A Snapshot in Time (2): What is "Wilde" about This?

So.  Chuck and Will, two elderly guys, are talking.  Will asks Chuck, "Did you ever cheat on your wife?" Chuck's response is labored and delivered with his head hung low only after a very long pause:

"Yes.  Once.  Not long after my wife and I married.  Decades ago.  It was horrible — the worst thing I've done in my entire life."

Will pauses, absorbs this news, then asks, "Did you ever tell your wife?"

Chuck: "Yes.  I had to.  I couldn't stand the guilt.  My wife and I shared everything.  I had to be honest."

Another pause, then Will asks, "Did she ever forgive you?"

Chuck's head lowers even further, his shoulders sink, his head shakes slowly back and forth, and the answer emerges: "Yeah.  She forgives me every single day."

I previously posted [Link] on forgiveness.  Since that posting, I've come to realize even more just how many people are left laboring under feelings of judgement —.  [Note: forgiveness is different from trust.  Trust can, by consistent and better behavior, be rebuilt over time; forgiveness cannot be earned at any time.  We're talking about forgiveness.]

Feeling shame or guilt is good if it's legitimate: it's a thing that tells us where we have erred if we get that sense from no where else.  It's called a conscience.  But after conscience has done its work — after introspection and clear vision and honesty as to the reasons for it and the consequences for others, after the offense has been admitted to the injured party and reparations made — forgiveness should reign.  Real forgiveness should free an offender from the offense and allow them to move on without the weight of the event on their back.  Poor Chuck.  He is not forgiven.  He's reminded every day.  It's that simple.

And just who can live day after day under a weight of guilt like Chuck's?  You?  Think of your worst offense, your most beastly moment in life: could you live being reminded daily of that event?  No.  Not well.

The real quandary, the deep irony concerning forgiveness, is just why Christians should be so unforgiving when they are supposed to be co-workers in the business of forgiveness.  And who in that business — the business of Heaven — is their boss?  Let's see.  Oh, yeah.  That would be Jesus Christ.

Really, despite all the stories of forgiveness in the Bible, Christians too often have very little to do with forgiving or making Christ's forgiveness known.  I have seen feigned "forgiveness" drive people from the church — a pastor's wife, a missionary's son, a young woman trying to find her way — rejected by the church that claims to show the way to forgiveness and healing.  I've seen with my own eyes a pastor, theologian, professor, and a co-translator of the New King James version of the Bible reject a deeply contrite young man who was looking for guidance on how he might recompense someone for a past offense.  The absolute crime of that pastor's rejection is to me far worse than the young man's offense.

Contrite.  from Latin, contrerere: to crush, to grind

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." Psalm 51:17.

I was also present when a pastor met a 30-something young man — someone he had known to be wild ass in his teens.  The pastor said to 30-something's face, doubtfully, "Oh...so you did turn out okay?"  Where was the hope, the faith, the love that the young man would do so?  Where were the prayers that he would turn out okay?  Where was the faith that those prayers would be answered?

I remember part of Corrie ten Boom's story; she survived the Nazi camps, including Ravensbrück, although her sister, Betsie, was murdered there.  At a church meeting after the war, Corrie saw in the crowd one of the women who worked as a guard at Ravensbrück — a woman who had severely abused Betsie.  Despite her reluctance (reluctance? Her well justified resistance!), Corrie approached the woman from the camp, took her by the hand, and at that moment found the grace to forgive her.

Ten Boom's is one of the very few examples I know of a Christian forgiving someone, and it is not a first-hand story — sad to say.

How shall we communicate with, understand and empathize with, the people who labor in life under their guilt?  Why is it that we are so reluctant to relieve people of that burden?  It's interesting that in this post we have to turn to a non-Christian (by his own confession).  How about a story from Oscar Wilde?

In his play An Ideal Husband, Wilde (as he does in most of his works) turns the world hilariously upside down in order to show the very self-satisfied and hypocritical Victorians just what they were not made of — in contrast to what they believed themselves to be: a people of "high moral tone," as Wild puts it.  Through great ironies, reversals, understatement, humor in frivolity, he treats this very serious issue of forgiveness. (The humor, he said, was his means of creating "non-friction," if you get his point.)

