Charles
M. Blow shared a bold piece of literature this week in a New York
Times op-ed. The article drew from Blow’s new memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones in which he
processes the weighty issues of his past and present including sexual abuse, the
bonds of family, stereotypes, and human sexuality. Regular readers of this blog
should know that many of my own values and convictions take a departure
from those held by Mr. Blow, and yet, there is a substantial amount of truth
to be gleaned from his writing.
In
particular, Blow provides a powerful model and illustration for what it means
to truly forgive. So often our definitions of forgiveness fall short of the
biblical meaning of the term. We tell people that the act of forgiveness is
more for the victim then the perpetrator, or that forgiveness must include the
associated act of forgetting. Both of which are inadequate, and
incomplete.
In
his book Reason for God Tim Keller offers a much
fuller picture of forgiveness that centers on the reality that for every
violation enacted, a debt is incurred that must be paid. We recognize this
instinctively which is why we speak of “getting even” or “paying someone back”
when we have been wronged. Keller proposes another path that neither ignores the
offence nor dismisses the debt - absorb
the debt yourself.
“There is another option” Keller writes, “You can forgive.
Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to
refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being
is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of
happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of
inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it
completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts
terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death. Yes, but it is a
death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of
bitterness and cynicism.”
This
is the forgiveness Blow introduces and illustrates for us in his memoir. Having
been sexually abused by an older cousin, Blow is tempted later in life to
murder him. With a gun in his car, racing towards his mother's house to confront his
offender, Blow has a life-altering epiphany. He writes,
“Then I thought
about who I was now, and who I could be. Seeing him in a pool of his own blood
might finally liberate me from my past, but it would also destroy my future. I
had to make a choice: drive forward on the broad road toward the unspeakable or
take the narrow highway exit. I don’t know which chose, my head or my hand, but
I exited and drove through my college campus, thinking about all that I had
accomplished. Me. With my own mind and grit. I had reinvented and improved
myself. I was a man — a man with a future. I couldn’t continue to live my life
through the eyes of a 7-year-old boy.”
This is far deeper than mere “forgive and
forget” theology; this is debt absorption, this is forgiveness. Blow does not
minimize his pain, nor does he ignore the fact that injustice has occurred. His
way forward is not through some Pollyanna vision of the past but a heroic willingness
to the pay the penalty himself. The offender is off the hook, but only because
the victim is willing to die in their place.
The
rest of Blow’s story spells out the implications of his actions including his
ongoing struggle with male attraction and his stigmatized existence as a black
bi-sexual.[1] Through his act of
forgiveness, Blow absorbed a debt that in many ways, he will never fully pay
off.
This
is the kind of forgiveness Jesus speaks of when he teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our
debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” or more bluntly just two verse
later, “For if you forgive men when they sin
against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you
do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matt.
6:12, 14-16)
When we teach that
forgiveness is a gift given to us freely we skew the deeper truth that
forgiveness always comes at a tremendous cost. When we forgive “as we have been
forgiven” victims are crucified for the sins of the criminals, the innocent
bear the wrath intended for the guilty, and the abused steer their cars off of
the highway and take the bullet their abuser deserves.
When we dare to
engage in this kind of Kingdom-defined forgiveness, we will find that in the
great paradox-ridden economy of God, this kind of death leads to life, new
life, a resurrected life. Life that is able to finally move on from the
nightmares of a seven-year-old boy into the glorious potential for a new
chapter, written by the Father who endured the full weight of the penalty of
all of our sin, all of my sin, all of Charles Blow’s sin, so that we too might
have the painful joy of taking up our own crosses, and following him.
[1] Studies have shown that boys who
are sexually abused are four to seven times more likely to develop same sex
attraction. Bolton,
F. G., Morris, L. A., and MacEachron, A. E. Males at Risk: The Other
Side of Child Sexual Abuse, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA, 1989,
p. 86 and “Victimization of Boys,” Journal of Adolescent Health Care, vol.
6, pp. 372–376.
