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Forgive

In a book chapter titled “The Psychology of Forgiveness” (2002), psychologists Charlotte vanOyen-Witvliet and Michael McCullough write: “Many of the world’s religions have articulated the concept of forgiveness for millennia. Indeed, the proposition that people have been forgiven by God and, as a result, should forgive their transgressors is common to all three great monotheistic traditions” (p. 447).

Perhaps due to its clear enunciation throughout religion, social scientists had ignored forgiveness as a topic of study for several centuries. However, nowadays “it crosses cultures and continents, disciplines and dogmas… (and) is a much discussed subject in anthropological, sociological, political, and psychological circles” (2000, p. 1143).

In a paper titled “Forgiveness: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature” (1998), James N. Sells and Terry D. Hargrave highlight a Jungian perspective on forgiveness, both in relation to others and in regard to the self, that defines it as a restorative instrument which can relieve guilt and help with the integration of archetypes, “particularly themes from one’s shadow, into a transcending self” (p. 26).

Does becoming fully human, becoming whole, demand that we overcome a deeply ingrained tendency to retaliate or seek retribution? McCullough states that the “forgiving personality” includes aspects of agreeableness, emotional stability, and a positive correlation with spiritual well-being (2001, p. 195). As part of its redemptive benefits, the “forgiveness response” accordingly enables the cultivation of virtue, and the development of “prosocial” capital (2001) “that helps social units such as marriages, families, and communities to operate more harmoniously” (2002, p. 454). These important traits become “channelized” into characteristic human adaptations which, “as an interdependent people, we simply have too much at stake to ignore the promise of… as a balm for some of our species’ destructive propensities”. Research further suggests that forgiveness may foster coronary health by “reducing the adverse physical effects of sustained anger and hostility”, while people who do not forgive their offenders could incur emotional and physiological costs (2002, p. 452, 453, 455).

Although a forgiving response may garner “psychophysiological benefits, at least in the short term” according to vanOyen-Witvliet and McCullough (p. 453), the picture is more complicated as certain sensitive people will nonetheless suffer health costs despite their offering forgiveness, or that forgiving an abuser might yield negative “psychological sequelae” (p. 454). Sells and Hargrave declare that the dangers of such “pseudo-forgiveness” could include avoidance, denial, injustice, manipulation, or perpetuation of injury (1998, p. 25).

Scholars Frank D. Fincham and Julie H. Hall conceptualize “self-forgiveness” as a set of motivational changes through which individuals learn to accept themselves and become less likely to engage in self-punishing behaviours (2005, p. 622). However, in cases of “pseudo-self-forgiveness”, where feelings of guilt or regret and a corresponding acceptance of responsibility are not fully acknowledged, a tendency towards self-centeredness, and disrespect towards the victim, may be evident (p. 626 – 628).

Author and doctor Aaron Lazare recognizes that in contrast to the often difficult work of apology, forgiveness tends to provide an unburdening, both to the transgressor and to the victim:

“We experience forgiveness as a gift that releases us from the twin burdens of guilt and shame. In addition, if we are the ones doing the forgiving, we are proud of our generous behavior in forgiving the offending party. We had the power to forgive and we used it benevolently” (2004, p. 228 – 229).

Fincham, F. D., & Hall, J. H. (2005), Self-Forgiveness: The Stepchild of Forgiveness Research, in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Volume 24, Number 5, (pp. 621 – 637).

Hargrave, T. D., & Sells, J. N. (1998), Forgiveness: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature, in the Journal of Family Therapy, Issue 20 (pp. 21 – 36). Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers.

Lazare, A. (2004) On Apology. New York, United States: Oxford University Press.

McCullough, M. E. (December 2001), Forgiveness: Who Does It and How Do They Do It?, in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 10, Issue 6 (pp. 194 – 197). American Psychological Society, Blackwell Publishers Inc.

McCullough, M. E., & vanOyen Witvliet, C. (2002), The Psychology of Forgiveness, in Lopez, S. J., Snyder, C. R., (Eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology, (Chapter 32, pp. 446 – 456). New York, United States: Oxford University Press.

Taft, L. (January 2000), Apology Subverted: The Commodification of Apology, in The Yale Law Journal, Volume 109: 1135, (pp. 1135 – 1160). New Haven, United States: The Yale Law Journal Co.

