Till everyone is blind

Someone I love dearly recently posted a link to an online article, praising it as profound wisdom. When another whom I love also admired the article, I clicked through and read for myself. Sadly, what I found was not wisdom. I found arguments that sounded reasonable, but at the heart of which lay deadly poison. I am so concerned for those whom I love, and for the author of the article (who is but expressing a popular sentiment), that I feel compelled to respond. But I didn't want to do it in bits and pieces in comment boxes, so I'm writing a post of my own.

You can read the column here. The author, ever so gently, excuses the sin of unforgiveness in the name of speaking for justice. She uses the example of Irish pub songs to springboard to the racial tensions in America. The reason this is so wrong is that unforgiveness is a deeper, more pernicious sin than racial injustice or cultural oppression. Unforgiveness can never be excused no matter how noble the rationale, and those who indulge it will ultimately lose all other goods, including justice, as bitterness and hatred consume their minds and souls.

We need to remember that justice is a minimum standard for treatment of others. Ideally, we'll be charitable to each other, but failing that we can be generous, and if we can't manage that perhaps we can be kind, but at the very least we should be just. Of course, it's also true that justice is foundational – without justice, expressions of kindness or generosity ring hollow, empty expressions of sentiment. But if justice does not lead to the higher goods, it remains stunted, a truncated foundation for human relations. Just as foundations were meant to be built upon, not moved into, so justice points to the greatest good, which is charity.

Forgiveness is essential to charity. I cannot be charitable toward someone against whom I am holding a grudge. Neither is forgiveness optional, as if it were some lofty goal that only saints can achieve. As Jesus makes clear in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18), our not forgiving others can get our own forgiveness rescinded. Forgiving as we are forgiven lies at the heart of the central prayer of Christianity. As Peter Kreeft observes, if we refuse to forgive, we speak damnation on our own heads every time we pray. Forgiveness does not negate wrongs (the Unmerciful Servant was truly owed, and justly deserved repayment), and neither does it negate the requirements of justice. But neither does it become optional when a certain victim count has been exceeded. Unforgiveness in the name of an oppressed nation or group or race is merely whitewash, because ultimately all these things are abstractions. Only individuals are moral agents, and individuals are commanded to forgive.

The cruel irony is that while the sin of unforgiveness is excused in the name of promoting justice in some arena, be it political or economic or whatever, bondage to sin is the deepest bondage of all. Ultimately it doesn't matter how “free” you are economically, or how much “justice” you've obtained in the political arena: if you're in thrall to sin, you're a slave. In her column, Ms. Weiss refers to “songs about killing the English” as “a trope, not an emotional reality”, and excuses singing them because “we root for the underdog.” She acknowledges that “hating people is wrong”, but then neuters her own statement by saying that “telling oppressed people to 'stop that hating' doesn't work too well.” Odd how Jesus stood in the midst of a people who'd been oppressed for centuries and told them to do precisely that. Those who did were freed even though the political and economic yoke of Rome remained. Those who refused to remained enslaved in every sense.

The truth is that the “tropes” which Ms. Weiss considers harmless because they are “not an emotional reality” are not harmless at all, but poisonous seeds that have sprouted and borne bitter fruit in Ireland through the generations. Perhaps the parish priests of Ireland tended to excise Matthew 18 from the Mass readings when it came around, or maybe they taught that it didn't apply to the English, or that it was applicable to individuals but not nations. I don't know, but I do know that the Church in Ireland, as well as the Irish people, are now paying a bitter price because the Church there chose to be a cultural institution interested in preserving its power rather than the impoverished Bride proclaiming her Divine Spouse's message of charity – including that difficult part about forgiving. “Tropes” that keep alive unforgiveness are anything but innocent. In Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan recounts how the Serbs commemorated their crushing defeat at the hands of the Turks at Kossovo Polje in 1389:

On June 28, 1988, the year-long countdown to the sixth centenary of Lazar's martyrdom at Kossovo Polje began when his coffin began a tour of every town and village in Serbia...The coffin drew huge, black-clad crowds of mourners at every stop... “Every [Serbian] peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for,” noted John Reed, at the front in World War I. “When he was a baby, his mother greeted him with, 'Hail, little avenger of Kossovo!'” (Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, p. 38, emphasis added)

Six hundred years.

In light of these “tropes”, this “rooting for the underdog” (which Serbians would certainly consider “rooted in a longing for justice”), does anyone think it coincidence that Slobadan Milosevic was able to appeal to this bitterness lying at the core of the Serbian soul? Does it surprise anyone that these same Serbs are now resisting the flow of refugees across their country – refugees who are victims themselves, and who have no relation to those who oppressed the Serbs – simply because the refugees are Muslim?

Unforgiveness is never innocent. Regardless of the argument used to rationalize it, it always bears poisonous fruit. Dr. Martin Luther King recognized it, which was why he always preached forgiveness alongside justice. Gandhi recognized this, and though the Muslims and Hindus had a record of mutual oppression that went back centuries, and both had suffered under the British occupation, he stood in their midst and dared proclaim, “stop that hating!” (How many heeded his call can be seen in the ongoing violence between Hindus and Muslims.) Unforgiveness never liberates. To hear a powerful testimony to just how innocent those tropes sung in Irish pubs are, listen to Irish poet Tommy Sands' song There Were Roses.

“And another eye for another eye, till everyone is blind.”

That's where unforgiveness leads. Period. Those who condemn forgiveness as weakness, who refuse to leave offense behind, who fan the flames of indignation in their breasts in the name of justice, are but chaining themselves more tightly to a crueler master. There is no freedom down that road, only more slavery.

Stop reciting the tropes. Stop that hating. Forgive. It's the only path to freedom – for an individual, a family, a clan, a race, a nation. For Irish and English, black and white, Serb and Turk, Hindu and Muslim – it doesn't matter who. Forgiveness is the only way to freedom. All other paths lead to slavery.