Forgiving Your Parents Though You Have Considered All the Facts

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

There is a podcast episode with Alain de Botton called Be as Weird As You Are. Not surprisingly, a great deal of it is about being as weird as you are, but for me the most memorable part is actually toward the end, where he talks about forgiving your parents. Here is a quote from that segment:

I know we’re supposed to forgive, and yet I think a lot of us know behaviour in a parent that’s just endemically s**tty. I think it’s too Hollywood to go, I love you anyway.

No, it was awful, and there’s no excuse.

And then there’s the question of, what do we do with that? It requires a dose of salutary pessimism, of going, they were my parent. I carry it as a wound forever that that parent who should have been there for me, did not act as they should. I can’t reinvent my notion of children and parents. I can’t pretend that something was that wasn’t, or wasn’t that was. I’ve got to stay loyal to my feeling that something went really badly wrong here.

There is a way to say I refuse to keep looking at that. I’ve seen it, I’ve wept, I’ve done the work, now on to something else, because life is short. There are other people who do not have this issue, I let it go. There is a certain dignity in saying, ‘There is something awful here.’ I just park it, I just move away.

I don’t forgive it. 

I understand it, I’m not naive about it, but I’m going elsewhere, thank you very much. To protect myself. Everybody reaches that stage in adulthood, where you think about the other person, okay you had the power, you had the ability to change, to not pass it on. Huge compassion for what you went through, but did you really need to do that thing, and then did you really need to, over many years, not say sorry, not properly acknowledge it, not properly go into it? Was that, is that, forgivable?

I find de Botton’s words thought-provoking, but I’m not sure what to make of them. On one hand, I agree with his main insight: don’t sugarcoat your parents’ bad behaviour. If parents dote on your other siblings but ignore you, for instance–it’s okay to call that out. It’s okay to say they are not acting in a loving way, full stop. Without trying to cover for them. Perhaps your parents have consistently mocked, belittled, or guilt-tripped you. Perhaps even now, well into adulthood, the few interactions they have with you continue in that vein, without any discernible effort to connect with you.

If so, de Botton is right: it’s okay to call a spade a spade. They’re being unloving. They’re not being good parents. In fact, they’re not being parents at all, they’re being childish. You’ve been abandoned. You’ve been deprived of something every child should have, a loving parent.

It is brutal to experience a sense of abandonment, a sense of being disowned. For Esther and me, our absence of loving parents was exacerbated a few years ago when we left our traditional Anabaptist community. Although sincere and earnest, the ‘plain people’ can sometimes display cultish behaviours, especially toward those who leave. Scholars might say there is something of a persecuted-persecutor complex on display here. Yesterday’s persecuted become today’s persecutor. All four of our parents are still alive, but there is something of a living death in our relationship between each other. Maybe we haven’t done our part in connecting with them, although it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying.

De Botton would say, get on with life. They’re a lost cause. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. For one thing, a commitment to the Christian faith requires forgiveness. I don’t think de Botton has that commitment, so that colours his perspective. Although some days it’s a bit shaky, I have that commitment. That throws a real wrench in the gears, if I’m honest. A spanner in the works. I pray every day, in the Our Father, for God to forgive our sins as we forgive others. Unless I forgive others, says Jesus, God cannot forgive me. It’s not that God won’t forgive me if I don’t forgive others, it’s that God can’t forgive me. Forgive, it says in the Gospels, not seven times but seventy times seven.

Yet forgiveness is tricky business. Forgiveness is a capacious word. It has many aspects. It’s not rolling over and playing nice. It’s not minimizing the awful things people are capable of. Otherwise, we take away character development. We remove the hero’s journey from the human story. We let people off the hook. We become relativistic and cynical about human nature, about human potential.

Ah, yes, our parents treat us badly, but you should have seen the way their parents treated them.

It could have been far worse. Some people have had it far worse!

At least they stayed together all these years.

Such sugarcoating is well-intentioned. We want to go easy on our parents. My theory is that, subconsciously, we hope our kids will also excuse our mistakes, of which there no doubt are an abundance. With what measure you mete, it shall be measured unto you.

There is some wisdom in that. The failures of our parents are indeed multi-generational. They commit them because their parents committed them. Their parents were also cruel to them; and cruel in the same specific ways. Furthermore, why should we think we are immune to inheriting those same dysfunctions? If these traits are multigenerational, it is right and good to show a bit of humility in preparation for when our kids develop their own ability to judge us.

Which brings us to a paradox.

This is the first part of the paradox. When our parents are unloving, we must be clear in calling them out. We have to. If we call unloving behaviour loving, we risk turning real, Christian love into a sick parody of what it actually is. The love of Christ is, and always will be: sacrificial, impartial, unconditional, tender, seeking connection, vulnerable, emphasizing relationship over manmade rules.

De Botton is right, it’s important to say it when our parents don’t show love toward us. Whether they have deliberately resisted God’s invitation to love, or whether they genuinely have never seen a pathway to love, one painful truth remains: they have not wrapped us, their children, up in their arms and loved us without reservation. And that is an unspeakable loss.