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Unity 3

Valence, a term commonly used to describe the relative attraction of particles to one another in the atomic context, also finds use in describing the qualitative nature of our subjective conscious experience, whether its seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, or touching and feeling. The attraction to, or repulsion from these experiences, and whether they present a pleasant or unpleasant quality, appears to not only have biological, but also quantum-mechanical roots. Microbes and bacteria and their effects on our physical and mental well-being as they relate to our environments, our social interactions, our diets, and the air we breathe, capture this notion on one level. Do the very waves or particles and the fundamental nature of such sensory sources and our complex interactions with them, also play important roles in determining the qualitative character, or qualia, of our experience? Deeper, beneath this layer of analysis, what is the nature of the electrical and neuro-chemical activity in our brains while we have experiences more generally?

Scientists including Andrés Gómez Emilsson at the Qualia Research Institute, theorize that the neural activity in our brains form a particular geometric pattern as we have conscious experience. The shapes and characteristics of these patterns are said to be isomorphic to, or mirror in a representational manner, the nature of the experience itself. When these experiences are described as pleasant, the patterns are observed to manifest as geometrically symmetrical traces and shapes when imaged. Does this phenomenon describe why our experiences of symmetry, synchrony, harmony, and thus unity, are generally described as being pleasant ones? Does this activity in our brains created by our perceptions make the experiences pleasant, or does the “pleasantness” exist outside our brains, attached to the experience itself?

Such conceptions describe a broader range of human consciousness from the perspective of chemical interactions in our bodies to the electrical activity occurring within our minds as they interface with the very molecular or subatomic nature of the environments and contexts in which we are enmeshed. Can such speculation point to even more fascinating revelations about the nature of consciousness and of reality itself?

According to philosopher Nick Bostrom, given statistical probabilities, chances are high that we are all really avatars in an extremely complex simulation. If this is the case and science proves that there is thus solid evidence for some higher order of being or intelligence, perhaps even outside our idea of space and time, would this not unite science and religion? Importantly, how might such revelation impact how we choose to live, and whether we even have choice in the matter?

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Christianity:
“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law of the prophets” (1946, p. 310).  [Matthew 7:12]

Bostrum, N., & Fridman, L. (2020, March 25). Simulation and Superintelligence. Lex Fridman Podcast [Youtube interview] retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfKiTGj-zeQ

Gómez-Emilsson, A., & Nelson, A. D. (2020, August 7). Consciousness, Psychedelics, and Panpsychism. Waking Cosmos [sound-only Youtube interview] retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CV-LUrlC7k

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Johnson, M. E. (N.D.) Principia Qualia: Blueprint for a New Science (pp. 1-84) [pdf document]. Qualia Institute. Retrieved March 2021.

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Unity 1

While studying primates as they conducted a dramatic, ritualistic splashing at one particular eighty-foot high waterfall, pre-eminent primatologist Jane Goodall translated their awe: “What is this strange substance which is always coming and always going and always here?” As an ethnographer in this context she then adds: “You can’t help feeling that if they had a language like ours, they could discuss whatever feeling it was that led them to these dramatic displays, which would turn into some kind of animistic religion” (2010, p. 294).

Noted physician and geneticist Francis Collins makes a similar observation of his own experience of awe in unity at a frozen waterfall: “Actually a waterfall that had three parts to it – also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me” (2010, p. 33).

In an essay titled “The Unity of Religions”, Hindu mystic and saint Ramakrishna, when replying to the question of why, if there is only one God, does this God appear differently to each religion, answers:

“As one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways and means to approach God, and every religion in the world shows one of these ways. Different creeds are but different paths to reach the Almighty. Various are the ways that lead to the house of the Lord. Every religion is but one of the paths that lead to God. A truly religious man should think that other religions also are paths leading to truth” (1903, p. 12).

Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman argues that we need a shared space which can lead us to coalesce around notions of the sacred, a global ethic “beyond just the love of family, a sense of fairness, and a belief in democracy and free markets” (2010, p. 279). He asks whether we can find such transcendence through letting go of traditional concepts of a judgmental, omnipotent notion of “God” and instead find reverence in the ceaseless creativity of an unfolding nature. Author and lay theologian C. S. Lewis further wonders whether such quest for unity in the sacred is itself ultimately a human need:

“I know that the hankering for a universe which is all of a piece, and in which everything is the same sort of thing as everything else – a continuity, a seamless web, a democratic universe – is very deep seated in the modern heart; in mine, no less than in yours. But have we any real assurance that things are like that? Are we mistaking for an intrinsic probability what is really a human desire for tidiness and unity?” (1947, p. 35).

