What can we hope for?
CW: abuse, violence
The first time I remember speaking to God…
I was five years old, playing with my cousin Jenny. We hatched a plan to say aloud every swear word we knew.
We sat crosslegged on her bedroom floor. In a whisper, Jenny launched into her list of words. She had an impressive list.
When she paused, I boldly inserted the only word I knew:
“Damn.”
Jenny added more words; meanwhile shameheat rushed to my face and I thought, “God heard me and now I won’t go to heaven.”
It seems I had sponged up some notion about forgiveness by then, because a solution presented itself: I will slip behind a piece of furniture and pray, “God, please forgive me and let me go to heaven.”
I’m unclear on the reason for hiding other than the vague sense I didn’t want Jenny to see I was trying to “undo” the fun we’d been having.
What I remember clearly was that I left Jenny’s house that day feeling highly doubtful my prayer had worked.
That moment in Jenny’s bedroom marked the beginning of a series of nights in bed praying, “Please, please, please, let me go to heaven.”
I was fairly confident that the success of a prayer lay in the volume of please’s.
“God is a threat to be managed.”
I wish my early experiences of God had been comforting and safe, but they weren’t. They were rooted in an image of God inherited from adults who probably didn’t feel very safe themselves much of the time. My early impression was that God is a threat to be managed.
Fortunately, that image of God transformed around age twelve.
Our mother took us children to a brown-brick church in our neighborhood.
My memory of that community of faith was that they were gentle and compassionate to my mother–an unmarried woman with three young children and limited resources.
In that church community, I learned the history of the Christian traditions, the prayers and creeds.
I began reading scripture, journaling, and talking to God by candlelight in my room after my family fell asleep.
The God I met through the words and relationships of the community in that brown-brick church building was gentle and caring. That God resembled Jesus, defending women and children, healing and forgiving enemies, crying when friends were hurting. The God I encountered in my room by candlelight was a comforting presence. God lessened my fear of being alone.
I wish my understanding of God at age twelve had lasted, but it didn’t. A few years later, I followed my teenage crush down the street to the Southern Baptist church.
My memory of that community of faith was that they were confident and clear in their notion that Jesus died to save us from God’s punishment. They were passionate about labeling sin and holding each other accountable for behavioral improvements.
In that community, I learned the idea that Jesus died because death–suffering—is required in exchange for God’s forgiveness. I began reading scripture with that teaching in mind, and seeing the image of a violent, punishing God reflected back.
I came into young adulthood perceiving God more the way I had first thought of God when I was five years old—a violent threat to be managed.
“The key, it turns out, is the incarnation.”
“If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask!” (Matthew 7).
When I became a parent, I discovered something.
It’s entirely possible to teach our children—to help them improve their behavior—without punishing them.
If we define punishment as inflicting suffering to the point of a threat reaction, there is almost no educational value in that technique. When your brainstem is “lit up” by the threat of violence, very little learning is possible. You lose access to the upper pathways of the brain.
If behavioral correction and positive learning is your goal, it is beneficial to avoid threatening your children’s sense of safety.
And if as a human parent, you find it entirely possible to teach your children without threatening their safety or punishing them violently, how much more will God give you this good thing?
I wish I had understood this earlier.
The key, it turns out, is the incarnation.
If we take seriously the notion that Jesus was God—God in a human body—then we must allow the stories of Jesus to update and refresh our understanding of who God is and how God relates to us.
You then are enabled to read everything else in scripture by that light.
“We find it impossible to imagine ourselves capable of freely forgiving.”
And in the stories we’re given of Jesus, you do not find any instances where Jesus is violent.
Jesus forgives without ever demanding that someone else “pay the price.”
In Mark 2, when Jesus forgives the paralytic, it’s not because someone else’s legs had been broken in his place.
If Jesus is God—meaning there is no part of God that is not reflected in Jesus, and no part of Jesus that is not a reflection of God—then I see no alternative but to conclude that God is entirely nonpunishing, and freely forgiving, without any exchange required.
That is the image of God we find reflected in Jesus, according to the scriptures.
So how then are you to understand the pervasive call throughout the scriptures for death in exchange for forgiveness?
Consider that it’s true that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6). It would appear the wages are demanded by us.
We are the ones who believe death is owed to us.
We are the ones who insist upon reparations for injuries we’ve sustained.
We are the crowd, crying “death, death!” because we find it impossible to imagine ourselves capable of freely forgiving.
Neurobiologically, I think it may be humanly impossible for you to forgive.
For this reason, I hate talking about forgiveness.
If we define forgiveness as letting go of the demand for violence and suffering as a form of payment.
For a long time I found it difficult to locate in side me a “demand for violence and suffering,” But it does live inside me. When I think about parents who abuse and neglect their children, I am capable of connecting with a rage so fierce someone would need to hold me back. Inside me I find a crowd crying, “crucify!” when I think about how to bring justice to parents who abuse their children. I find it psychologically impossible to forgive those parents.
Spiritually, I think is what God is hoping we will come to understand through the story of Jesus.
Forgiveness is neurobiologically impossible for human beings.
We must be helped with it.
We must first experience it ourselves, before we will become capable of extending it to someone else.
We must be able to locate inside ourselves the same violence which we are struggling to forgive in the other.
For this reason, I love talking about forgiveness.
But before I could talk about it, I had to slowly trace the path of my inner rage to the doorstep of my own violence.
“When Jesus faced death itself, he remained committed to nonviolence”
If Jesus was God in a body, then we can imagine God knows that feeling of rage.
At the same time, as the story goes, Jesus never did return pain for pain.
Jesus entered our human story where, for centuries, the solution to injury had been to cry, “death, death!” and revealed to us that God has another solution.
And when Jesus faced death itself, he remained committed to nonviolence, saying instead to his enemy, “Listen, it’s unnecessary that either of us should die. But if you believe one of us must… let it be me.”
What if Jesus died to reveal that we were wrong about violence and punishment being necessary?
What if God’s forgiveness never needed to be purchased with death?
What if we are the ones who chronically underestimate God’s capacity to freely forgive, because we find it so baffling, so neurobiologically confounding?
It makes sense, then, that we really could not have arrived at the awareness of God’s nonviolent forgiveness on our own. We needed God to come to us—in a body like ours—and show us who God really is.
∞
The therapist in me suspects it is neurobiologically impossible for the human brain to auto-generate forgiveness. And yet, inexplicably, when I allow the story of Jesus to shape my understanding of who God is and how God relates to me—and the human limitations inside me—I experience a bodily trust that is tangibly felt. My breathing slows, my muscles relax, and I feel myself to be forgiven for my vengeful fantasies. I sense that my pain is seen and understood by God. I find inside my body a surprising, neurobiologically baffling, capacity to forgive. And I’m able to gently set down torch and receive God’s tender care and forgiveness for the violence that lives inside me.
Listening with you,
Questions for reflection:
How does reflecting on Jesus update mistaken notions about God that you inherited?
How might paying attention to your nervous system help you become aware of what’s happening inside you?
How does the experience of God’s forgiveness expand your own capacity?
Further reading:
Mark 2: 2–12; Romans 6:23
The Brain & the Spirit, Chapter 4, A Borrowed Body, “Forgiveness,” pp. 91–96.
