'Real forgiveness means change, mental effort, movement away from our old way of behaving and thinking.' Photo: by Christopher Stites on Unsplash
Pattern matching: Beth Allen responds to Yearly Meeting Gathering with a familiar prayer
‘We often still think about forgiveness at a nursery level.’
We give ourselves such problems when we live with other people! They are different from us – so awkward! We disagree with them, but quietly, so as not to upset anyone. In this year’s Epistle from Yearly Meeting Gathering we reminded ourselves that ‘we need to tenderly explore disagreement… and avoid a false peace’. We also committed ourselves to thought and action in three huge areas of disagreement: our enmeshment in racism, our attitudes to our gender diversity and action on climate justice.
How can we begin? The Epistle drove me back to Jesus’ ‘pattern prayer’, a template for life in any community, which he suggested to the disciples when they asked to be shown how to pray. Yes, it is full of asking. Yes, it isn’t the only prayer there is. But I think it’s worth noting that Jesus doesn’t hint at the mystic’s flight of the alone to the alone, or the bliss of feeling caught up into cosmic Love. The test of mystical experience is not how high I go, but in how I behave towards others when I come back to earth, in the way my everyday life matches up to the truths I saw so clearly in those timeless moments.
So Jesus starts us off by asking that we may be helped to live on earth according to the values of heaven. Next, that we may be given daily the food that will give us the strength to do that. Each day, every day, starting today. If we are to break our addiction to getting and spending, to our way of life which destroys our planet, we can appropriately start with the addict’s motto: ‘one day at a time’. This can help with the Quaker addiction to feeling that we are good people. Just by living in the UK I share in, and benefit from, a system that is unjust, polluting, misogynistic and racist. So I need the daily strength to resist, to speak out, to choose different food, to travel wisely and to live up to the values I say I want to live by.
And I don’t need to beat myself up all the time. Jesus’ pattern prayer continues with the request that will help us more than any other to make our Epistle real in our lives, not just words on paper. We ask for forgiveness.
When my children were small, saying sorry was a lesson to learn in small ways. John took Mary’s toy cat, she hit him, there were tears and defiance, then justice in the form of a parent who descended and insisted that both should say sorry. Of course both said it with bad grace but a ritual had been performed, and life went back to normal. We often still think about forgiveness at that nursery level. Saying we are sorry, that we regret the hurt and pain we have caused, is a performance and we imagine that things can go back to how they were before. On the contrary, real forgiveness means change, mental effort, movement away from our old way of behaving and thinking. It means truly mending a broken relationship, considering the causes of the wrong and, if possible, suitable justice.
Even between individuals, this isn’t often simple. In our small community we see how complicated it can be, and in the wider world, it is so much harder. What is genuine forgiveness and justice for those murdered by racists, for Northern Ireland, for Grenfell, for the melting of the Arctic ice, for Afghanistan? Thank goodness that our systems include some means for addressing some of these huge global and social wrongs.
Thank goodness too that we are a community of Friends. That does give us the strength, and many of the tools, to at least make an attempt in those parts of our life where we can have some effect, make some changes, have some influence.
In our shared worship, we can each look at our own lives and consider where the seeds of these issues are growing in us. Then in discussion we can acknowledge and explore them together, and help each other find ways out of apparently impossible tangles. Stillness and silence help us to face up to truth, and, when we see uncomfortable truths, our Epistle reminds us that ‘support can lead to greater self-acceptance, enabling Friends to flourish and contribute’. If we only accept the good parts of ourselves, we can’t flourish fully; instead we can practise accepting ourselves and each other as flawed human beings, trying in every sense, and we can then make our contribution with humility.
In the pattern prayer, our request for forgiveness is the only one with a condition: ‘As we forgive those who wrong us’. We make our mutual forgiveness real and genuine as we live it out in our community, changing our attitudes and our actions, not just performing ‘sorry’.
In the gospels Jesus told Peter that: ‘I will call you Peter, which means “a rock.” On this rock I will build my church, and death itself will not have any power over it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and God in heaven will allow whatever you allow on earth. But he will not allow anything you don’t allow.’
In our Quaker community, we don’t give these keys to one individual, we share them. We are all foundational rocks; we all have the power to let each other into the glory of our shared heaven, or to shut each other (and ourselves) out into non-being, powerlessness, less than humanity. So our worshipping Meetings, our friendly communities, are the tools for the work we do on forgiving each other and ourselves. Flourishing lively Meetings are also our reward.
And we don’t do this alone. Jesus told his friends that the Spirit would help them, and that the Spirit can show us what is real and true, fitting in with creation, and leading us into more and more truth than we had expected. Once more, we remind ourselves in the Epistle: ‘A commitment to truth requires us to be open to new experiences, with a readiness to learn.’ We are a Spirit-led community, ready to listen to each other, to change and to grow. We experience and recognise this Spirit in the sense of unity and gatheredness that we feel in worship. The Spirit helps us to move, to make the changes in our lives. These show that our mutual forgiveness is real, not just a performance. The Spirit can keep us together in the community we value, so that we are enriched by our variety and differences.
Jesus taught his friends to ask for forgiveness, and for daily strength. We need both, and we need the Spirit too. Let’s ask!
