Forgive Us
How do we say we are sorry? When do we say we are sorry? Why do we say we are sorry? To whom do we say we are sorry? Are saying we are sorry and asking forgiveness the same thing? We could explore any number of possibilities related to asking forgiveness. Perhaps we should begin with what it means to ask forgiveness. According to Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, the word forgive means "1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for b: to grant relief from payment of 2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon ." To forgive, then, means to release someone from something; to ask forgiveness is to ask that we be released, usually from some kind of debt.
We will probably explore the idea of debt more another time, but for now, a debt is something that we owe someone, whether the thing we owe is material or not. We can owe someone money, we can owe someone lunch, or we can owe someone the respect of acknowledging that we have in some way wronged him or her. When we ask forgiveness, then, we are asking someone to release us from whatever we owe that person--even if that person is God.
That said, then, saying "I'm sorry" is not the same as asking forgiveness. Saying "I'm sorry" is a statement; we are stating that we regret something we have done. As we explored earlier, asking places us in some way subordinate to another. If we merely state that we are sorry, we have not placed ourselves in that subordinate position. It might be argued, however, that by asserting that we are sorry we are also placing ourselves in the same kind of subordination; but, at the outset of saying "I'm sorry" is the problem: making this statement focuses on the self. When we say we are sorry, we begin with I, and that places us anywhere but subordinate to the other.
Another problem with saying "I'm sorry" is that it is akin to the ubiquitous and pointless "How are you?"--it lacks meaning because it lacks sincerity. Usually, when people ask the how-are-you question, they merely mean hello. Much has been made, in the last few years, of people (especially people working in stores) saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; there is even a delightful song by Go Fish which addresses the substitution. Yet, the word holiday is derived from holy day, and surely Christmas is one of our most holy of days. It is, once again, all about about intentions. I can say "Happy Holidays" and intend just as much (or more) reverence and respect as anyone saying "Merry Christmas."
Just so, I can honestly care about he response to my asking "How are you?"--and I can sincerely mean it when I say "I'm sorry." However, all of these phrases begin to lose their meaning because we use them so much and so loosely. Just as the word love, in English, begins to fade because we use it interchangeably to express our feelings about our spouse, our deity, and our pizza, so does "I'm sorry" begin to lose its meaning as we use it to address forgetting to convey a phone message, losing our temper, or running over the cat.
Asking forgiveness pushes us to be more specific. Saying "I'm sorry" allows us an immediate distance between what we did and to whom we did it. We have tried to teach our kids to ask forgiveness according to a formula (which we stole from someone. I do not recall who; being teachers means we adopt and adapt ideas from pretty much any source we encounter--it's one of the teacher skills most teacher education programs don't address). The formula for asking forgiveness is really pretty simple: [Address the person by name while looking him or her in the eye], please forgive me for [state specifically what you have done to wrong the person you are talking to]. Do not make excuses. You may offer to make amends in some way if that is appropriate. Then listen to the other person. After it is over, it is over.
By asking forgiveness in this way, we are connecting ourselves to the action which precipitated the need for forgiveness and also to the person harmed. Until we take hold of the thing, how can we let it go? We have to accept the thing we have done, admit it (to others and to ourselves) before we can begin to seek forgiveness. But we also have to connect ourselves to the other party; we have to acknowledge that there is another party--which is something the I'm-sorry statement does not accomplish.
Knowing the words to say means nothing (ultimately) if the intention is not true and sincere. I have had dozens of students who know what to say and when to say it; their manners have been impeccable. Yet they are like the Eddie Haskell character on Leave It to Beaver: what they say with their mouths and what they say with their hearts are very different things. The Eddie Haskell effect results in empty words and unfulfilled expectations. We might fool someone occasionally, but we will certainly not fool God; most often, we merely fool ourselves.
I have a very bad habit, when it comes to prayer (and habit within prayer, it could be argued, is a problem in itself) of inserting a plea which says, "Forgive me, Father, for my short-comings and failures," with the implication that God can sort it all out--He knows what I did and He can fill in the blanks. And God could do that, though I am not sure that He wants it that way. By not being specific, I am, in effect, creating space-holders with the words short-comings and failures. They become the x of my quadratic equations of asking forgiveness. I am saying that I do not have the time or the interest to actually establish what I am talking about. Maybe I am too ashamed to voice my sins; maybe I am just trying to cover all my bases; but most likely, I am being too lazy, too irresponsible, too removed. Even though I may have addressed God directly, I have not addressed anything else directly, and so I have left a void.
Someone might object that the Lord's Prayer is not so specific: Christ prays "forgive us our debts," which is no more specific than my short-comings and failures. However, as we have already observed, Christ is modeling how we should pray. When I am teaching students how to write, whether it be an essay or a poem, I have to be careful--students have a tendancy to embrace the model I provide to the point that they cannot begin to write their own piece. They make my model into a template that they try to fit their own words into; they refuse to see the model in more abstract terms. Christ could not anticipate all our "debts" that we might include in the prayer. (Well, okay, He could, but you know what I mean.) It is up to us to fit ourselves into the model. Just as my students must realize that it is possible to have six paragraphs in an essay (I had a college freshman argue, once upon a time, that he could not insert another paragraph into his essay because his high school English teacher had told him that essays had to have five paragraphs), we must all realize that we can--and we must--make our prayer personal and specific and real. That is part of the debt.
