Love Alone

Forgiveness ought to be simple: we relinquish all claims to what is due us, and render payment for our selfish, reckless, and callous living. That is, after all, our master prayer is "Forgive us our trespasses." Do we mean to be reckless? Do we mean to be callous? You see, these are the natural outcomes of selfishenss.

But our master prayer is "Forgive us our trespasses." Our trespasses. Whom have we injured? Whom have we slighted? Whom have we neglected?

Perceptions of slights to ourselves, the ones who give offense, disperse like a toxic vapor. We say, "What is that compared to my sins against others and against God." And perhaps this is the universal antidote: to stop asking the chronic question: "But what about me?" with its habit of tallying imagined slights and injuries .... even reciting an unending litany that traces back to childhood, faulting parents and teachers.

What are these compared to the wrongs we have committed or have been complicit in? For in the secret place of our own lives, our Father sees in secret. He has seen all and remembers all and does not forget. If there is litany of sins to be recited, God's memory is faultless. He leaves out nothing concerning our offenses.

Each day we pray, "Against Thee only have I sinned" (Ps 50). The One Whom we have offended is always and ultimately God. It is God's Heart Which breaks, for which Heart is more sincere, which Heart is more sensitive, and Who, in all our lives, has higher hopes for us?

You know, t`he one we hurt most in a schoolyard scrap is not the other boy, but his mother and father. The girl whom we slight or bully, sits alone in her room counting the life-subtracting hours, but her grieving points to another one greater, her grieving parents, who ache more. We have — all of us do! — One God and Father. And He is One with His feeling and compassionate Son, Whose sensitivities are far beyond those we can imagine. He is able to hear even the stirrings of our hearts as loud as thundering hoof beats. We do not have that power. We struggle to hear even what people audibly say to us.

Did I say He has that power .... as if it were just one among many? It is the power. As Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemman said, Christianity has no other content but love. In God's Kingdom Love is the only language spoken, it is the only custom observed, it is the only feast celebrated.

In our deadened or distracted sensitivities, in our poverty of fellow feeling, we drive by night, through fog as it were, with exceedingly dim headlights. We are apt to injure, even kill. Still we drive on because our foremost concern and cause is ourselves. (I have places to go, people to see, I am late!) If anyone should be harmed by our recklessness, then instantly our foremost thought is to obtain mercy and forgiveness.

My eldest daughter once came to me fearing that she had not come off the way that she had hoped to at an important reception. I said, "Don't worry. No one noticed. For the lens that each person was peering through is a mirror. And they are all worried about how they came off. That is just how most people are."

I say most people. There are those noble few who let go of their mirrors a long time ago (or never picked them up in the first place). Do you know the name Father Richard Frechette, CP, D.O.? He is a Roman Catholic Passionist priest whose "parish" these past thirty-eight years has been the most dangerous part of Haiti — a section of Port au Prince known as Cite Soleil. You will not find other acres on this earth which are more soaked in blood, more seething with hatred, or burning more deeply in rage. Since 1987 he has called these acres his workplace and home. Because he is a doctor and possessed of a superior education and is a marvelous man to behold, he might be anywhere else, anywhere of his choosing. But he is there. Still there.

I remember during the years I served that prostrate country, suffering and death surrounded you every day. Every day you saw children on the beach competing with pigs in the filthy sand for scraps of garbage to eat. But this was in distant Jeremie. In Port au Prince, so many bodies were piling up that bulldozers were proposed to deal with the public health hazard. They would be pushed into a pit. (Did you know that the demand for cemeteries in Haiti is so great, that you are entitled to burial for only three years till your remains must make way for someone else to buried? Truly a culture of death.) But Father Rick strove to give each person — as many as he could — a decent Christian burial. He said, "If we throw these bodies unceremoniously into a pit, then we have declared that all along these people were garbage."

He founded an orphanage named "Nos Petit Freres et Souers" or NPFS (translated "Our Little Brothers and Sisters"). When it was suggested that the NPFS staff should leave Haiti under the present conditions of chaos, for the state has failed, the government has fallen, and no one has remains to keep law and order, Father Rick said, "How could we leave the children? What kind of shepherd would leave when the wolf comes?"

We recognize this reference. It is the Gospel where Jesus said, such men are shown to have been hirelings all along and not shepherds.

Does it take a toll on Father Rick? After all, he is no superman. This ceaseless pouring out of love and devotion took a toll even on the Man-God. Yes, Father Rick is a living saint, but he is also human. Sr. Mary Anne (of our Hermitage) told me that when when he came to our campus to seek retreat and restoration, he mostly slept.

About a dozen years ago, I was having coffee during the pre-dawn hours with Ned Wentworth, a regular volunteer from Connecticut at our ministry. But this time, he came down to Haiti with a special purpose: to meet with Father Rick. It turns out they were friends in high school in New England.

A few days after, after returning from Port au Prince, I again had coffee with Ned. The pre-dawn darkness, the cool air, the hot coffee, and the silence all made for a certain intimacy.