The situation in brief: Sir Robert Chiltern, now a prominent Member of Parliament, has been blackmailed: his nemesis possesses a letter he wrote in his youth, a letter which shows he used an inside-trade secret to make his fortune.  If the blackmailer doesn't get what she wants, she will expose Chiltern in the press.  He will be absolutely ruined.  But since the time of his offense, he has become an honest figure, a representative figure, someone of character who illustrates what politicians should be and who motivates others to be such: honest, humbly so, compassionate, incorruptible, and fair.

What does Chiltern say of his wayward youth?

I wish I had seen that one sin of my youth burning to ashes.  How many men there are in modern life who would like to see their past burning to white ashes before them!

In his despair he can only see one possible future in light of his sin: "I suppose I should retire from public life."

Robert Chiltern: A Sin in Youth, Then into a Dark Hole for the Rest of Life?

Chiltern's wife, upon learning of his youthful deed, banishes him from the house and from her love because of his youthful lack of character, because of the moral stain she now supposes colors her husband's character through and through, even so many years later.  That is also why — even when the letter that is the evidence of the deed is safely destroyed — she will tear from him all further ambition in life, banish him into the dark hole of his past.  She supposes the fact of the deed and the sin he once was capable of defines him forever: a snapshot in time.

She simply denies any usefulness he may yet have in his remaining decades and refuses him any opportunity to put his honesty and skills to work for the public, for his country, and in good character live toward some good end.  No: it shall not be.  His shall be a life sentence.

Her resolution is to destroy the man's hopes for any future, not to forgive nor to recognize what he has become beyond his youthful sin.  She says, after all, "One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."

Chiltern's good friend, Lord Goring, pulls Lady Chiltern aside and opens her eyes to some realities that are greater than the fact of her husband's youthful sin:

Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? .... What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great...career, if you close the doors of...life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success?

Goring has, even before this moment, expressed to Lady Chiltern that we "are not meant to judge" one another "but to forgive...when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is [our] mission."

And, last, Goring says, "If he has fallen from his altar, do not thrust him into the mire....  He would lose everything, even his power to feel love."

Lady Chiltern:  Flowing Robes of Sanctimony

This is true of how we treat one another, how we can banish another person from our lives (as Lady Chiltern originally did with her husband), how we hold one another in contempt and provide no room for future life.

What Lady Chiltern does not know, and what, unfortunately, many Christians do not recognize even though they claim belief in words like "redemption," is what Fredrik Backman observed:

"'They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong,' she said gently." (132) 

I think of the intolerable weight of shame that drives people to punish and harm themselves, to forget they are human — even, in many cases, to become homeless and disappear from society (for society does not see the person who is homeless).  It's often the weight of shame...that makes the despairing soul forget that there is a God who forgives, lifts us up, dusts us off, gives us clean clothes, gives us a new path to walk, and make us a better person.  And so we gain a person who understands with a deep empathy a great deal more about life than if he had ever done wrong -- possessing an understanding more than many professed "saints" among us will never grasp.  No, the sin is not the virtue; what they learn emerging from it is.  "Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  When you are restored, strengthen your brothers" -- Christ to Peter.

Precisely.  In the end, Peter knew things that others might never understand.

Yes, there are the poor choices individuals made — the lack of "capability" (and lack of character, and...and...and) — that lie at the root of those choices.  If you insist on retaining these in your view of a single person, you do not know love, forgiveness, or hope.

You see, one's past failures — sins —  do not have to be the end of anyone's story, a fact that Backman (oh, yes — and Christ) point to.  Yes, some people can and do choose to continue their way to destruction, and there's little we may do for them at that point.  Yet sometimes it is we who force that end upon them — which starts when we forget that we made some choices along the line that may have ended up in consequences similar to theirs....

"Oh, yeah...it would, if you'd kindly not insist that I pick it up again."

