If Everything is Forgiven in End

Like That

Over this past weekend, I was away at a retreat. Over the course of the weekend, I was asked to engage in a ritual, designed to release something of my choosing to which I no longer wanted to hold on. 

I chose something deeply personal. I chose to release a burden I’d been carrying for years, and to ask that it be forgiven.

The day prior, though, something curious happened. I heard the facilitator of the retreat reference, in passing, the Lord’s Prayer. I am not a religious person, but something about that reference stuck. And what spun out with me from that reference, what snuck into my head when I was awake in the middle of the night thereafter, was the notion that when we ask to be forgiven, we must also be willing to extend forgiveness.

And so, when I chose to release the burden I’d been carrying the next day and ask that it be forgiven, I also decided that the ritual had to include my forgiveness of the person who had brought the burden into my life in the first place.

I found myself exceedingly emotional during the ritual. I wept as I described what I was putting on the table, and wept harder when I described the person and the conduct I was there to forgive.

Out loud, I said: “I am here to forgive him, for so much violence and so much damage and so much harm.” I sobbed my way through to this: “He owes me nothing.”

I have never been so publicly broken in front of a group of people as I was at that moment. It was raw, and painful, and beyond explanation in how it emerged from my spirit.

I should make clear that I did this with no expectation of anything in return from the person involved.

I forgave that person because the burden I was carrying was not just material, but emotional. It was a burden of resentment, of rage, of sheer blinding seething hatred, and I’d been carrying it around for the better part of a decade.

I was not the only one weeping when I was done.

And I left my moment in that ritual with sudden and profound recognition that an entire chapter in my life had just come to an end.

I’d let go.

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Many years ago, I was a singer/songwriter on the side of practicing law. I performed around New York City in the mid-aughts, and was in the process of cutting a demo album with a Grammy-winning producer when life and marriage and children intervened. 

That producer and his wife, my vocal coach, played at my wedding. She is the godmother of my eldest child and a dear friend to this day.

What I remember most from that window of my life is the first time I ascended the stage at Rockwood Music Hall to sing a song I had written myself, entitled To That Joy.

It told the story of a grand romance that went sour, with all its wounds and harm, sung to a lilting tune that, I was told, got lodged in the minds of everyone who heard it.

That song ends with a moment of reckoning, a return to who we were before all that damage, with a soaring chorus that goes like this:

I let go, love,

And once I did that

There was joy

And everything is forgiven in the end

Like that.

History repeats.

And no matter what we believe, we won’t be taking our resentments and our rage and our hatred to wherever we go when this life is over.

The question, truly, is what we do with them while we’re here.

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I’ve thought a lot about forgiveness in the context of the history of this nation lately, and its present. About how angry we all are, and about what is justified and what is not, and what can be done to heal it all.

In the context of the white supremacy on which this country is built, very few white people have asked for forgiveness for what our ancestors did, or for the benefits we gain from so much exploitation and violence to this day.

And very few of us of any marginalized identity are ready to forgive, even just for the sake of unburdening ourselves, those who have wrought so much violence upon us in the past or in recent years, through the resurgence of unspeakable evil and hate.

I’ve always found it remarkable when victims of violence forgive those who have taken so much from them. I’ve always found it to be an extraordinary act of grace.

And until recently, I’ve candidly never understood the point. I’ve been the person who would carry a grudge for decades, never letting go, never tempering down the rage, convinced that without a justice or even just an acknowledgement of the harm perpetrated that would never come, forgiveness could not be granted.

I’ve believed that certain things were unforgiveable.

And yet, what I’ve learned now is that it is possible to forgive without expecting anything to change or anything in return.

It is possible to release the burden of our trauma with a stark understanding that the person or people who created it may not change or even know that we are forgiving them, or care.

It is possible to forgive and still refuse reconciliation, still maintain firm boundaries, still say “no, I will not allow this into my life any longer,” still require reparation, still know the healing isn’t done.

It is possible to forgive and yet insist on accountability.

It is possible, I now realize, to forgive just for the sake of your own body, for the sake of your own soul, for the sake of being able to breathe again, because you have decided to release yourself from so much malignant and incendiary rage.

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I had reason, on my return, to see the person whom I had chosen to forgive.

What I did, almost immediately, is burst into tears.

What I did next, shockingly, was apologize.

Out of my mouth came the words: “I am sorry for my part in the mess we made.”

I expected nothing.

He was stunned.

But then, after a minute, he apologized too.

I am under no illusions that anything will change.

I am under no illusions.

And yet, there is something miraculous in the words that are spoken in moments like that.

There is something miraculous in the tears and in the recognition that comes after.

They are not meaningless. They are not nothing.

Today, speaking of miracles, the burden from which I sought to be liberated in that ritual this past weekend vanished into thin air.

The details don’t matter but the fact of the end of it is exceedingly true.

When I got the news, I sat down on the floor of my office and sobbed.

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What we do for one another in the context of reckoning with harm is real, and matters, and goes beyond the things we say, into the deep marrow of our bones, into our spirits, and into our connections to one another everywhere.

When we seek forgiveness, we offer the possibility of an unburdening to others, and to ourselves.

When we forgive without being asked to do it, but merely because we know it is time, because the burdens we carry as a result of so much trauma and harm are too heavy to continue, we find ourselves, as I did the whole drive home, breathing deeply into bodies that feel brand new, with clear vision, and new hope.

I wonder what would happen to us, as a nation, if we sought forgiveness for so much historical and present harm, if we extended peace and accountability and restorative justice— if we tried, just once, to acknowledge what we’ve done.

I wonder what would happen if we extended forgiveness to others simply because we were ready to set these innumerable burdens down, because we knew it was time to heal ourselves, as individuals and as a nation, rather than waiting for others who might never do it to lead the way, rather than waiting for vengeance, or a justice that might never come.

I wonder what would happen if we just extended our forgiveness, and asked to be forgiven.

I wonder if it might not change everything.

I wonder if we might breathe peacefully, as one nation, all at once and all together.

I wonder what it would look like, in America, if everything was forgiven in the end, like that.