On Turning Over New Leaves

MEDITATION

As the leaves begin to turn
and fall,
we pass on our way,
the last roses of summer,
their colors so sharp,
vivid in the coolness,
yellow and red and pink,
reminders of warmer days,
harbingers now for the winding down
of another summer.
In this new season, we feel the air go chill
and crisp and light –
our hearts enter into the spirit
of harvest,
a time of folding and binding
and raking,
a cleaning out of the lushness
that once was,
a putting in store.
We are storing our memories
and our dreams,
we are remembering what has been
done and what was forgotten
and left undone.
In this movement of preparation,
we are renewed in our desires
to set our lives right,
to go back and finish
what has been left undone.
We are aided in our work
by the cool crisp air,
which invigorates our spirits,
and by the dark colors
of the last roses,
which hold our promises.

SERMON

In any other church, but a Unitarian Universalist church, the chances that you'd hear about sin and forgiveness on any given Sunday would be better than 50-50. These sermons usually come laced with a good dose of guilt, making you either want to run to the confessional if you're Catholic, or asked to be saved if you are Southern Baptist, for example, the way I was raised as a young girl. I had to be saved twice before I ever even reached the age of 12 in the Baptist church.

Like some of you, at least, I'm admitting that religious sermons on sin and forgiveness – my subject today – shouldn't come around very often – even if it's something I desperately need. And Unitarian Universalists have a particular aversion to the topic of forgiveness (we can barely say the word sin), in part because it is attached to so much guilt in Christianity (although Christians do not necessarily have the market cornered on guilt).

In my sermon today, however, I will argue that despite the squeamishness some of us may feel
about the subject, learning to forgive ourselves and others, practicing contrition, is part of the purpose of religion, and it is a good and kind thing for our own hearts and souls. I'm speaking on forgiveness today because this is the beginning of Rosh Hashana in the Jewish tradition, the Jewish New Year,
the beginning of Tishrei, the anniversary for the creation of the world and the time just before Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown this year on Oct. 5. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement,
the day that Adonai in the Jewish tradition seals our fates for the upcoming year. At Rosh Hashana, we hear the shofar sound, the ram's horn, and we are called to ourselves, to our consciences – these are the Days of Awe.

This is the time of year, fall, the autumnal equinox, that the Jewish community takes time to take stock, look into their hearts, and search for forgiveness for wrongs they may have committed
over the preceding year. It is a religious time to ask for forgiveness from others and to pray that you will be forgiven and hope that your past sins will be washed away. I wish I could tell you that if you are Unitarian Universalist that you don't need this – but we all know better. Hurting one another,
being insensitive, breaking promises, even telling lies or tall tales or avoiding the truth, is part of the human condition. As writer David Augsburger says: "Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness."

I preach a lot about peace, a relatively safe topic, and I always say that peace begins with each one of us. But we cannot have peace of any kind without learning the arts and rituals of forgiveness.
We cannot learn compassion, either to give it or receive it, if we are riddled with bitterness or grief,
wrongs that have been done to us or wrongs that we have done to others, if we are riddled with guilt.
At the very heart of how we can learn to be our best selves are the fundamental questions – can we ask for forgiveness; can we forgive others and can we forgive ourselves?
The Hindus say that if you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive; if you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred." Forgiveness requires love or compassion – for the other and for ourselves. If we are stuck, and can't forgive, then compassion is not running through our actions and thoughts.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, but a permanent attitude. We must, I believe, think every day about what is in our hearts, know if there is some piece of anger or bitterness we feel toward another, know if there is a blight in our thoughts, a failure we hold against ourselves, that keeps us from being at peace, being our best selves. Forgiveness contains a full circle of actions, for first, we must learn to have the courage to ask for forgiveness, be brave, as the Hindus say, and, then, we must learn to offer forgiveness to others and to ourselves.

First, we must learn to ask for forgiveness. We must admit our failings and shortcomings,
our indiscretions, our unintentionally cruel jokes, our slips of the tongue, even our evil thoughts,
our greed, our jealousy, our uncharitable opinions. And then we need to be humble, humble enough to admit to another that they matter too much to us not to ask for forgiveness, to admit that an action came from a long-ago grudge or that a vicious remark was the product of a less than wonderful day.

I don't do it enough, but I know that I ask my children, my friends and my family to forgive me all the time. The smaller things are relatively easy, as we all know, and the larger things can be huge. If you have asked for forgiveness, though, for small transgressions, when you make a really big mistake, it will be easier to admit to your wrongdoing and easier to approach the person who has already suffered your small faults. In this way, forgiveness does become a permanent attitude, as King said. This kind of forgiveness is at the heart of true friendship, an acknowledgment of imperfection on both sides and a willingness to ask forgiveness, grant forgiveness and go on. It's what creates humor and flexibility in our relationships with our parents and our children, too. Our mothers are always saying such and such and our fathers are always forgetting this or that; our buttons are pushed and we lash out, we may go from being a reasonable adult of 50 to a child of 14 in the course of about one second.

With our children, we admit our imperfections up front and ask for some flexibility in the harshness of their judgments against us – it is good for them, and often amusing, to occasionally see their parents admit to being human, and good for them to learn how to ask for forgiveness, modeled by their parents.

