Rev. Susan Maginn
Fight or Flight or Forgive
October 5, 2008
Wy'east UU Congregation
Portland, OR

Now is the time for turning. It is the time of turning toward the harvest, toward fading leaves, toward sweaters. This is also the time of year when it is said that the veil between this world and the spirit world is particularly thin. This is when the holy is looming, waiting for us to slow down and notice.

It is Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a time for welcoming the New Year by turning toward God. It is the time of Ramadan, a time for turning toward God with a month of fasting. For both the Jewish and Muslim holidays, this is a time to forgive and a time to be forgiven.

It makes sense that these traditions have a time, every year, to consider forgiveness. Without the teachings of forgiveness we are left to fight or flight. These are our oh-so-human reflexes to pain that we see most clearly when we are hurt. There is a rush of adrenaline that gives us the energy to either fight the source of our pain or run away from it.

In many ways, fighting just feels good. Scientists are studying the effects of forgiveness on the body and what they are finding is that the monitored brain looks the same when someone is craving food when someone is craving revenge. Our yearning for revenge is as primal as our yearning for food.

There is another interesting finding. As you might imagine, when people tell the story of how they have been wronged, their blood pressure skyrockets. The severity of what has happened doesn't really matter. What matters is how the person feels about what happened, how they have or have not integrated the event into their life. What is interesting is that if the person has been able to have forgiveness for what happened, their blood pressure still skyrockets but then drops significantly as they talk.

Sometimes the last thing we want to do is fight back. We want to get as far away from the pain as possible; thus the 'flight' part of 'fight or flight'. We may be seeking basic physical safety or food supply. I'm thinking of those who fled the southern coast in the wake of the hurricanes. I'm thinking of people who flee an abusive spouse.

Is there a place for forgiveness in those times when a violation has so clearly taken place and immediate justice feels so urgent? For example, after September 11th, or in 2004 when it seemed as if the presidential election was stolen for the second time in a row.

Yes, there is a place for forgiveness in such times. Our soul has a singular longing: for peace. This longing for peace cannot be satisfied by the ways of revenge or vindication. The seductive ways of revenge and vindication might feel good in the short run, but our soul's longing for peace can only be truly satisfied by the ways of forgiveness.

When we are in fight or flight mode, we are consumed with our own personal concerns and fears. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but simply put: being self-absorbed will limit the effectiveness of the fight. When we are able to consider how forgiveness plays a part, then we might take action that will serve something larger than our own pride. With forgiveness, we can have perspective on the events to see the bigger picture of why this happened in the first place, seeing the interconnections and the ways that we can make a difference. The power of forgiveness might embolden us to make that difference. Unfortunately we might also see that there is little we are able to do and then we will have to walk the tough road of figuring out how to let it go.

In a crowded auditorium, two men sit smiling on the stage. They are waving and welcoming the kids and they sit down and come to silence. The principal comes out and introduces the pair of men. "This man's son was killed by this man's grandson." So begins one of the many miraculous stories of forgiveness.

One night a boy was delivering pizzas to a house where some other boys had been drinking all day and were planning a robbery. When the pizza was delivered, the boy at the door took out a gun and demanded money from the boy delivering the pizza. When he refused to give the money, he was shot dead.

Soon after the murder and the sentencing of the grandson to prison (the grandparents are the guardians for the boy), the father of the killed son reached out to the other family. The father and the grandfather got to know each other. The father felt that he had to do something to honor his son's life and asked the grandfather to do public presentations with him where the two men could warn kids about random violence and the power of forgiveness. A not-so-insignificant side note to this story is that the father is Muslim and the grandfather is African American.

The grandfather speaks about how he would do anything for this man, not out of a sense of guilt or duty, but because over the years the two men have become best friends. The father is even asking the courts to reduce the prison time for his son's murderer, saying that he will give the boy a job with his company whenever he is released.

The boy waits in prison and reflects on the extraordinary forgiveness being offered to him by the father of the boy he murdered. He is now inspired to forgive those who have hurt him: the mother and father who abandoned him as a baby for their drug addictions, the friends that have hurt him along the way. He may not be freed from prison earlier than expected, but the forgiveness extended to him is freeing him in ways he never imagined possible.

