic breath-control) and then surrendered myself to the Meeting.
  And the Meeting has carried me, as if on wings.

By andavane on 28th May 2017 - 20:18

---

Please login to add a comment