If you want to see a visual representation of the brokenness of people who have failed, see August Egg's three paintings, Past and Present, the first of which one blogger sums up: "The painting, which is one of a trio, is a swipe at fallen women. This is the first of the three, and as the paintings progress, her situation gets worse, until, in the final painting, she sits homeless under a railway arch having lost everything."  I would not say a "swipe at" but, rather, these paintings are a realistic depiction of their fate in Victorian society: there the fallen woman will find no understanding, no mercy, and no forgiveness.  Another blogger presents all three paintings [Nichols].

 

Egg's Past and Present, No. 1.: The Affair Discovered

Egg's paintings, and Wilde's play, are indictments of that mindset that presents a life in which there is no forgiveness.  There is none in Lady Chiltern for Robert when his crime is made known: he falls to worthlessness in her view.  Many a Christian, likewise, has been seen only for the sin of their youth and thereafter banished, condemned, and left flayed before the public, disemboweled, drawn and quartered.  What was it I wrote, above, about Lady Chiltern?

"...she will tear from him all further ambition in life, banish him into the dark hole of his past.  She supposes the fact of the deed and the sin he once was capable of defines him forever: a snapshot in time."

And a snapshot in time, of course, never presents an accurate image [Link] and leads to no deeply understood and contexted image of a single moment in a person's life.  And it makes no room for God's continued work in us, each a part of His body on earth.

We all love and favor a picture of ourselves as having moved on in life from an old sin, as having gained not only forgiveness but also a God-given vocation (one that centers precisely on her particular sin), and gains the grace of a mission — it's a picture of ourselves as having risen above our shame and being full of heavenly ambition.  It's a good picture, that — encouraging overall.  Yet...too often we make no such picture of others we know to have sinned, whether against us or otherwise.  We retain of them only an image by which we and others might define and judge them, even as Chiltern's letter does: he will be known only for and by the sin of his youth.  It's no matter what happened thereafter to him, no matter what he became, and no matter what good he did along the way from then onward.  This is precisely where we do not practice forgiveness.

We may be totally valid in our view of anyone's past sin.  And of the offender: it is not that any of their better deeds through the years would make them worthy of forgiveness.  That is never the case with forgiveness; it is never deserved and can never be earned.  Yet there is such a thing as a recompense done with knowledge of one's sins.  This is precisely what Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is all about — e.g. Julia Marchmain's life at the end of the novel, if you need an example.  It is also the woman of ill repute who weeps on Jesus' feet, wiping her tears away with her hair.

It's like this.  If Corrie Ten Boom had only, solely, recounted in a memoir the sordid details of what the former Nazi guard did to her sister, there is solid precedent for just such a book in the secular press.  But her book is ultimately about Christian forgiveness: so Ten Boom provided a picture of forgiveness and hope for that woman — a person who could never deserve forgiveness but whom we see receive it.  In that moment lies a hopeful future for the woman.  In recounting that moment in her book, Ten Boom's forgiveness of that woman extended years — decades, and eternally — beyond the act of forgiving the woman and the act of publishing her memoir: Ten Boom provided a picture of forgiveness and hope that will not pass away.  That is precisely how we might think on anyone in our past whom we know to have fallen, our Robert Chilterns, our "Chucks," our wives as in Augustus Egg's paintings.

Because of what we don't know about others today, we should not be dismissive about our fellows solely on the basis of their past — if we believe that Christ is working in all of us. What we tend to leave out are the very real possibilities: that our "perpetrator," severely chastened (physically, mentally, spiritually) in the years following, has become thoroughly understanding of their youthful sins as Chiltern is of his own.  It can be that they deeply owned their sins and often disowned themselves because of them.  That they were given a vocation, a mission, a heavenly use, and, like Chiltern — driven by shame — their usefulness may come on the heels of their sad considerations of resigning from their present usefulness in life, and such considerations will diminish the usefulness they have been given.  They may well have retained an ever-present and deeply probed understanding of their youthful deeds and consequent effects then and now upon others.  Some I have known remain deeply and consistently contrite — have remained crushed and ground down — by their choices in youth.  One very old friend wrote to just such a person two nights ago, "It has always concerned me that you beat yourself up [about your past]." 