There is the well-trod passage from Matthew that says "Then Peter came and said to him, 'Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times."

One could hear in this story that forgiveness is so important that you would do it not once but seventy-seven times. However, it also speaks to the complexity of forgiveness Ð that it would take that long. That it takes forgiving seventy-seven times to be freed of the anger. It takes forgiving seventy-seven times to understand how you will be transformed by forgiveness. It takes forgiving seventy-seven times to know in your bones that forgiveness doesn't happen in an instant. It could be seventy-seven cycles of instants made of grief, acceptance, justice making, reconciliation and letting go. Forgiving is anything but quick and easy. It is a glorious mess.

Here's the nutshell of my story and what I have learned about forgiveness along the way.

When I was an adolescent, I was abused by a man who was dating my oldest sister. A couple years later, I realized what happened to me was wrong, and I told my family. This choice to tell my family was complicated by the fact that my sister was still dating him, and they were living together. A couple months after I told the family, he and my sister eloped. They remained married until a couple years ago.

As you might imagine, my path to forgiveness has been a complicated one. It is not just as simple as forgiving him for his transgression. It is forgiving my parents, my sister and even myself. It is forgiving him for not being able to stop the cycle of abuse that he saw modeled in his childhood home.

Within my family, forgiveness has come but it has been pretty messy. There have been phases of angry outbursts and threats; phases of joyous reconciliation and miraculous forgiveness. There have been phases of distance and silence, love and compassion. And there have been phases of toleration without love.

So what have I learned about forgiveness through all this?

I have learned that forgiveness is freeing, but it is not ours to create or command. Forgiveness is a gift from beyond and it does not always arrive when we think we need it most. Many of us are taught that forgiveness is the right thing to do, even the noble thing to do. However, if you rush to forgive, you will only bury the hurt and the hurt will fester and wreak havoc until the hurt is well cared for. By the same token, if you wait for the hurt to completely go away before you forgive, you will always wait. As the decades pass since the abuse, I learn that the hurt never completely goes away, but there is space for the hurt and the forgiveness to live side-by-side. Over the years, they have even become pretty good roommates.

Sometimes forgiveness gets a bad wrap. We think that if you are forgiving then you are willing to let people walk all over you. That's not it. My favorite description of forgiveness is being tough-minded while being tender hearted. To forgive is to have the tough mind of justice while also having the tender heart of mercy.

Our country's leadership could use a primer in forgiveness to learn about the limits of fight and flight reflexes. I'm sure you have heard of Addie Polk this week. She is a 90 year old woman who was given an eviction notice after living in her home since 1970. Addie Polk attempted suicide on Wednesday and is in critical care this weekend in Cleveland.

Wall Street has been forgiven this week while we, and all the Addie Polks of this country, wait. We are waiting for trickle down forgiveness.

The biggest blessing of forgiveness is that we can let the hurt go. Not that it goes away, but that we have the hurt. The hurt doesn't have us. When we are fighting or "flighting", the hurt has us in its talons.

Sometimes we can even subconsciously continue defending ourselves from a hurt long after the source of the hurt has gone away. Hurt lives in our bodies until we let it go. As we age, we can hold the hurt in our muscles and bones, sometimes actually changing our posture and the way we move. We can hold the hurt in our voices, sometimes changing the way we speak.

A cardiac surgeon once told me that the vast majority of the heart disease he saw was not genetic or related to the diet. It was unprocessed grief.

When we are hurt, there are those times when it just rolls off of us. This can be nice because then we don't have to be bothered with the mess of fighting, 'flighting' or forgiving. When hurts just roll off of us, this can even be mistakenly viewed as strength. But really, if hurts roll off, then we are probably so hardened and defended by past hurts that we can no longer feel the hurt. We probably can't feel much of anything else, for that matter.

When we have an open heart, a healthy heart, we will be hurt. A hurt can have the power to break our hearts. Our hearts can be broken open and when our heart is broken open, we are exposed to fully experience the beauty and the pain of being alive. Only then, can the beauty of the world can shine through.

May it ever be so. Amen.