“The Long, Hard, Winding Road to Forgiveness”
Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
October 1, 2006
Every year I choose one Sunday morning to talk with you about the topic of forgiveness. I do this because I happen to believe that forgiving is one of the most important things we do. I believe that lack of forgiveness is one of the biggest obstacles to living as fully, as richly, and as deeply as we might otherwise.
I usually do this sometime in the fall because fall of the year seems to be an appropriate time to talk about forgiveness because as the leaves change their colors and the weather turns cool, the end of another year is in sight, and I think it’s a good time to begin to look back over everything that has happened during the past year or so and to ask ourselves if there is anybody whom we need to forgive.
Why should we be forgiving - - of ourselves, of others, or even of life itself?
Forgiveness offers us freedom from the past, freedom to live fully in the present, freedom to dream about the future. When we learn to forgive, it offers us a second chance at life. When we learn to forgive, we transcend the limits of life and open ourselves to new possibilities.
So, as I said, I believe that forgiving is one of the most important things we do.
However, I want to be clear about what I mean by forgiveness and what I don’t mean by forgiveness.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean accepting, condoning, or excusing bad behavior, either someone else’s or our own. Forgiveness doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, whether it’s verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting things slide. It doesn’t mean one person coming to his or her partner and saying, “I’ve been unfaithful, and the other person saying, “Oh, that’s okay.”
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, and forgiveness doesn’t always mean the same as reconciling. It doesn’t guarantee that we will have a relationship with someone after we forgive them. We may decide to forgive the other person, but also decide our life will be happier without the other person in it.
What does forgiveness mean?
Forgiveness does mean letting go. It means letting go of our hurt and our pain. It means letting go of our urge to hurt another person as badly as the other person may have hurt us. It means refusing to allow what happened to make us angry and bitter for the rest of our lives. Somebody once said, “Forgiveness means letting go of our hopes and dreams for a different yesterday.”
I also want to acknowledge this morning that forgiving is hard, and even we want to forgive somebody, it often takes a long time, sometimes years, but I believe the effort is worth it.
As the Unitarian Universalist minister Tom Owen-Towle says, we have three choices in life: avoidance, resentment, or forgiveness. “Given those options,” he says, “only the latter one can bring our lives release and refreshment over the long haul and move us nearer a satisfying life.”
This morning, however, I don’t want to talk only about forgiveness, as important as I believe it is.
You see, I recently realized something.
Although during the past six years, I’ve given six different sermons on the importance forgiveness, I have said almost nothing, hardly one word, on a much related topic, and that is on the importance of apology.
Now before I go on, I want to say that apologizing and forgiving don’t always go hand in hand. For example, we may choose to forgive or reconcile with someone who hasn’t apologized to us, and apologizing to someone never guarantees that person will either forgive or reconcile with us.
However, in general, when it comes to healing the hurts and wounds that too often divide us, it’s my experience that a good apology goes a long way on the long, hard, winding road to forgiveness.
But you want to know what?
My guess is that most of us don’t know how to make a good apology.
I don’t remember ever being taught very much about apologizing. Besides being taught to say, “I’m sorry,” during all my growing up years, I don’t remember my parents ever sitting me down and saying, “This is how you do it.” During all my many years of education, it is a topic that was never covered.
Frankly, this has caused some problems for me. Throughout my ten years of marriage and my six years of ministry, I’ve learned the importance of both apologizing and forgiving, but like a lot of other things in life, I’ve mostly muddled my way through.
Most of the time, muddling through has worked out ok, but not always. There have been times in my life where I’ve been in the wrong and I’ve ended up saying, “I don’t know what else to say but I’m sorry.” Often times, this has been enough, and the person to whom I was apologizing has been gracious enough to forgive me. However, there have been times when this hasn’t been enough.
There have also been situations in my life when others have apologized to me, and though they seemed to be sincere, something was missing that made it hard for me to forgive, but I couldn’t say why.
Apologies have also been in the news a lot lately. Pope Benedict has expressed regret for remarks he made about Muslims. Every other day, some big famous person seems to be apologizing for something, sometimes successfully, but often times not so.
So I’ve been wondering, why do some apologies work? Why don’t some work? Besides saying, “I’m sorry,” what exactly should we say when we apologize to someone? And exactly what good does apologizing do?