We will probably explore the idea of debt more another time, but for now, a debt is something that we owe someone, whether the thing we owe is material or not. We can owe someone money, we can owe someone lunch, or we can owe someone the respect of acknowledging that we have in some way wronged him or her. When we ask forgiveness, then, we are asking someone to release us from whatever we owe that person--even if that person is God.
That said, then, saying "I'm sorry" is not the same as asking forgiveness. Saying "I'm sorry" is a statement; we are stating that we regret something we have done. As we explored earlier, asking places us in some way subordinate to another. If we merely state that we are sorry, we have not placed ourselves in that subordinate position. It might be argued, however, that by asserting that we are sorry we are also placing ourselves in the same kind of subordination; but, at the outset of saying "I'm sorry" is the problem: making this statement focuses on the self. When we say we are sorry, we begin with I, and that places us anywhere but subordinate to the other.
Another problem with saying "I'm sorry" is that it is akin to the ubiquitous and pointless "How are you?"--it lacks meaning because it lacks sincerity. Usually, when people ask the how-are-you question, they merely mean hello. Much has been made, in the last few years, of people (especially people working in stores) saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; there is even a delightful song by Go Fish which addresses the substitution. Yet, the word holiday is derived from holy day, and surely Christmas is one of our most holy of days. It is, once again, all about about intentions. I can say "Happy Holidays" and intend just as much (or more) reverence and respect as anyone saying "Merry Christmas."
Just so, I can honestly care about he response to my asking "How are you?"--and I can sincerely mean it when I say "I'm sorry." However, all of these phrases begin to lose their meaning because we use them so much and so loosely. Just as the word love, in English, begins to fade because we use it interchangeably to express our feelings about our spouse, our deity, and our pizza, so does "I'm sorry" begin to lose its meaning as we use it to address forgetting to convey a phone message, losing our temper, or running over the cat.
Asking forgiveness pushes us to be more specific. Saying "I'm sorry" allows us an immediate distance between what we did and to whom we did it. We have tried to teach our kids to ask forgiveness according to a formula (which we stole from someone. I do not recall who; being teachers means we adopt and adapt ideas from pretty much any source we encounter--it's one of the teacher skills most teacher education programs don't address). The formula for asking forgiveness is really pretty simple: [Address the person by name while looking him or her in the eye], please forgive me for [state specifically what you have done to wrong the person you are talking to]. Do not make excuses. You may offer to make amends in some way if that is appropriate. Then listen to the other person. After it is over, it is over.
By asking forgiveness in this way, we are connecting ourselves to the action which precipitated the need for forgiveness and also to the person harmed. Until we take hold of the thing, how can we let it go? We have to accept the thing we have done, admit it (to others and to ourselves) before we can begin to seek forgiveness. But we also have to connect ourselves to the other party; we have to acknowledge that there is another party--which is something the I'm-sorry statement does not accomplish.
Knowing the words to say means nothing (ultimately) if the intention is not true and sincere. I have had dozens of students who know what to say and when to say it; their manners have been impeccable. Yet they are like the Eddie Haskell character on Leave It to Beaver: what they say with their mouths and what they say with their hearts are very different things. The Eddie Haskell effect results in empty words and unfulfilled expectations. We might fool someone occasionally, but we will certainly not fool God; most often, we merely fool ourselves.
I have a very bad habit, when it comes to prayer (and habit within prayer, it could be argued, is a problem in itself) of inserting a plea which says, "Forgive me, Father, for my short-comings and failures," with the implication that God can sort it all out--He knows what I did and He can fill in the blanks. And God could do that, though I am not sure that He wants it that way. By not being specific, I am, in effect, creating space-holders with the words short-comings and failures. They become the x of my quadratic equations of asking forgiveness. I am saying that I do not have the time or the interest to actually establish what I am talking about. Maybe I am too ashamed to voice my sins; maybe I am just trying to cover all my bases; but most likely, I am being too lazy, too irresponsible, too removed. Even though I may have addressed God directly, I have not addressed anything else directly, and so I have left a void.
Someone might object that the Lord's Prayer is not so specific: Christ prays "forgive us our debts," which is no more specific than my short-comings and failures. However, as we have already observed, Christ is modeling how we should pray. When I am teaching students how to write, whether it be an essay or a poem, I have to be careful--students have a tendancy to embrace the model I provide to the point that they cannot begin to write their own piece. They make my model into a template that they try to fit their own words into; they refuse to see the model in more abstract terms. Christ could not anticipate all our "debts" that we might include in the prayer. (Well, okay, He could, but you know what I mean.) It is up to us to fit ourselves into the model. Just as my students must realize that it is possible to have six paragraphs in an essay (I had a college freshman argue, once upon a time, that he could not insert another paragraph into his essay because his high school English teacher had told him that essays had to have five paragraphs), we must all realize that we can--and we must--make our prayer personal and specific and real. That is part of the debt.
posted by Rodney Rhodus | 7:46 AM
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