Attending Forgiveness Vespers this afternoon made me think of others that I’ve done. I don’t know what number I’m up to yet, but it’s enough that I always think of how different they are from each other. I’ve been at some where a lot of people were in tears (including me, I think. I can’t remember.). I’ve been at some where for some reason there was a lot of laughing — we were all trying to be serious, but funny things kept happening, and in the end, the somewhat bubbly mood prevailed.

I’ve been in some where I actually had something to forgive. As I mentioned back here, that’s been a rarity in my life, in part I think because our societal tendency is to be polite at all costs. In church, it’s the rare person that makes an issue out of things. That can make church a blessed haven from the crankiness and rudeness of the outside world, but occasionally it probably keeps us from clearing the air.

And so, we need Forgiveness Vespers.

The time that I had something to forgive, I made the rounds of the line as you do, and I’d gotten a little mechanical. And so I didn’t notice when one person asked my forgiveness with a little tension in their voice. I said what I’d been saying with the same inflection over and over: “I do forgive you.” And I would’ve moved immediately to my next line, but they went off the script. “Thank you,” the person said, with genuine feeling.

That may have been the first time I really looked at them. I suddenly remembered why they would really be asking. It’s true — they had hurt me. It was done and over with, but the mark it left on me would take years to go away, and it made a little change that was permanent. I was touched that they had really been afraid that I wouldn’t forgive them It’s not like that, or maybe I just had the slight embarrassment of being mistaken for a better person than I was (than I am).

How could I have not forgiven them? And how could I not have needed their forgiveness as well? Did they not know that though they hurt me one time, I had made remarks, been petulant, thought unjust and cruel things, not just about them, but about everyone? Wasn’t it obvious what a total fake I was?

Maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t, but something had happened at work shortly before to make it obvious to me. I had gone with a co-worker to an event that involved a long car trip together. During the drive, she started blowing off steam about someone we worked with. He was a funny guy, and we all loved his sense of humor, but he could also be very irritating and very sensitive. She went on about him at such length that I got caught up in it, and we ended up spending the whole time in the car complaining about him and coldly analyzing his behavior. It was a tiresome trip, and when I got home I felt like I needed a shower.

But that’s not half of what I felt the next day. At lunch with the guy, he suddenly looked at me and said with energy, “So … do you hate me or what?”

Lost for anything to say, I just said, “Why would I hate you? What are you talking about?” I think I already knew, but I was grasping for something normal to say.

“I talked to [so-and-so] last night …” Oh, yes he did. And she had talked to him. In spite of her constantly complaining about what a pain he was, they used to call each other all the time. And apparently, when he had called that night and said something that annoyed her, she just started unburdening herself of everything we had said in the car. No, make that everything I had said. It took her less than a couple hours to pass along every stupid, ugly, pointless, idiotic thing that I had said.

I don’t tell this story now as some kind of self-flagellation. It’s long-gone now. The guy was quick to forgive, which might have been part of the reason that I was too, months later in church. But there were a couple lessons that came out of it, and I thought of them again today.

• When confronted about the gossip, I said, “I didn’t mean any of that stuff.” And it was true. I couldn’t blame him for not thinking that was an answer. It didn’t sound like much of one. But it was the honest truth. All the things that seemed so pertinent, so clever, so superior to say under those circumstances were really just puffs of noxious gas, and I had known it as soon as I got out of the situation that gave rise to them. I’ve never forgotten that when I hear something that someone has said about me. We say so many things, and there are so few of them we really mean.
• I’m really not such a nice person after all. Quite a shock. I’d been saying I was the chief of sinners every Sunday for years, but I had probably been thinking in the back of my mind that I was just the sort of wonderful person who would say something like that. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like a wonderful person. With the merest incentive, I had treated someone in a way that was an offense to his humanity, and mine.
• Sins, remarks, hurts, unkindnesses — they’re so often the work of an instant. Sometimes you haven’t the least idea where they come from. But the effect of them lasts for years, and you can’t really take them back. The trick isn’t just to be cautious in your speech (though of course that’s a good practice). The trick is to do the difficult work of repenting, confessing, praying and working to do better … so that when something comes straight from the heart in an unguarded moment, it doesn’t stink of petty grudges, egoism, judgmentalness and an ugly outlook.

Forgiveness Vespers is rarely a difficult event any more. I’ve been to too many for that. But I think there is a lot going on, if a person can bear to see it.

Follow-up

In thinking over this incident more, I realize that I left something important off the list of what I learned from the incident with my co-workers. In order of importance, from least important to most important, I learned never to trust:

1. … a gossip. What you tell them is bound to be broadcast sooner or later.
2. … the gossip you hear. You may actually hear some things that are true, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be profitable. If it’s important for you to know something, be assured that it will come to you by better sources than other people’s hearsay.
3. … the impulse to gossip. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more aware that there’s more harm done this way than I really want to know. It seemed like good fun — and nearly harmless — when I was younger. Now it seems like anything but that.
4. … the spirit of gossip. Gossip can cast a sort of spell over a group and make them regard each other with either an unnatural attraction or an unnatural dislike. It can ruin harmony and fellowship in no time at all and lead to a combative climate where everyone feels like they have to say terrible things about each other just out of self-defense.