So, I suppose my first
act in contemplating forgiveness should be to consider forgiving Tim [Nagy] for
assigning me a parable. And not just any parable, but the confusing Parable of
the Unforgiving Servant. This is the story of a man who accepts mercy from his
master only to turn around and deny that same mercy to a fellow servant. There
is a good deal of debtors’ prison, families sold into slavery and even torture
to keep the reader interested, but the underlying message is a difficult one
for those of us raised with a friendly Jesus. The upshot is a fairly explicit
threat to dig deep into one’s heart and find a way to forgive those around us,
or else.
One of the real
privileges of working at a college is the opportunity to learn from your
colleagues. Their research and teaching interests can open up whole new worlds
for you. About ten years ago, Prof. Alan Udoff and the Philosophy Department
organized the first International Philosophy Conference held at St. Francis.
Scholars from the United States and around the world explored the writings of
Vladimir Jankelevitch and the ways in which he dealt with the question of
forgiveness. It would be a great disservice to attempt to summarize
Jankelevitch’s thinking, and I can only claim to have left the conference
inspired to find out more about him and his work. The take away for me that
Saturday was a template for thinking about forgiveness in terms of the
understandable and therefore excusable, versus the forgivable or unforgivable.
People wrong us for all sorts of reasons, both purposeful and unthinking,
determined and callous. What I believe I heard that day was that it was
important to try to understand people and the motivations for their actions, so
much so that most times you can simply excuse behavior rather than have to
forgive it. Understanding an attack or a slight as a cry for help or sign of
confusion or error is a good place to start thinking about most situations in
which we find ourselves. True forgiveness is a much more difficult task.
I will now spend some
time thinking about Tim’s motivations in assigning this reading, and the very
strong possibility that this assignment was both random and enjoyable.
Timothy
Houlihan, PhD
Associate
Professor of History
No comments:
Post a Comment