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Greek to Me
Begging My Pardon
by Michael Raysses
I miss the good old days. I do. It’s not fashionable to admit it, but I grew up in a time when there were “gaps”—socio-cultural fissures that ran long and deep between contrasting sectors of the public. There was The Generation Gap, The Gender Gap, and The Credibility Gap. We were so gap-crazy back in the 60s we even had a clothing store that sold blue jeans to match our gap-obsessed ways. Ironically enough, it was called The Gap.
I mourn the loss of gaps more than I do my elephant bellbottoms. I began reconciling myself to a life without them when I realized that perhaps I’d stumbled on the next big break, gap-wise: wasn’t the absence of gaps a gap unto itself? I was going to call it The Gap Gap. That is, until I realized there’s a split out there that dwarfs any gap I’ve ever seen, and is more than big enough to sate my gap-starved ways—the Forgiveness Gap.
Forgiveness is an act that most people can relate to on more than an abstract level. Implicit in the concept is that there’s something to forgive: someone’s committed some act (or not), the nature of which requires a pardon for the parties to continue to interact or at least proceed with a clear understanding about whatever happened. The standard by which someone can commit an act requiring forgiveness, though, is fluid. For instance, being a lapsed Greek Orthodox, I was never particularly happy about practicing a religion that labeled me a sinner merely for being born. The only thing I found original about the notion of Original Sin was that it put me on the defensive from the get-go, which was a great strategy for keeping me spiritually off-balance. Personally, I think it’d be a great PR move if the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church would grant blanket amnesty to everyone out there functioning under the Original Sin burden, a sort of get-out-of-purgatory-free card. But that’s not going to happen, so I’m left to think about the dearth of forgiveness in a world where zero-tolerance is the gold standard.
Since 9/11, “zero-tolerance” has taken on a literalness that extends to how we as a country proceed against anyone suspected of anything that even remotely smacks of terrorism. Coincidentally, since then, the state of the world has devolved into an ever-expanding spate of both inter and intra-national clashes. And why wouldn’t it? When nothing’s tolerated, everything becomes intolerable. Throw a dart at a spinning globe and you’d be hard-pressed to miss hitting a region not impacted, if not embroiled, by some form of conflict that increasingly draws on zero-tolerance for its authority, diminishing the quality of life there in the process. Per force, where there’s lots of fighting going on, forgiveness is in short supply.
But how can I expect people to extend clemency to someone with whom they have been in conflict if I can’t find my way to offering it to myself, especially in times of great self-contained, auto-inflicted discord?
Whenever I think of a decision I’ve made that I regret, I flash on a time when I was living in Washington, D.C., interning with a lobbying group. It was an especially resonant moment: I learned the nuts-and-bolts of lobbying; I spent considerable time on Capitol Hill, taking all the theory a political science major had and placing it in a very real context. Halfway through my tenure, my lobbying group offered me a position within their ranks when my internship ended. They were going to help get me into law school in D.C., during which time I’d continue to work with them, so that by the time I graduated, I would’ve had a full grasp of the ins and outs of working The Hill. In short, I would’ve hit the ground in full stride.
But in what has to be one of the most unconscious decisions I’ve ever made, I summarily rejected their offer, out-of-hand.The reason? I had to get home, to rejoin my tribe. I opted out without so much as a minute’s deliberation.
30 years later, I couldn’t tell that story without being racked by waves of regret and incredulity. I regretted not even taking a day to consider my options; more deeply, I was incredulous at how dense and artless my response was. The worst thing about all of it, though, was that I didn’t forgive myself for it. In fact, for years I lashed myself over my grand mal abdication of reason. And the net effect of all that recrimination left me draped in a hair shirt of my own design.
It was a situation I would’ve endured indefinitely if it wasn’t for a casual chat I had with my mom less than a year ago, one in which I confessed that episode to her. When I finished, she was dumbstruck: how could I not have at least mentioned it to her and my father at the time? When I apologized for that omission and asked for her forgiveness, she said something seemingly designed for a parent to impart to a child: until I learned to forgive myself, I would never be able to accept forgiveness from anyone else. I don’t think she could ever be more right.
So I gradually forgave myself. One by one, I pried my fingers from the stranglehold they had on my need to blame myself for what I’d done. And the instant I fully disengaged from it, all the sodden weight I’d been dragging around for years was gone, replaced with the ability to assess new incidents in light of that occurrence.
So I came to understand that my internship didn’t end 30 years ago—it continues till this day. I finally understand this quote from Lewis B. Smedes: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”