It often happens that recognizing and owning one's sins through the years is to find that a nail has worked up from a floorboard: it must be dealt with, once again, and hammered back into place to keep debilitating guilt, like a rusty nail, from causing pain and tripping oneself up.  The old nail must be pounded back down to keep us from despairing about ourselves and to keep such a mindset from affecting our vocation, and from affecting others.  Hammering the nail: it means that one must (again) recognize that God forgave that old sin even when humans still do not.  Not least, it means accepting that forgiveness for ourselves.

Apart from our usual thoughts about and treatment of people we have known to have failed, a more complete picture would show that they have attempted with compassion to extend forgiveness (in deed), not judgement — to guide others quietly out of a wayward choice when such an occasion arises, to hide the forgiven sins of others, and to appease the pain of wrong decisions and their hurtful pasts.  It may be as we do these things through the years, they will not have been done completely without error; nonetheless, they must be done while avoiding the "high moral tone" of the self-righteous and the present-day "Victorians" (or, if you will, Pharisees) while stripping ourselves of the "flowing robes of sanctimony" as one wayward legal entity put it.

Is it too much to hope that Christians will actually "forgive" one another, to stop holding in mind an inquisition and a remembrance of old sins when Christ has forgotten them — and demonstrate that forgiveness by never speaking of the old offense again?  Yet inquisitions exist everywhere even today; they didn't end in Spain.  There is the example of McCarthyism and senate hearings, ruined lives, friendships, professions: these are not good examples for Christians to follow.  None should have to suffer like poor Chuck: being forgiven every single day he lives and being assured and reminded that "you are forgiven for that terrible moment in life and that lack of character."  Christ does not treat us so.

 In his moment of crisis, Wilde's character, Robert Chiltern, will not make a public self-confession in Parliament — even though the occasion to do so provides an intensely dramatic moment toward the end of the play.  Instead, knowing that his crime will be made public, he does good to his country: this, despite his firm awareness that he will be ruined the next day by the public exposure of his youthful sins.  And the damage done by a public report of his youthful crime will bring with it damage well beyond the crime itself as well as obliterate the good he did thereafter.  Chiltern can only persist in doing what good he may, even while he resigns himself to the ruin of his career and "reputation," to the loss of his wife and friends, and to the remainder of his days spent within an ignoble and lonely end  — essentially a "solitary confinement" (for he will be shunned for the rest of his life).

Christian Cancel Culture 
"To understand all is to forgive all."  So how are we to understand our remembering of sins against us, remembrance as an action that carries a severely prominent subtext and enactment of blame, which consigns our offenders to a fate like Chiltern's.  It is very simple to understand: often it is merely ourselves holding out for revenge.

The simple and only possible answer for "why?" is that we have not forgiven.

Gracious to ourselves, we withhold the same grace from those who offend against us, will scarcely touch the load of their own guilt and our own lack of character in making deliberate choices to fall, but we'll rather bounce merrily onward to enjoy a moment of their condemnation.  Period.  This is simply Christian Cancel Culture.  Christ never cancels as long as breath continues: "a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish."  To do otherwise is not forgiveness in action.  It is not love.

One who covers up another's offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.

Apparently, only by deep comprehension — nearly to the point of despair — of one's own failures can anyone come to understand what forgiveness is.

Just so: Wilde's example is Lady Chiltern.  She has no concept of her own lack of character.  Even when (pressed by circumstances and by convenience to herself) she commits a sin of her own, at that moment she can only clearly see other's sins but struggles to see, to accept, her own — a major theme in Wilde's play.  Her own sin (comically) shocks her!  How was it that Johnathan Swift (satirically) defined satire?  "It is that mode of writing by which we see everyone but ourselves."  Just as in An Ideal Husband.  (And Wilde delightfully creates that hilarious moment when Lady Chiltern does, indeed, see her own sin — even names it — despite her utter shock at her own moral frailty, and...all is forgiven with peals of laughter — just as we all should embrace and extend forgiveness.  For there will be holy laughter in heaven despite our past sins.  Otherwise, it would not be heaven.  The non-laughers [Ἀγέλαστος — mirthless people] will not be there.

