Keywords of the Moral Life: Forgiveness
Death to Hallmark! Hooray for Judgment! Let the Airing of Real Grievances Commence!
To welcome the season of Advent is to welcome our own judgment. To welcome our judgment is to welcome our forgiveness. Without this, the darkness of the world continues unabated.
The Good, Bad, and Ambivalent: Christmas Story Edition
To be clear, I hate sentimental Christmas stories: the Hallmark Channel sends more of our souls flying into the abyss every winter than the Christmas shopping season, precisely because when we overspend, overconsume, overimbibe, we know it. We find ourselves incapable of stopping, but the fact remains that we know it and want to have it recognized.
Hallmark wants us to gloss over any sense of real damage and replace it with vague, therapeutic-friendly kinds of problems, transporting us to a place where it always snows and where the baby Jesus (if he appears) is the culmination of all of my hopes and aspirations.
But friends, Advent is the story not of our waiting for our aspirations to be made full.
It is the story of us waiting to be forgiven and healed.
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In the Christmas season, there are innumerable minor characters either passed over in silence, or who appear as minor supports of the architecture. We know nothing of Mary’s parents, or of Joseph’s, no knowledge of their friends or workshop conditions. The shepherds, apart from being addressed, left us no response. These are the figures who, if they were to speak, would offer their praise, I think. They would add their adoration and wonder, their songs and their aspirations.
But there are those who, given the opportunity, would have their voices remembered: the ones whispering around Joseph, the guards at Herod’s palace, the soldiers dispatched in the murder of the innocent. Those who do evil in the world are, sometimes, true believers committed to the cause, and sometimes, those whose malice is that of institutional participation. Hannah Arendt, in documenting the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the orchestrators of the so-called “Final Solution” of the Second World War, noted that what stood out above all was the banality of how evil occurs. It was rarely, she saw in Eichmann’s trial, dramatic acts of malice, but most often bureaucratic process, ordinary documents, committee meetings.
But some of the Christmas story find themselves simply bureaucrats: enter the long-maligned innkeeper. I say this not to minimize the damage that is done: the innkeeper who left a pregnant woman out of inner shelter was operating, like all Bethlehem, under burdened circumstances. If Luke’s account is correct, it would have meant that all of the long lineages of Benjamin would have come home to Bethlehem, overwhelming the guest houses and shelters for so many, and Mary was simply one of the many.1
The innkeeper remains maligned in many of the stories as one of the sides of the story: not on the side of the shepherds or the angels, and not quite on Herod’s side, but somewhere drifting close to the shoals of Herod’s viciousness in turning a pregnant woman out. But, as we will find later, there were a great many infants and toddlers in Bethlehem, many of whom would find their lives cut short, with Mary’s child one of and with the human masses.
How the shepherd is read here poses a problem to us, for he is a sympathetic figure, and yet, not a friend to the Holy Family. This is in no small way, I think, because it is tempting to read the Christmas Story in terms of winners and losers, of those who have been brought in and those cast out. But increasingly, I think this is a mistake, even for the most dramatic of villains such as Herod. All throughout Luke, themes of God giving justice to the lowest and overturning the thrones of the powerful echo, that when the Messiah comes, there will be a gnashing of teeth for many. The valleys being filled in and the mountains made low, which John the Baptist prophecies about, are nothing if not an invitation for those who are on the mountain top to get down quickly before the mountain is cut down. This theme of the Great Reversal—prophecied by Mary and by John the Baptizer, reiterated by Jesus’ reading of Isaiah—is coupled with Zacheus coming down from the tree, the Centurion humbling himself.
But for every dramatic repentance, there is an innkeeper, stuck firmly in the banality of a system. Neither evil nor virtuous, neither great nor malicious, incapable and helpless. For what is an innkeeper with a house full to do when another in need appears? Of what wrong exactly should he repent?
Caught between polarities, the innkeeper’s guilt is one of the processes governing his life: of taxation, of market demand, of an emperor’s fiat. There is no indication of malice in his turning Mary and Joseph away: there is only that there is no room. And yet, Mary is turned out to the stable none the less, a lesser hospitality. Unable to be part of a moral side, his guilt does not even rise to the offensive, to the possibly forgivable, and thus the innkeeper remains in limbo, neither innocent nor guilty of inhospitality, and thus, not able to be justified or penitent.
Advent: The Welcoming of Judgment
Innkeepers are everywhere. But, thanks to the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Messiah, there is no true limbo forever. For the precursor to being forgiven is being found wanting.
Wendell Berry, in his new The Need to Be Whole, attempts to construct an account of social cohesion in which many of the old agonisms are left to rot. The book is mostly about the legacies of the Civil War, and how race continues to animate division within the U.S., using his home state of Kentucky as a complicated case study: Kentucky never joined either side, and thus, was a more composite picture by Berry’s telling of the complicated story of racial prejudice, one which did think in terms of sides but of the wounds which racial prejudice and slavery gave to both the enslaved and to whites, both slaveholders and not. His reason for writing a more nuanced picture is not, I think, to efface slavery as a moral wrong, but to point toward the ways in which all members of the conflict wound up inheriting one singular bequest: disconnect from the land.