That’s why I was happy to recently discover a book titled On Apology by Aaron Lazare, a professor of psychiatry, dean, and chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Lazare’s book is not exactly a how-to guide, but it does suggest that an effective apology usually has four parts, and I want to take a look at these with you this morning.
What are these four parts?
Lazare says the first part of an effective apology is simply acknowledging that an offense has occurred, saying “I’ve done something wrong. I’ve hurt or offended you and I shouldn’t have.”
Let me give you an example to explain why this is so important. I was driving through a parking lot of a strip mall near my home the other day. Another driver was coming around a corner, but was driving in the left lane. It’s a good thing we were both driving slowly. Otherwise, we would have had a head-on collision. After I hit the brakes and realized we weren’t going to crash, I felt my blood begin to rise and was tempted to signal to the other driver through sign language my estimation of his I.Q.
But then the other driver did something. He gestured with his hand as if to say, “This was my fault, and I’m sorry.”
“That idiot almost hit us!” Hiromi, sitting next to me, screamed.
“Yeah,” I said, “but he did the wave thingey, so it’s okay.”
Why did doing the wave thingey make it okay?
Lazare suggests that simply acknowledging an offense helps to restore the self-respect and the dignity of the person who has been offended.
Reflecting on my own life, this makes sense to me. I know that often when I become upset, it’s rarely because I have been physically hurt. It’s rarely because I have suffered some financial or material loss. It’s usually because somebody has bruised my ego. It’s because somebody has failed to treat me with the respect that I think I deserve.
When the other driver did the wave thingey, it was as if he was saying, “I respect you enough to recognize that you don’t deserve to get run over by me.”
In many circumstances when they’ve been wronged, it seems that’s what most people want most is simply a recognition of their dignity, a recognition that they didn’t deserve to be treated as they were.
In his book, Lazare tells the story of a British airline pilot of Muslim heritage who was falsely accused of training the September 11 highjackers. After being arrested at the request of the FBI, the man spent five months in a London prison before a British court ruled that there was no evidence against him. The pilot initially asked for compensation and an apology, but after not getting either, he is now suing the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice for $20 million. He said that if an apology had been given, he would not have resorted to legal action. “It’s not for the money, it’s the principle,” he said, “My family doesn’t deserve to be labeled as terrorists and I didn’t deserve five months in prison.”
Acknowledging an offense also helps because it shows the offended person that he or she was not at fault. In his book, Lazare relates a story about two women who were awarded $1 million dollars in a lawsuit that resulted from them being victims of sexual abuse. After the settlement, one of the women said that more important than the money was getting over the feeling “that I was the bad girl.”
Acknowledging an offense also assures the person who has been offended or hurt that the person who offended them has shared values and can be trusted again. “When those who have offended us refuse to acknowledge their behaviors are unacceptable,” Lazare says, “we may feel we can no longer count on the trustworthiness, predictability, and support we always took for granted.”
Lazare’s emphasis on the importance of acknowledging an offense has helped me understand why Pope Benedict attempts this past week to smooth things over with Muslims after implying in a public address that Islam is inherently violent have largely failed. While the pope has said he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction to his recent remarks, he has yet to say, “It was insensitive of me and wrong for me to imply that Islam is inherently violent,” and expressing regret and apologizing are not the same.
In the pope’s case, his failure to say “I was wrong” leaves in doubt whether he thinks Muslims are worthy enough of an apology. His failure to say “I was wrong” also leaves unclear whether he believes he was at fault in the matter or whether he believes that Muslims are merely overly-sensitive for being so angry. His statement leaves in doubt whether he is likely to make such an implication again.
One reason many apologies fail, Lazare suggests, is that that expression “I’m sorry” is ambiguous, especially in English. It’s unclear whether the person saying it is apologizing, and really acknowledging an offense, or only expressing empathy.
Other common blunders, are using the passive or conditional voice when making an apology. For example, when Senator George Allen of Virginia recently said, “I do apologize if he’s offended by that,” after referring to an Indian-American man as a monkey, he indicated he just doesn’t get it. Of course the man was offended!
The second part of offering an apology, Lazare says, is giving an explanation, though he acknowledges this is tricky. Too often offering an explanation may be seen as an attempt to make an excuse or justify bad behavior. However, in most cases, Lazare says, giving an explanation is still a good idea.