Does this appeal of “tidiness and unity” perhaps point to some more general desire for spiritual or philosophical fulfillment, which itself may have deeper cosmological, biological, or even quantum-mechanical roots? Is it worthwhile to consider whether such speculations can inform the foundations of our religious and philosophical ideals, and vice versa?

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Buddhism:
“In five ways should a clansman minister to his friends and familiars: by generosity, courtesy, and benevolence, by treating them as he treats himself, and by being as good as his word” (1946, p. 309).

Collins, F. (2010) in Paulson, S. (ed.) Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (pp. 31-43). New York, United States: Oxford University Press

Goodall, J. (2010) in Paulson, S. (ed.) Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (pp. 285-299). New York, United States: Oxford University Press

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Kauffman, S. (2010) in Paulson, S. (ed.) Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (pp. 273-283). New York, United States: Oxford University Press

Lewis, C. S. (1947) Miracles. London, United Kingdom: Geoffrey Bles

Ramakrishna (1903) The Unity of Religions, from Swami Abhedananda; The Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (pp. 10–12). New York, United States: Vedanta Society

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Sermon

My father, Reverend Dr. E. A. Kirker (1926 – 2004) was a United Church of Canada minister. One particular sermon of his originally delivered in August 1995 on the topic of bitterness may provide a balm or salve when assailed by this emotion’s corrosive effects, as it has for me. I have transcribed it below, and if it resonates with you, please share it, or whatever part of it, and credit my Dad, as I have titled him in boldface in the picture link at the start of this paragraph.

My Dad was born in a royal port. In his case Annapolis Royal, or Port Royal, as it was once known, while I came out the shute as the little black-haired asian-looking “wild man from Borneo” as he had put it, perhaps redirected in the bardo from Tibet, up there on the slope of the Royal Mountain or Montreal, at the Montreal General Hospital.

My Dad’s passion was flight, and  WW2 provided the opportunity for him to earn his wings at CFB Greenwood as the co-pilot of a “flying boat”, the PBY Canso (so named in Canada, after the Strait of, but was the same aircraft as a PBY Catalina). His aircraft was tasked with coastal patrol around the Bay of Fundy, looking for German U-Boats. Persistent memories I have are the times we enjoyed together as members of the Montreal Soaring Council in Hawkesbury, Ontario, where we would often drive to from downtown Montreal for summer weekends during the sixties and seventies and where we had a trailer parked.

Often, because my Dad was a certified glider pilot instructor, his otherwise peaceful sermon-inspiring flights that he so looked forward to would be preempted by line-ups of Saturday students begging him for a half-hour instruction flight that they could proudly record in their logbooks. These times, I took the role of flight control officer – actually more of a timekeeper with a stopwatch in the club trailer parked by the field – and logged the days’ flights; glider name-number, tow-plane name-number, pilot name, tow-plane pilot name, passenger (if any) name, take-off and landing times, that sort of thing. If there weren’t enough hands on the field, I would also help “run wings”. This important task was often assigned to trained, safety-conscious teenagers who could run like the wind and first hold up the glider’s wing as the tow-plane taxied, then signaled to the tow-plane pilot that the tow-rope was taught and he would juice it, and then run alongside the glider, grasping the wingtip until ground-speed was sufficient to keep it up on its single-wheel landing gear by itself, while the tow-plane, either a Piper Cub or a Cessna L-19, roared, pulling it down the grassy runway. On some occasions, I would ride with him, in his favourite two-seat glider, the Czechoslovakian work of beautiful flush-riveted aluminum art, the Blanik.

He passed from our space-time back in late 2004, but I sometimes wonder whether science permits instantiations of his image to make appearances in our space. Or rather, is my mind simply yearning to find remnants of him today in a world so drastically different from just a decade and a half ago? Here are screen captures from a serendipitous and un-retouched (apart from overall brightness and gamma adjustments) ten minute long infrared video panorama recorded in September 2017, where his likeness seems to appear in the clouds, grinning, perhaps projected from the great beyond. Watch the entire raw footage of the Conestogo Bridge 360 degree infrared pan.

Dealing with Bitterness

If you have traveled to the east coast during this or an earlier holiday season you may have noticed something unusual about the trees along the ocean shoreline. Gnarled and weather-beaten from constant battling with the elements, often stunted from lack of sustenance in the rocky or sandy soil, these trees seem to lean landward. Yet they are tough, resilient, durable, resisting all that storms do. Why? Or how? I’m told it’s because they have developed their deepest roots on their windward side.

