Triple Takes on Curricular Worlds

Chapter SIX. Forgiveness

INTRODUCTION Delese FORGIVE: TO GIVE UP resentment for an offender, to pardon. To give up resentment? Surely this is one of the most difficult shifts in thinking and feeling humans can make when they have been aggrieved, scorned, or hurt. And to forgive with real sincerity? Even rarer. Still, there is the often-quoted other half of forgiveness, if we are to believe Shakespeare’s admonition in Lear: “Pray you now, forget and forgive.” But then, he could not have been so naive about human nature as to suggest a kind of erasure from one’s memory whatever word or action was injurious? Perhaps he merely meant to get on with it, over it, for as Martha writes, “As long as I am unforgiving, my energy for living is redirected toward a single characteristic or past action, event, or circumstance .” She looks to the work and example of Hannah Arendt to make meaning of forgiveness and its central role in creating a more humane context for life. This includes forgiveness at the most personal level—forgiving ourselves , and at the most global—forgiving the world “as it has been passed on to us.” And as we forgive ourselves and others, we ask for forgiveness from others, recognizing the always already brokenness of the world and those humans who inhabit it. “I boldly invite [students] to forgive me and promise to forgive in return,” she writes. “Will we fail? Yes. That’s the point.” Oh, we do not speak of such things in medicine. Doctors do not speak of it, and when I’m a patient I do not want to hear it, particularly my doctor’s failures or the prediction that he will most certainly have more. But as I note in my piece, mistakes occur all the time in medicine; they occur because doctors 107 SIX Forgiveness are fully human and all humans make mistakes. Unfortunately, U.S. culture places unattainable standards of perfection on its doctors, as David Hilfiker writes, because we always look to shamans for magical healing, we always look to priests, the medical priesthood. There’s a tendency to look at healing as a divine art, so there’s something within people that expects divinity from our healers. But the profession has also encouraged them. (1989, p. 96) And because of these expectations—not to mention the very real threat of litigation —when doctors do make mistakes, there are few forums for revealing and discussing mistakes, and almost no tradition of apologizing and seeking forgiveness from patients and their families. Moreover, nothing in their training prepares them for the sorrow and guilt they face in the aftermath of mistakes . I wonder how, where, and under what circumstances might forgiveness become a healing rite in medicine? Mary’s take on forgiveness blends the disparate moments forgiveness is sought and granted—in the confessional, between mother and son, and in the seemingly unworthy characters drawn by Flannery O’Connor—and how the forgiven “can begin again, afresh, in a grace state that forgiveness bestows.” That is, as Mary points out through O’Connor’s stories, “forgiveness is not judgment; it is grace,” itself a part of God’s mystery that O’Connor says “cannot be accounted for by any human formula” (1969, p. 153). Mary finds some of O’Connor’s most unworthy characters—a smug, Bible-thumping racist, a condescending son, a hackneyed old woman who causes her family’s murder —and shows how each is selected for grace, each “redeemable because they are able, at the end, to find their better beginnings.” Perplexed, as always with these thoughts, I am reminded of Annie Dillard’s thoughts on such mysteries which, “from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?” (1990, p. 73). FORGIVENESS: BEGINNING AGAIN Martha Forgiveness is the Key to Action and Freedom. —Hannah Arendt Hannah had it right, I think. And she should know. Plenty of opportunity to practice forgiveness during her lifetime. Persecution in her homeland— internment in a French concentration camp—married to one man and in a long-term, if unclear, love relationship with another, whose political views TRIPLE TAKES ON CURRICULAR WORLDS 108 bound them together but often diametrically opposed her own (Kristeva, 2001). Yet her life was filled with action and, it seems, the freedom to think and to dream. She writes of action, freedom, and...