Why?
When we have hurt another person or when another person has hurt us, the person who has been hurt needs to know more than the offense was a violation of shared values. After all, we don’t always act according to our shared values. An explanation helps the person who was offended or hurt to determine what the chances are the offense will recur and whether the person can trust the relationship. For example, if I’m late to meet a friend for lunch, is it because my watch stopped unexpectedly or because I’m chronically late to appointments. “This additional information,” Lazare says, “gives the offended parties the knowledge necessary to make a well-grounded decision either to terminate or repair the relationship.”
The third part of offering an effective apology, Lazare says, is expressing regret.
Why is this important?
Often when we’re hurt by another person, we want them to know how badly we’ve suffered. We want them to “feel our pain.” There is a part of us - - not necessarily a good part of us, but nevertheless a part of us - - that wants them to suffer just as much as we have.
When somebody expresses genuine, sincere remorse and regret, it helps alleviate that sense of wanting to get back, of wanting to get even.
Former South African President F.W. de Klerk has spoken to this saying, “Deep regret goes much further than just saying you’re sorry. Deep regret says that if I could turn the clock back, and if I could do anything about it, I would have liked to avoided it.”
Similarly, lack of regret, Lazare says, “indicates the wrongdoer may not share the moral standards of the rest of society and, thus, is at risk to repeat the wrongful act.”
The fourth part of an effective apology, Lazare says, is an offer to make reparations. When an offense has mostly been to a person’s ego, often an apology itself is enough to make reparations. However, other times, greater reparations, may be in order. For example, if I’ve borrowed a power tool from a neighbor and broken it, the appropriate thing to do would be to replace it.
To summarize…four parts to an effective apology: acknowledging an offense, offering an explanation, expressing regret, and offering reparations. Or in other words, saying something along the lines of, “I’ve offended or hurt you, and I shouldn’t have. Here’s why it happened. I feel terrible about it, and I’m committed to not letting it happen again. If it’s possible, I’ll make it up to you.”
Knowing how to apologize, however, begs the question of whether it’s a good idea.
According to Lazare, people often fail to apologize, even when they know they have hurt or offended someone, for one reason: fear. They fear what might happen to them as a result of apologizing. They fear what others may think of them. They fear what they may think of them themselves.
I admit that there have been at least a few times in my life when I have succumbed to such fears.
But let me suggest for your consideration this morning that such fears are usually overblown are off base. Let me suggest that apologizing, like forgiveness, is something good we can do for ourselves.
Why? First off, when we apologize for our wrongs, whatever they may be, we end up living with less guilt. Far too many of us, I believe, are walking around with too much guilt.
Second, most people are far more open to our apologies than we tend to believe. Like the returning Prodigal Son, we are far more likely to embraced than rejected when we apologize. Apologies lead to deeper relationships rather than weaker ones.
Third, and somewhat counter-intuitively, people think more highly of us when we do apologize.
What do I mean?
I recently read a profile of former President Clinton in The New Yorker. Whenever he travels to Rwanda, he is warmly embraced there, despite his failure during his presidency to intervene in the genocide in that country that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Why? He is one of the only world leaders to have apologized for his failure to intervene.
Here’s another example from the world of politics. Richard Clark, this country’s former “counterterrorism czar” is held in relatively high esteem among the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of five years ago. Why? He is one of the only people to have apologized for his role in the failure to prevent those attacks.
Let me give you one more example, something not quite so extreme and closer to home. A member of the church recently called me. This person had borrowed a book from the church library and had lost it. The person apologized for losing the book and insisted on buying a replacement copy.
I had already held this person in high esteem before. I respect and trust this person even more now. Why?
We all make mistakes. We all do things we shouldn’t do. As we get older, we hope to get a little wiser. We hope to get a little bit better about this task of being a decent human being. But we never become perfect. Never ever.
So given the fact that all of us are imperfect, I respect and trust more someone who has the courage to own up to and apologize for their occasional mistakes than somebody who is afraid to do so.
Let me finish with this hope. In this broken and hurting world, may each of us take the steps that are necessary, whether they be of apology or forgiveness, to bring us closer to that ideal of loving oneness and harmony that is the secret dream of each of our hearts.