In trading in industrial logics for agrarian ones, and militaristic ones for reconciliatory ones, the States wound up trading away connections to the land and particular places. I have issues to pick with the book, but the one which Berry gets right is that, whatever their moral status within the Civil War, Americans did indeed inherit a common world after it which was more industrialized and committed to the usurpation of the natural world than it was before. All fell short of the glory of nature, and all now find themselves, he suggests, under a common ecological Fall. For there to be reconciliation—a true making whole—there has to be the recognition of the wrongs, and that is what Berry sets out to do in his book: to name the ways in which all persons together have gone wrong. That part of the book, whatever other flaws there may be, is sobering, and offers a reframing of how America might then think about racial injustices together.
In the coming of Jesus, the shepherds, the innkeeper, the world at large—all find themselves in a moment of reckoning and there will be none to escape the thunder. This is not to say that all will hear that thunderclap equally: those on top of the mountain will feel the ground beneath their feet collapse, and those being lifted up will have to let go of their self-identity as the persecuted ones. But there is a common thunder coming, which all will feel.
In the coming of God into the world, there is an entrance of our judgment. We are weighed by a baby, turned over by an infant; all of our ways are revealed and nothing is hidden. A sword will pierce Mary’s heart first, and then, all the rest of us behind her. And like Berry, who wants to illuminate the common damage which all inheritors of America’s history of prejudice and violence share, the Gospel is a story of reckoning even as it is a story of forgiveness. For there is nothing to forgive if there is no damage done: the Gospel offers nothing to a world which has nothing to confess.
In Christ’s coming, our banalities are exposed, our allegiances held up, and an invitation to repent and believe the good news given. Repent and rejoice, all you sinners. Be welcomed in and be healed, all you damaged!
Advent: The Need to Be Forgiven
For there to be reconciliation—for us to be forgiven—there must be something to be forgiven. The ambiguity of the innkeeper is not a problem, insofar as the innkeeper commits no direct wrong, but their participation in the banality of a system which produces damage none the less must be addressed. The banality has done damage, and it has done damage to the innkeeper, the one who is habituated to its systems as “the way things are”, the failures that must be.
In our world, we see the banality, but cannot see that the banality—even if we did not start it—still does damage to us, does damage within us, which calls for us to remains small within the system, to continue to damage as a default. And thus, because there is no ability for all to have fallen short, we must find ways to keep the wound of America open: there can be no end to the battles between the unjust and the just, Berry writes. Politically, this takes its toll:
Without forgiveness, there can be no limit to accusation and retaliation. And “forgiveness” is a word now unused in our public language. It is fearful to think that without the reconciliation that comes with forgiveness, and with no public inclination to forgiveness, we can have no freedom…It is the most difficult and necessary and practical of all the virtues. It unsticks us from the past. It frees us to have our being in the present world. And no human can set its limit.2
All forgiveness which the warring world offers to itself is one of analogy, one offers a new possibility within time—to forgive past wrongs is to embrace the possibility that we might have a different future, a reconciled one materially and interpersonally. The soldier of Herod, or even Herod himself: we can conceive of him being offered forgiveness, but is there a reconciliation there? Can he bring the children back from the dead?
What Advent invites us to consider is the following: it is not that the damage done by Herod is somehow equal to the ambivalence of the innkeeper, but that both Herod and the innkeeper are caught up in a world which is in need of healing: the damage of the world is comprehensive, and scalable, such that all find themselves caught up in it. That there is no restoring of Rachel to her children is not unimportant, and there is no need to set aside the specificity of that suffering. But where justice comes up against a limit is that the resurrection and the life will restore these children, whether Herod ever could or not. Our justice is not set aside, but asked to admit that forgiveness is the only way of making whole what can never be reconciled, and for the innkeeper, those ambiguities of the moral life that can never be escaped.
For there is no need for forgiving if no damage is happening. And if there’s no forgiveness, all we have is winter, and never Christmas.
Reading: Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. On the balance, it’s a provocative work, but one which falls short in its own ways. I’ll offer my own full-scale review at some point. Lots of student papers, as the end of the Fall semester is upon us. Lots of articles on Baptist responses to migration, in preparation for a conference in January: for being the largest non-Catholic religious group in North America, you’d think that Baptists had nothing to say about migration from their neglect in the literature.
It gives me great comfort to think of Mary as being one of the many, in no way visibly radiant or spectacular, that a night clerk could have easily misunderstood. If, as Christians talk about Mary, she was the first disciple, the God-bearer, I like to think of the innkeeper as misunderstanding rather than as an antitype: it makes my own ignorance easier to be patient with.
Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, 243-244.