Our Forgiveness Blog
How to Pass Forgiveness to the Next Generation: Forming Forgiving Communities
How can we pass forgiveness to subsequent generations? We began asking that question in our blog post The Ripple Effect on April 10, 2012. Let us begin to explore some answers to this question through the implementation of forgiving communities.
By “forgiving community” we mean a system-wide effort to make forgiveness a conscious and deliberate part of human relations through: discussion, practice, mutual support, and the preservation of forgiveness across time in any group that wishes to cultivate and perfect this virtue (alongside justice and all other virtues). The Forgiving Community is an idea that can become a reality wherever there is a collection of individuals who wish to unite toward a common goal of fostering forgiveness, developing the necessary structures within their organization to accomplish the goal, and preserving that goal for future generations. We will consider The Family as Forgiving Community here and in a subsequent post, we will consider The School as Forgiving Community.
The central points of the Family as Forgiving Community are these:
1. We are interested in the growth of appreciation and practice in the virtue of forgiveness not only within each individual but also within the family unit itself.
2. For family members to grow in the appreciation and practice of forgiveness, that virtue must be established as a positive norm in the family unit. This necessitates that the parents value the virtue, talk positively about it, and demonstrate it through forgiving and asking for forgiveness on a regular basis within the family.
3. For each member of the family unit to grow in the appreciation and practice of forgiveness, that virtue must be taught in the home, with materials that are age-appropriate and interesting for the children and the parents.
4. Parents will need to persevere in the appreciation, practice, and education of forgiveness if the children are to develop the strength of passing the virtue of forgiveness onto their own families when they are adults.
To achieve these goals, one strategy is the Family Forgiveness Gathering.
The parents are encouraged to create a time and place for family discussions. We recommend that the parents gather the family together at least once a week to have a quiet discussion about forgiveness. They are to keep in mind that to forgive is not the same as excusing or forgetting or even reconciling and that forgiveness works hand-in-hand with justice.
Questions for the family forgiveness meeting might include:
– What does it mean to forgive someone?
– Who was particularly kind and loving to you this week?
– What did that feel like?
– When the person was really loving toward you, what were your thoughts about the person?
– When the person was really loving, how did you behave toward that person?
– Was anyone particularly unfair or mean to you this week?
– What did it feel like when you were treated in a mean way?
– What were your thoughts?
– Did you try to forgive the person for being unfair to you?
– What does forgiveness feel like?
– What are your thoughts when you forgive?
– What are your thoughts specifically toward the one who acted unfairly to you when you forgive him or her?
– How did you behave toward the person once you forgave?
– If you have not yet forgiven, what is a first step in forgiving him or her? (Make a decision to be kind, commit to forgiving, begin in a small way to see that the person is in fact a person of worth.)
The parents are reminded that they do not have to know all the answers.
Helpful Forgiveness Hint:
As you begin to forgive, please realize that you will be finding life-giving meaning in the process of forgiveness itself. You will learn about your ability to endure despite the pain. You will learn that forgiveness is a friend, which can bolster you the next time and the next time and the next time after that when you are emotionally hurt. You will learn how strong you are because you have faced difficulty and have overcome it with respect or compassion or love (or perhaps all three). So, begin the journey and look forward to finding meaning in the process.
Thought for the day:
‘I know what love is’ was the emphatic statement of the simple man, Forrest Gump. ‘I know what love is’ is now your goal. And the paradox is that you may begin to find love out of the ashes of all your resentments and disappointments from hundreds of injustices inflicted on you by others. Yes, forgiveness is a paradox–as you practice a sense of love toward people whom you might currently consider to be unloveable, you develop a certain wisdom about both love and forgiveness. It is in the struggle to forgive that you find wholeness. As you practice forgiveness, you discover love in such a way that it is more natural, more readily available, more deeply expressed, and more consistently expressed by you across the board.
The Forgiving Life, page 20.
Does Forgiveness Give Meaning to Suffering?
When others are unfair to us, we respond in part with emotional pain. After all, we do not expect others to treat us with disrespect or to withdraw love from us. When this happens, it hurts.
An important question, then, is this: What do we do with all of this pain? If we are not careful, we could too easily toss that pain onto others or conclude that we ourselves are not worth too much if we have this much pain. Good people, we might falsely reason, are pain free and since I am filled with pain, therefore I am not a very good person.
The meaning of suffering in the above two scenarios is quite negative. What does it mean to suffer? It means that I will be mean to others and to myself.
Yet, there is a better way if we shift our focus. With some effort, we may grow into seeing that our suffering is an opportunity. It is that opportunity to not let the pain and suffering defeat us, but instead to become motivated to reach for a higher good. Our pain can be a motivator to give back good where we received unfairness. That good can extend not only to the one who caused our pain but also to anyone else now who needs a little good to come their way. We can learn to be a conduit of good to others as we become more sensitive to their pain precisely because of the pain that we now carry. Because of our pain, and now our motivation to leave good in the world, someone else may be a little less pained, suffer a little less because we now desire for them a better way than we have had.
Suffering, put into service to others, gives meaning to the suffering. It gives meaning to life. As others benefit from this, the paradox is that we ourselves find that our suffering is reduced.
Forgiving others is one such path of taking our pain and putting it into service to others, particularly those who have created the suffering in us.
Forgiving the Chicago Cubs for Losing the 2003 National League Championship Series
It is the beginning of the baseball season, a time when no team is yet in last place. Hope springs eternal even for the futile. That is what makes early April so special as the baseball fan is allowed to have great expectations no matter which team is his or her favorite.
I read a recent blog in which one fan took great pains to explain which of the Chicago Cubs players he is forgiving for losing the 2003 National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins. This exercise is occurring 9 years after the loss. He listed 5 players and gave detailed explanations of their underachievement as rationale for his forgiveness.
His forgiveness leads to three questions: Can we forgive athletes for losing? What if they were underperforming, which then led to losing? What if there were good intentions and yet they lost? Can this still be a moral wrong?
Let us take each question in turn. First, can we forgive players for losing? The question presupposes that certain behaviors are so reprehensible that they are deemed unjust regardless of intentions or other circumstances. And there are such behaviors: enslaving another person is an example. Yet, this cannot be the case for a sports loss because the game is set up deliberately so that one team loses. It is part of the game to which all agree, players, fans, everyone. The act of losing, therefore, is not unjust by itself.
Then, to our second question. Is underperformance unjust? Yes, we can think of certain instances in which underperformance is immoral. A mother who underperforms in feeding her infant, depriving the baby of much-needed nutrition, would seem to be behaving unjustly. Yet, our question centers on athletic performance, not on a failure to give crucial nutrients to an infant. In the context of athletics, underperformance by itself would not seem to constitute an affront—a disappointment, yes, but not an actual offense. There is no wrong, for example, in trying and underperforming in a sporting event. Thus, we cannot judge underperformance by itself without factoring in effort or intentions.
The third question centers on intentions. Can one forgive someone who has good intentions and fails? Yes, I suppose we can think of examples, such as a car driver who is not paying attention to the road, intends to drive well but fails, and runs into another car. The consequences of not paying attention are so great that good intentions here are not sufficient to exonerate the driver. Again, however, the example has taken us away from athletics. Surely, all of the Cubs were trying. This was not the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The only consequence was losing. The outcome of losing, as we have already seen, is not an immoral act.
The act of losing in sports is not unjust and therefore is not a forgivable offense.
Underperformance by itself is not unjust in the context of sports. This is so if the athlete is trying.
Trying and failing is not unjust because the consequence, losing, is not unjust.
There is nothing to forgive here. The Cubs players did nothing wrong.