At length I said, "Did you see Father Rick?"

Ned replied, "I did, Father, I did."

"Can you tell me about your lunch with him? What did he say?"

"Oh, we talked about many things .... but one thing astonished me. He said that the main thing he had to do every minute of every day was to dodge assassination attempts that were constantly being planned and carried out by very boys he had brought from helpless malnutrition to adulthood!"

I was silent. I was familiar with this neighborhood in the human soul. I had seen the slight and gracious form of a humble nun who had poured herself out as a servant to the poor for decades, yet endured the hatred of some of the same people for whom she had sacrificed so much. On a regular basis, I saw the Voudou candles on the wall out in front of our clinic signifying that a houngan or a manbo (a Voudou priest or priestess) had been engaged to kill her. She had to be careful at what she ate, for several priest friends, good sincere priests, seeking refuge at our clinic, had later been poisoned.

Enduring the hatred was simply part of the sacrifice you made. I was warned about it when I agreed to join the apostolate in Haiti full-time: at the bottom of the food chain people writhe in pain and become twisted beyond recognition. It is up to you to hold up and secure decency and rightness. These people must take refuge in you; you do not look to them.

I saw it in the form of fire-brands in our city standing on soap boxes with megaphones claiming that "white devils" (ourselves) had stolen all this (the grounds and clinic we built for them), had stolen it from the people. And I had no doubt that he and his confreres were out for blood. Indeed, if a Haitian on our staff received a raise, Sr. Mary Anne had to agree to keep it a secret. Otherwise, their neighbors (especially other employees) would burn their house down. This seems to be woven into the benighted pattern of life, an outcome of the evil we have chosen: "Why should they receive that money. Why wasn't that money given to me?"

Did you know that the only thing God made was goodness? "Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good" (Gen 1:31). We are not empowered to create anything, not really. We cannot insert new elements into the Periodic Table. We can only discover them. We are able to create only in the sense that we can rearrange what God has already made. Even the evil one and his fallen angels have no prayers of their own. They can only invert and subvert the ancient and sacred prayers that God gave to us.

We ourselves are born in perfect innocence and goodness. Our first state, like the first state of the Creation, was innocence and goodness. To depart from that native goodness, we must choose evil. It is a marvel and a mystery that among those who chose not to depart from God's goodness (or found their way back to it, by the grace of God), there exist those who have made goodness their vocation. Instead of living their lives for themselves — seeking their own happiness, their own advancement, their own pleasures — they have chosen to minister to the horribly twisted and disfigured ones who did choose for that evil. That is, they have gone back into the world which they refused, And they strive every day to be a light of goodness in that cruel dark.

Now, the way ahead for them is hard. Which way should they go? We could say that there are no maps, that these are uncharted waters, that this is undiscovered country. But it is more accurate to say that it has been crossed by few. We are fortunate that the Gospel stories have survived. For in those pages we find the golden lessons describing the notable path of Goodness through the world. God entered our darkness as One of us, St. John tells us. He crisscrossed it thirty-three years. He was the Sign of Contradiction, pushing back darkness in our souls wherever He went.

And the good ones who have followed Him, read and re-read these accounts, feed their hearts with His holy words, and commit them to their inmost memories .... like Father Rick — his references for life and the choices he makes are inevitably Gospel teachings. This is how they are able to understand what they must do, to know how they must act, and to find the words they are to say. They look to the font of all Goodness, to the Incarnation of God's unsurpassable Love for the world. And especially they are fixed upon that brilliant moment, that burning point, where pure Goodness turned square-on to pure evil. And He said:

Shall we say we desire goodness and not remain fixed upon Jesus? Shall we profess Him — we call it Christianity — and ignore this defining moment? Forgive — a word etched with Divine fire across the human story.

To each of us everywhere and always, the question is, Who shall be the ones to hold up and secure decency and rightness that holy sanctuary, when it has been trampled down and almost lost underfoot? If we reject these things, who do we are? What do we have? A pointless parlor game? Lives devoid of meaning and content? For "Christianity has no other content but love," Fr. Schmemann has said. And the Way, if it be not this, has no choice but to be wastelands of selfishness, rage, and personal degradation.

When I came to that seething land of Haiti, I met the living saints who had come for no other reason but to love. All of them and each of them .... for no other reason but to love. They did not come to fix anything. Haiti cannot be fixed. They did not come to change lives. For most lives there cannot be changed. They came to love one person at a time.

Most inspiring to me were the nuns who had laid down their lives at age eighteen and were now turning eighty. They had the same open, shining faces, beaming out Divine love, which were now no less radiant, but rather more. Yes, they have been the objects of hatred and even assault. But this has not lessened their loves .... because there is something here far greater. And they forgive and forgive and forgive .... though no one has said, "I am sorry."

Whatever it is that holds each of us back, let it go. There is something far bigger here. Let us take to heart the golden lesson: let us forgive. For this is the door which the Lord bids us knock. And He shall open it. And we shall be with Him, the One Who forgives. And we shall have peace and light and life to our very souls. For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.