And so the non-Christian Wilde must point out what Christians very often cannot see: they suffer the same ineptness of vision which Lady Chiltern suffered.  And there stands Christ, illustrating in a parable that "he who is forgiven much loves much; he who is forgiven little loves little."  If people know Christians by their love, people (both inside and outside the faith) will miss that love because it resides in the enactment of forgiveness — the forgiveness that Christians are too often very slow to give to others.

It is not so much that we give forgiveness; rather, we allow it to be given to them.  It is to allow Christ's already established forgiveness to be theirs, to allow His sacrifice to cover their misdeeds, even misdeeds against us.  "What you forgive on earth will be forgiven in heaven...."  Look it up.

The fascinating thing about our usual response to our own and others' sin?  It is seen in King Lear's absurd line:

I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.
(Act 3, Sc. 2, ll. 59-60)

We mistakenly believe, as does Lear in that moment, that this line allows us to do two things: justify our actions and allow us to condemn someone else.  It is to say, "I'm not as bad as that guy."  The only answer to Lear's inane utterance is this: "so what?!"  Forget everyone else.  It doesn't matter what they have done.  Our job is to own our misdeeds and extend forgiveness to others.  That is all.  And all the time we are sitting, comparing our failings to those of someone else, there is Christ saying, "Forgive them; they know not what they do."

It is both grim and astounding that Christians seem singularly unable to forgive one another — really forgive — and almost wholly unable to connect the dots of their own sins.  We define one another by quick judgement, condemn one another, and then...banish (cancel) one another from the graceful treatment we would ourselves enjoy.  I am literally nauseated by this fact, not at all the least when I see a propensity toward it in myself.  It is not merely grotesque in us.  Lady Chiltern is very gracious to herself (even when she is caught in a sin of her own).  She banishes her husband.  Not seeing any need for forgiveness in herself, she extends very little love to her husband in his greatest need.  After all, she seems to say, echoing Lear, I am "more sinn'd against than sinning."  That is a deception.

So, is there a more common example of how forgiveness works (beyond, say, Ten Boom's extreme Holocaust experience)?  Yes.  There is one every day you see another human being — or at least an opportunity.

In a conversation decades ago, a student-worker in an English department of a Christian college risked much by confessing to her mentor-and-friend that, while grading some exams for the department, she had cheated — changing her friends' scores so that they all received better grades.  She was caught in the act by a faculty member in the department.  This brought her disgrace throughout the college.  Feeling banished, she transferred to another university to finish her degree.

She might have left these facts unknown to her mentor, who was away from the college at the time and who would not return to the college due to taking a position at a university — and so he might never have known.  But the student risked it — confessed, and, with failing voice said, "so...I suppose you're ashamed of me and want nothing to do with me now...."  The mentor? — "Look: it doesn't matter what I think.  You see things for what they are.  It has nothing to do with me.  And this event does not define who you are unless you let it.  You just need to forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on.  You and I will never mention it again, okay?"  The mentor continued to keep up with her, celebrate her graduation, be a reference for her in her job search, celebrate the birth of her child.  Why?  Because the talents she possesses, the being she is, the road to her redemption has not disappeared beneath that one indiscretion.  Because she is still a being created in the image of God.  In acting as he did (words are cheap), her mentor allowed the weight to be lifted off of her, and she moved on without a debilitating load of guilt — she could rest at night without that particular event raising its ugly head again.  She continued well in life, not without other mistakes along the way (whose path is perfect?), but with an understanding of how we treat ourselves and others when we falter.  Falter?  We all shall do so at one time and another.

Don't you want the same forgiveness for that memory haunting you in the wee hours of the night?

