To understand is to forgive, even oneself -- Alexander Chase

Necessary background: My life no longer clips by at the frantic pace described in my last post -- thank god! I'm tutoring an interesting assortment of kids instead.

"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my neighbor sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus said to him, I say not to you, until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."

No, I have not suddenly become religious (although I would like to read more of the bible -- there're some interesting stories in there). One of my students is, and this is what he has taped to his computer -- what he looks at every day.

It strikes me as a) impressive -- and a little sad -- that a middle school student chooses/ needs to remind himself to forgive others for trespassing against him and b) incredibly daunting a mandate.

I have a lot of patience for wounds -- I certainly won't toss you out for a first, second, or third offence -- but can I actually forgive? (please forgive that rhetorical question -- that was totally borderline Carrie from Sex in the City, a sin you can add to the tally detailed below).

I have a history of a seemingly out of character line-in-the-sand tipping point for intolerance.

In fourth grade, I made a girl in my class cry. She had complained over and over about how she wished she were popular. I told her that if being friends with us (the nerd herd) was so bad, she shouldn't be friends with us anymore. I may have said other not so nice things -- I honestly don't remember, but I do know I got in trouble. I sat across from her in the school counselor's office and refused to apologize even while she cried in front of me.

That is not a story I'm proud of. It would be easy enough to cast myself as an early crusader against conformity and the social status positioning and posturing that most children endure. But it actually kind of frightens me that I could be so hardened and unfeeling to someone vulnerable, as most fourth graders -- especially those foolish enough to say out loud that they wish they were popular (this will pretty much guarantee that they won't be) -- probably are.

Here is another story I'm not proud of: When I returned to NY as a 10th grader after a year in England, I set about changing myself. While I never aimed at Mean Girls style popularity -- tiny sweater wearing, field hockey playing, lip gloss wearing -- I tried to shed my old nerd-happy skin. I threw myself into cigarette smoking because I knew I couldn't do anything actually bad (I mean, come on -- I had read Go Ask Alice), but I didn't want to be quite so squeaky clean (and trust me, I am still ruing that dumb call -- I'm currently sucking on battery-operated fakes). In two years, I went from watching Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and playdates pretending we were Jewish immigrants in the lower east side circa 1900 (hey, it was Scarsdale) to rolling my eyes watching other people drink and smoking furiously -- i.e. from an actually cool kid to a terribly bored one.

That's not the story. The story is, that when I first came back after my year overseas, my former playmate sat behind me in Spanish class and told me how happy she was were in class together. I leaned over to pick up a dropped pencil and pretended I didn't hear her. She never sat near me again, and I don't think we ever spoke after that day.

I have been feeling guilty about that moment in my life for more than fifteen years. Of all the selfish, shitty things I've done, that one burns pretty brightly in the catalog of things that I think should send me downstairs at the end, if I believed in stairs at the end.

I could say, like Lear (my fave Shakespearean ranter) that "I am a man more sinned against than sinning." But either way, whether it is myself I am trying to forgive, or my dad, or the friend I haven't spoken to in seven years for sleeping with my ex (actually, for trying to tell me she had done me a favor for showing me what a scumbag he was) -- no matter whom I'm working on forgiving, the emphasis must be on the progressive tense of that verb.

Catholics have forgiveness built right in to their world view. Although much has been made of Catholic guilt -- after all, you have to feel guilty before you can be forgiven -- the fact remains that absolution is a possibility for those who believe that Jesus has taken on the burden of their sins and lifted it from them (solve: to loosen). I can't even imagine how good it would feel to have some absolute authority tell me my repentance was enough -- and to show me how to truly release that sense of "sinned against" that stops forgiving from becoming forgiven.

Unfortunately for my (somewhat needy) spiritual angst, I do not believe in Jesus, or God, or any other moral absolute. Is this my punishment for moral relativism? If nothing can be completely wrong, and no one completely evil (or good), we are left to live with our discomfort over what we have done and what we have yet to forgive in others? Yikes.

At least Hillary can joke about it: “In the bible it says you have to forgive seventy times seven. I want you all to know, I'm keeping a chart" - Hillary Clinton