How deep are your roots? So long as the sun is shining and the breeze is gentle, all is well, but when the storm clouds gather and the harsh winds blow, and hopes are deferred and dreams shattered, those without deep roots on the windward side simply collapse in bitterness.

Few emotions can affect one’s physical and mental well-being as readily as bitterness, Leslie Weatherhead, the English preacher and psychologist, told a young woman whose parents objected to her proposed marriage. After an engagement lasting ten years, her fiance was killed in a car accident. With hopes and dreams shattered she became deeply embittered. Physical symptoms appeared. She was unable to see except by holding up one of her eyelids.

Dr. Weatherhead, whom she sought out for counseling, helped her to understand that there was nothing organically wrong; the closed eye was simply an indication of her unwillingness or inability to face her situation. It was as if her mind was saying to her body, “You must bear this bitterness for me”.

Bitterness is also contagious. Someone feels wronged and soon family and friends take up the resentment. The other person retaliates in word or deed and quickly two widening circles of people are involved. The seriousness of the alleged offense grows in everyone’s mind until it is grossly distorted and exaggerated.

I remember how two families in one of my earlier congregations were in dispute involving their children. Eventually I was able to help them resolve the problem only to find that one the mothers remained bitter, and no reminder of the harm she was doing to herself and others would placate her. It turned out that she was suffering from deep resentment toward her husband, one which the dispute with the other family simply brought to the surface. But once recognized, accepted and talked out, the bitterness gave way to a new relationship.

It must be said, however, that some people seem to enjoy their bitterness – or at least find satisfaction in it. Perhaps it is the pride that comes of feeling that as victims they are somehow special. You know the type: men or women who think that everything bad happens to them. This “dirty deal complex”, as psychologists term it, results in such folk gaining attention which becomes a way of restoring their self-esteem.

The fact is, however, the world closes in on bitter persons. Friends who are “turned off” soon turn away until, unable to find anyone to listen to their complaints and grievances, embittered people grow sour on life itself.

This surely is the most difficult kind of bitterness to deal with: to turn against life, thinking that you have been singled out for harsh treatment by God.

Yet even scripture records stories of people who felt they were victims of divine retribution. Naomi, for instance, who saw both her husband and son die. So sure was she that the Almighty had inflicted those tragedies she told her friends to friends to call her Naomi no longer but Mara, a name which means “the Lord has dealt bitterly with me”.

So with King Hezekiah. In our First Reading we heard him recall his feelings in a time of illness. “In the noontide of my days I felt I must depart… Like a weaver I have rolled up my life… All my sleep has fled because of the bitterness of my soul”. Then the mood changes, for he survives and begins to see things from a different perspective: “Lo, it was for my welfare that I had such great bitterness. But thou, Lord, has held back my soul from the pit of destruction”. Or as this might be translated, “You have loved me out of the pit of bitterness”.

So it was for Job. Afflicted in body and soul he asks the age-old question, “Why? What have I done to deserve this?” In the end he comes to understand that God is greater than any personal misfortune. His sufferings fall into the background, and his struggles cease. Because Job has experienced the divine presence and heard the voice of God, his bitterness of soul dissolves.

Then there’s the apostle Paul. Paul knew from personal experience how people have a way of nursing their resentments, brooding over the insults and injuries they feel are directed at them. So at the top of a list of things which must go from the life of a Christian Paul put “pikria”, the Greek word for “long-standing resentment”. Thus we hear him saying to the Esphesians in our Second Lesson: “Get rid of bitterness” (Good News Bible)… Instead be kind and tender-hearted to one another, and forgive one another as God has forgiven you through Christ.”

Yes, consider Christ. Throughout his short life Jesus encountered situations which evoked the whole range of emotions: anger, fear, despair, loneliness. But bitterness? Never, even when the world seemed set against him and his disciples deserted him. Why? Surely it was because his life was so deeply rooted on the windward side, so completely lived in the full awareness of God’s presence and power, that he was able to draw on the deepest well-springs of spiritual strength.

Friends, we, too, need roots that run deep on the windward side of life, for the storms can be severe, the testing-times intense. Who has not had some experience that has not left a taste of bitterness?

“Bitterness paralyses life; love gives it power”, wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick. “Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness sours life; love makes it sweet again. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love annoints its eyes.” God grant that our eyes may be open to perceive this truth, and our souls to receive it.

E. A. Kirker, August 1995.