Our situation is very similar to that of Eustace's, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — a particularly horrible person at the beginning of the story and whose outward semblance (his actual body) became the very beast he has been on the inside.  Eustace meets Alsan, who peels away the layers of beast, both without and within, so that Eustace might become a real person — and so...

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that "from that time forth Eustace was a different boy."  He had relapses.  There were still many days when he could be very tiresome.  But most of those I shall not notice.  The cure had begun. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 7, emphasis mine)

So much for Eustace.  We see him again — a much different, a decidedly better person — in The Silver Chair.  And we receive an opportunity in the Bible to see King David's sin as well as St. Peter's denial of Christ and his deeds, later, which received stern words from St Paul.  But what we see afterwards is their continued faith in God — their chastening, their restoration, their continued vocation.  (Remember -- Christ to Peter: "Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  When you are restored, strengthen your brothers.")  Their disobedience is not the lone snapshot we see of them — there is a more complete picture of them in their restoration.

And, further, if Lewis's Aslan is at all like Christ, he is most so at the moment one character faces him after a string of misdeeds and direct, contradictory actions from what he had told her to do — ill deeds that produced very severe consequences for her and for many others:

And she wanted to say "I'm sorry" but she could not speak [....]

"Think of that no more.  I will not always be scolding.  You have done the work for which I sent you into Narnia." (The Silver Chair, Chapter 16)

Oscar Wilde's play is a comedy in the classical sense: it ends happily for all the characters.  That is how Christians believe life in the hereafter will be, a resolution that begins here, now, and continues from this point in life.  Then again, that's not life here on earth, as apparently some view it — it's not for everyone, just for those who can walk in some exclusive grace meant only for themselves.  Members Only.  The "Religious" leaders.  That's horse hockey.

In contrast, there's the sinner who stands in the temple, who cannot even look up, and prays for forgiveness.  Who goes away justified?  In such cases, it is like real life, not like literature (not a la Wilde, but as in poor Chuck's story): most often people do precisely what they want to do and justify it all day long.  Unless they are moved by Christ to do otherwise, and even then they can reject his voice.  I know: I've been there plenty of times.  Are you there?

Forgiveness is not solitary.  It involves every member of the body of Christ, which is why Charles Williams wrote, "The thread of the love of God was strong enough to save you and all the others, but not strong enough to save you alone."  You also must extend it through forgiveness in action.  If you do not...you are not forgiven: it is all on His terms.

Reconnection?
As someone said, "forgiveness does not require reconnection."  Reconnection is an issue of trust, not forgiveness.  The question is this: "does your offender know that they are forgiven?"  If we have not done our part to forgive and let them know of our forgiveness, then we are amiss and work against God's purposes.

There will come a time in your life when you will need — like me, like everyone — true forgiveness.  If you pray the Lord's prayer, which is in part "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others their sins," I hope you are one who forgives — truly — making others know and experience that forgiveness, not a smiling but condemning silence — or a feigned forgiveness which smilingly extends a dagger of "reminder" every day.  I hope rather that we will make people know that we do not hold onto (and present to others) a snapshot of them in their moment of failure — no, but rather that we look and hope for their good.  That is a forgiveness God gives: "Neither do I condemn you.  Go and sin no more."

If you are someone who is perpetually condemned for a past offense, do not despair.  Although various people will judge you for a long-past sin, banish, condemn, cancel, take opportunity from you, and paint a picture of you that is not today true (and is perhaps a picture not completely accurate to life even in the past) — they will also, of course, miss out on knowing the person you are now, who you are further becoming, and will miss the person God is (re)making you to be.  Do not despair.  "To despair is to turn your back on God" says Marilla Cuthburt.

As someone said, "Worry about your character, not your reputation.  Your character is who you are.  Your reputation is who people think you are."  You want a character today that's build by God, no matter what it may have been in the past.

If you stand in the temple with your head down and cannot look to heaven because of past sins (which you are always mindful of...and which someone feels the need to remind you, and others, about), know that there are still other people, like you, who are contrite and humbly look to God for the help only He can offer.  And all the while, there stands Christ, forgiving — right behind you.