The Long Road to Forgiveness

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

However useful as a developmental state, innocence is vastly overrated as a moral state. The hallowed innocence of the inner child is a starting point, not a steady state. A fundamental experience of basic worth helps us tolerate the complexity of being truly human—which, alas, includes such realities as coming in last in a race or losing someone's love. I could feel this defense going on in my own heart when, at the beginning of my separation, I searched myself hourly for a story line that would reconcile my idealistic faith in our 30-year marriage with losing it. For example, when my husband told me that he might have to file for bankruptcy (which made no sense given our income), I grew hysterically convinced that he had an undiagnosed brain tumor. “All these years, did I just make you up?” I later asked him. And I knew that at some point I would want to take a long, hard look at my own contribution to our dilemma. But in the beginning, I just couldn't abide the rotten feeling of corruption, either his or my own.

Then I watched in amazement as a friend fell in love with a married man. Mired in her own morally compromising situation, Sarah began to think differently about her ex-husband's infidelity. “I had always felt that Tony had not behaved very well when he was leaving the marriage,” she said ruefully, “but now behaving well doesn't seem as simple as it did before.” She no longer felt secure in her own innocence. “It wasn't even a conscious decision. I just found that I had forgiven Tony. Hell, I've even forgiven Woody Allen.”

If our first childlike belief is that innocent people don't deserve bad things, our second is that our suffering will render us good. The hard truth, I learned slowly, is that your hurting me doesn't make me the good guy.

I've come to believe that rigid fascination with the moral stance of innocence sets us up for prolonged suffering, for passivity, for a heartbreaking expectation that the world can be tidily divided into good people and bad people. We argue that someone—not us—should pay, as if innocence lost were wealth stolen. Often we are angry more at bystanders than we are at the injurers themselves, so powerful (and not necessarily wrong) an idea it is that innocence should be protected. Of course, the bystanders then protest their innocence. Such passivity, while tempting, leaves us all stuck; no one picks up the bill. Thinking morally, are we not all charged with repairing and restoring our disordered universes, including the messes left by others?

Obsession

At times the loss of my marriage felt hard and final, like a death. I thought I knew about death. My mother had died just weeks before my husband's sudden leaving, and the two losses were sometimes joined into one great numbing cosmic whack, while at other times they shaped themselves into two sharply contrasting experiences. At 77, my mother died too young, but her dying was saturated with profound meaning. On the other hand, I couldn't begin to comprehend the loss of my marriage. Nothing made sense to me.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print