“When I was a little child / The preacher told me lies / And I can’t forgive him now / I won’t forgive him now” —Claire Holley, “Love Never Came“

Last week I had the great pleasure of meeting novelist and lawyer Thane Rosenbaum. He was at Emory last week lecturing about his newish book The Myth of Moral Justice: Why the Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right. (Excerpt here.)

You’d think the book is about why lawyers suck, and you’d be right enough. But at its heart, Thane’s book is about forgiveness and reconciliation, the crucial importance of (public) apologies, and the central role of story and memory in each.

Thane talks about how even folks who win lawsuits leave the courthouse (assuming they even get to go to court) feeling ambivalent. Why? When they tried to tell their story, they were told it was legally irrelevant, or ruled out of order. If they wanted an apology, it never came up. As Thane said, “Divorce trials are never about who gets the china. No one really wants the china.”

When apologies are issued, they are frequently “non-apology apologies.” The apologizer regrets frustration and inconvenience. Or mistakes were made. That’s no way to make an apology. That’s no way to achieve reconciliation. Then it occurred to me.

The right to confront the accused

The reason I still feel an ambivalence, an anomie, about my leaving the church, about my leaving the ministry, is that there was never a public acknowledgedment of the events (mostly others leaving or being forced to leave) that convinced me I needed to leave. I now know why I needed to write those stories down. I now know why I needed to send it to the bishop, to the chair of the ordination board, to the district superintendent.

And I now understand why the bishop responded the way he did—no acknowledgement of the pain of the stories I shared, but instead a correction of the church budget figures given me by the man who was pastor of the church in question at that time. The bishop also advised I do my homework better before making such weighty decisions, completely ignoring the weight of the narratives I had told about the abuse of clergy in his church, some of which occurred under his direction, and the vast majority of which involved no church budget figures at all. It wass though different numbers in a church budget would change the fact that ministers are sent to “punishment parishes” for reasons of church law when reasons of church mission were actually the stakes.

As Thane would likely tell me, the bishop acted like a lawyer when, as I assert, he should have acted with pastoral care. A previous bishop had used purely (church) legal reasons to boot my childhood minister (by way of sending him to a “punishment parish”), and the bishop (when I left the ministry) defended his predecessors’ lawyerly behavior with still more lawyerly behavior.

Scribes and Pharisees, scholars and lawyers

It impresses me that the “Scholars’ Version” of the New Testament—prepared by the controversial Jesus Seminar, whom I don’t usually support—translates “the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus’ frequent rhetorical opponents, as “the scholars and lawyers.” Don’t act like the scholars and lawyers, Jesus says. The way of the Kingdom does not lie there.

However, I have yet to find a translation that does justice to what’s usually translated as “hypocrite.” It seems that our popular understanding of “hypocrite” has slipped to the point where it means little more than someone who can’t live up to their own ideals. But that, I am sure, is nothing more than being human.

“Hypocrite” originally meant an actor, back when actors always wore exagerrated, oversided masks on stage. (So you’d know who was who.) Later, it became a pejorative to describe those who “wore masks” off stage. A better translation would be “poser.” So now Jesus’ litany of curses becomes, “Woe unto you, scholars and lawyers, posers!”

Be bitter, it helps

I now understand why I delight each summer in hearing—usually from one or another former classmate who also decided to leave the ministry for similar reasons—that that bishop’s conference is short several ministers after decades of surplus. Thanks to Thane, I now know why I am still a little bitter after all these years:

My story was never heard by the powers-that-be, who need to hear it, and whom I need to hear it. Because my story is not heard, they cannot properly apologize (or even tell a counter-story in response). Because there is no apology, we cannot reconcile. And without reconciliation, forgiveness is a dim possibility. Because they do not repent, much less acknowledge my pain, I choose to hold onto my bitterness.

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, and as a culture we do a shitty job teaching it. I’m not sure I understand it myself. I know I’ve forgiven and been forgiven. But the notion that everything can be forgiven—or even that it should be forgiven—strikes me as both fundamentally flawed and fundamentally Christian. To demand a transgressor be forgiven, to say forgiveness is obligatory, is itself a transgression (no matter how many people are sad somebody hung on a cross, I might add). Frankly, demanding forgiveness seems a sin.