Forgiveness

I don't go to the movies very often, but I have seen two movies in the theatre recently. I am certain the proximity of these movie-going experiences led me to notice an insight I am about to share (lucky you).

Forgiveness is not something we often talk about in normal cultural circles, and it can be hard to think about forgiveness outside of a religion connotation. But I wonder if thinking about forgiveness as something particularly human and earthy, rather than something spiritual and celestial, might not be a way of understanding what is indeed divine about forgiveness.

In the movie version of Foer's novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a scene near the end of the move highlights one aspect of forgiveness. Oskar has been carrying around this incredible guilt about not picking up the phone when his dad called from the towers - what ended up being, in fact, his dad's last words. The weight of this guilt gave Oskar "heavy boots" and drove him to an obsessive search for a key that he felt sure his father had meant for him to find and would unlock a wonderful secret about his father.

In an anticlimactic moment, for Oskar and for moviegoers, we discover the key belongs to a stranger. But what happens when Oskar finds this stranger becomes a sort of "key" in itself. Oskar had told no one, not his grandmother, not his grandfather, not his mother, no one, about the betrayal of his father through his inability to pick up the phone. For some reason, Oskar decides to tell this complete stranger, and at the end of his story he begs the man to forgive him.

How odd, I thought, to ask forgiveness from someone who had nothing to do with what you felt you needed forgiving for. The stranger resisted telling Oskar "I forgive you," until Oskar's tears and adamant insistence finally led him to say "I forgive you." The relief Oskar immediately felt was telling - it pointed to some deep human need to have the words "I forgive you" verbally pronounced over us.

Second movie: The movie version of Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. Also near the end of this flick in a rather comical mock confession-box moment on the campus of Reed College where Don, as the new "pope" for a year, prepares to hear his first set of confessions. He reverses the role of confessor and confessee and asks his predecessor to forgive him for representing, in that moment, the priests who had forever damaged his friend when he was younger. Again we have resistance to saying "I forgive you," but this time because the person saying "I forgive you" was having to let go of a great deal of hurt and anger. But like Oskar, the relief felt by saying the words "I forgive you" was quite evident.

I came away from these two movies thinking about the power of both saying and hearing the words "I forgive you," and then wondering why this powerful phrase does not figure into our cultural lexicon in a more substantial way. I am not done pondering this yet, but I feel strongly that thinking about forgiveness as a mark of our humanity, as a central human need, is an important concept that we've lost somewhere along the way.