Asking for forgiveness, by the way, is not intended to be an easy way out or as a way to trivialize our true wrongs. If I am content to say I always forget everyone's birthdays, for example, and ask for forgiveness, year after year, then I'm certainly not truly contrite and I'm not learning anything about the deeper love and commitment that should come from remembering family birthdays and anniversaries. To ask for forgiveness, requires that I am truly contrite, sorry, and that I want to do better. Sometimes, we might develop a ritual to symbolize our sincerity and also to help us and our friend or family member truly clear the air. We might agree to exchange cards or gifts or we might agree to write words down on paper and burn them outside in a bucket, this is the purpose of our New Year's ritual in January, writing down things we want to leave behind, and then symbolically burning them away.

On the other side of the circle is the need for us to be forgiving to others and to ourselves. Sometimes the thought of forgiveness may seem soft or fuzzy to us, especially if we have been harmed in a cruel or intentional way. The odd thing about forgiveness, though, whether we are offering it or receiving it, is that it's not really about the other person or their actions – it's about ourselves. When we do something wrong, we are better, bigger people for admitting it, pure and simple. Genuine humbleness, not wallowing in guilt, giving into a negative picture of ourselves and the world, is a cleansing act for our hearts.
Similarly, when we forgive another, not necessarily condone nor forget, we release the bitterness and anger within ourselves that would cripple us in our own pursuit of a meaningful life.

A poignant example of this is told by Sister Helen Prejean in her book Dead Man Walking:
"Lloyd LeBlanc has told me that he would have been content with imprisonment for Patrick Sonnier. He went to the execution, he says, not for revenge, but hoping for an apology. Patrick Sonnier had not disappointed him. Before sitting in the electric chair he had said, ‘Mr. LeBlanc, I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done,' and Lloyd LeBlanc had nodded his head, signaling a forgiveness he had already given. He says that when he arrived with sheriff's deputies there in the cane field to identify his son, he had knelt by his boy and prayed the Our Father. And when he came to the words: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,' he had not halted or equivocated, and he said, ‘Whoever did this, I forgive them.' But he acknowledges that it is a struggle ... especially as he remembers David's birthday year by year and loses him all over again: David at twenty; ... David getting married, David standing by the door with his little ones clustered around his knees, ... Forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won," Sister Prejean concludes.

Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of a brutally murdered son, will never forget his son, nor what happened to him, he certainly doesn't condone it. But in the horror of the discovery, he knew he could forgive the person who did the action, if not the action itself. This kind of forgiveness is not light, soft or fluffy. It is a kind of forgiveness that requires a person to have a much bigger and deeper view of the world and life, and living, and dying, itself. It's also a matter of personal survival. Hatred and bitterness and anger in the face of life's more cruel and unfair, and even violent, actions will cripple us and destroy us from the inside out. It takes tremendous courage to decide to live in the face of such violence, to let the violence and hatred bitterness, despair and anger flood through you and out, leaving behind, a wiser and more compassionate person, yourself.

Most of us also must learn to forgive ourselves. In my pastoral counseling work, I try to remind people who are plagued by guilt or who are self-deprecating because of their failings to another, that such a deep feeling of remorse is a sign of their deep love for that other person and their deep love for themselves and what they wish to be. Moving toward the underlying love and away from debilitating guilt, it is my prayer that the love will wash away their bad inner feelings and emotions and give them a chance to love themselves again.

Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, we need something to symbolize this change – a letter we write to ourselves or to the other person, a token of peace or love that we offer to ourselves or to another from the depths of our sorrow and love, instead of our guilt. Exercising our feelings in a positive way, creating a personal ritual, is to learn to literally express our love and compassion, for ourselves and for others.

Some of you may have noticed that I have gone around the full circle of forgiveness without mentioning god's role, which would be paramount in most religious traditions and certainly during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur for the Jews. The rituals of most religious traditions, prayers, incense, candles, rosary beads, prayer shawls, center upon the person entering into a more spiritual place and at the very least asking for god's guidance. Some of you may have such a sense of the holy that you call upon within yourselves or without. Others of you do not. The holy for some of you resides in an idea of god or goddess, Adonai or nature, itself, or in life, itself, or in love, itself, or in the heart of compassion. For others of you, you may simply turn to the solid lessons, and rightness you have learned from living. Forgiveness doesn't require a belief in a mystical or spiritual force. For those who have a practice that allows for that possibility, there can be comfort in seeking inspiration and compassion from something beyond or from tapping an inner spiritual wellspring.

Learning to pray – an act of humbleness and sometimes contrition – also doesn't necessarily require an image of something beyond. Learning to pray is about taking ourselves out of the center
of existence and acknowledging larger circles beyond us, circles that include others, the earth, nature,
the deepest held values and perhaps the divine.

Whatever language works in your heart and mind, learning to forgive yourself and others and learning to ask for forgiveness are the first steps toward inner and outer peace, they are the first steps of compassion. And whether you believe in something like god, or not, the acts of true forgiveness are filled with something I can only call grace, a grace that can transform your heart or another's.

For we cannot have peace or truly experience genuine compassion, have transformed hearts, without the rituals of forgiveness. I wish you a blessed new year in this time of autumn, a year filled with new days and new possibilities – let these days of awe be for us a reminder that every day can give us a new start and brings with it new hope. AMEN