Last call to freedom

Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church 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. (Matthew 18:21-22)

Faces appeared as I sat in the silent chapel to which I retreat now and then. Listening to Jesus’ words, a parade of people from my past lined up and pressed into awareness, accompanied by a question, ‘If not now, when?’

‘It’s time,’ I whispered, ‘past time,’ and let the parade commence through my mind’s eye. No labor was required, just a willingness to resist the instinct to hold fast to hurts and resentment that had calcified into an identity, or at least part of one.

The faces appeared, one after another, starting with older boys who abused me and made me feel small, weak and insignificant when I was young. Behind them, came several teachers who worked out the grief and disappointment of their lives on vulnerable students, then a coach or two who made sure that I knew I was expendable.

Most painful were those who might and could have noticed how small, weak and afraid I felt much of the time, demanding strength and resilience I did not have because that’s the way males are supposed to be.

It seems juvenile, petty, to be thinking of this now, at 73, but I know the trajectory of life that followed those years, and the ways I compensated to project a strength and mastery I knew I didn’t have.

The faces paraded by, one by one, raising decades of slights and incidents that live (damn them) in the halls of memory, leaping to awareness at the slightest provocation.

With each face, I spoke three words aloud in the silence of the chapel. ‘I forgive you.’ Over and over again, ‘I forgive you.

‘You may not have meant to be mean or thoughtless or hurtful, but even if you did, I forgive you. And if you didn’t see or understand what I needed, so what? I forgive you. I didn’t understand either, a mystery to myself. You were probably doing the best you could, and even if you weren’t, I forgive you.’

Just when I thought the parade was over, my prayer done, one more face appeared, mine. And I knew what to do.

‘I forgive you,’ I said. ‘I forgive you for being insecure, needy and vulnerable in a time and place when they were humiliating, not merely a mark of humanity. I forgive you for the façade you erected to hide it. And I forgive you for being naïve, stupid, selfish, petty, narcissistic and for the sins that haunt you in the night.’

Perhaps it was all this letting go that awakened an old image, a sweet memory from childhood, me and Blondie, my cocker spaniel, chasing each other across a field, free, unencumbered, innocent, at least far more so than now.

At play in the fields of the Lord, we were, a phrase too romantic for normal conversation, but it captures the flight of soul when your heart is lighter than air and love is the air you breathe.

It’s real, this freedom, this love. I felt it then and pray for it now in silent chapels, knowing that it is for this that we are born. Children of the freest love of all, that’s who we are, and that’s who invites us to let it all go into the Love Who Is.

David L. Miller