But there is a second part of the paradox. We, who now are parents ourselves, are caught up in the same web as they are, as well as their parents and grandparents before them. The same destructive tendencies that plagued our parents will also plague us, are already plaguing us. So to return to de Botton’s word, we need compassion. Amid our stark and honest evaluation, we also need compassion. But it cannot be a cheap compassion. True forgiveness is never flippant. We forgive, not as we ignore the facts, but after we have considered the facts, all the facts.

If we cannot name intergenerational sin, we will never break free of its spell. If we cannot show compassion toward our ancestors, we will never have the clarity and sanity to make improvements in our own parenting.

* The title for this post is drawn from the recently-deceased poet Wendell Berry’s poem, Manifesto–The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

On Attending to All Controllable Variables

Gideon Yutzy1 Comment

The people we call authentic can identify their weaknesses, can talk about them in an honest way. That’s good, on one hand. In another way, the fact that humans are unpredictable and flawed doesn’t mean we cannot strive for character. Growing in character is, after all, going to benefit us more than anyone else, though the people who have to live with us probably aren’t going to complain too loudly.

When we speak about authentic politicians, we often mean they are authentic to their baser impulses, such as fearmongering and name-calling. But couldn’t a politician also be authentic to their nobler impulses? Why are we more likely to call such a person boring, elitist, and, well, inauthentic.

At heart, nobody likes to live in constant dysfunction. At the end of the day, feeling dysregulated isn’t all that sexy. Going off on reactive outbursts might feel good in the moment, but what then? Who’s left to pick up the pieces? So I tweeted something off my chest – how am I now going to replenish myself with the nutrients that produce stable, flourishing humans?

In our inalienable right to pursue happiness, perhaps we also ought to look after the basics sometimes. Sleep. Exercise. Water. Regarding water, I remember a quote from a comedian: “Sometimes I panic and think I need a new religion, a new profession, and a new spouse, but then I realize I just need a tall glass of water.” Also, there was a stodgy preacher from the Midwest who once stumbled upon an excellent point. He said something along the lines of, “You can be as spiritual as you wish, but if you aren’t getting your rest and a proper diet, you aren’t going to be a good Christian.” In the many sermons I heard from him, that’s the only thing I remember.

We replace stress with rest, so we can speak gently to our spouse and children. We plan our day so we can have a robust medley of productivity and relaxation. We make the effort to stay in touch with friends and family even if we feel misunderstood or slighted by them. These are viable ways to live, and I’m just going to say it, authentic ways to live. Yes, being human means making mistakes, and members of our race are hard to live with. We will inexorably do things we regret, things those around us abhor. But there is nothing inauthentic about learning to space out our failings. There is nothing inauthentic about being 0.01 percent less of an asshole this month than last month.

There is nothing inauthentic about attending to the variables within our control.

How to Stay in the Same Faith as JD Vance

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

With much of the Christianity you find online, it’s good to steer as wide a berth as possible. That includes the brand of Christianity associated with the current Republican Party in America.

Vice President JD Vance recently wrote a book about his journey into the Catholic Church. I’ve watched a few bits and pieces of his promotional interviews. Now, I know Christians ought to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but somehow it’s hard to see this conversion as genuine. Vance insists that Mr. Quiet-Piggy Trump really is a virtuous man after all, despite calling him Hitler a few short years ago. And that rounding up vulnerable people Gestapo-style as if they’re cattle is simply ‘enforcing the law.’ Vance’s entrance into the church was convoluted at best and politically motivated at worst, and the only miracle I see is how he has managed to scrupulously avoid any real contact with the Christian faith.

But hey, we must remember the parable of the wheat and tares, and the old truism, ‘Christians don’t get to choose family.’ Let us go outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured, amirite. But I could almost develop an ulcer if I think too long about how that slippery, smiling man seems to drag Christ’s name through the mud at every turn, how he weaponises the Christian faith to create divisiveness, and not the noble divisiveness that comes from a politics that serves ‘the least of these,’ but rather the kind that furthers his shallow political ambitions and agenda.

And yet I know it’s easier to criticize than build. If I reject the Christianity associated with the current religious right–and I do reject it, roundly–then what form of Christianity do I espouse? I remember Tony Campolo’s story about eating at a greasy spoon restaurant in Hawaii during one of his many speaking tours. Unbeknownst to him, the little diner was located at the entrance of a brothel. A prostitute was talking to her colleague (if that is the correct word) and telling her it was her 40th birthday. Impulsively, Tony Campolo planned an impromptu party and had a cake brought in. The burly chef, seeing Tony with the cake, along with ‘wall-to-wall prostitutes,’ wiped his hands on his dirty apron and gave him a look of utter disbelief. ‘I thought you were a preacher!’ he said to Tony. ‘Say, just what kind of church do you belong to?’

Tony said that in one split second, the Holy Spirit gave him the exact right response: ‘I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for sex workers at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ I’m not sure if JD Vance would be throwing birthday parties for the down-and-out, probably not the Haitians in Ohio anyway. Unless the Holy Spirit has been working on him more than what is public knowledge, and that certainly is not outside the realm of possibility given the mischief the Spirit can get up to.

I also remember the great Richard Foster’s seven streams of Christianity. I don’t remember all of them but I think they included missional, sacramental, contemplative and doctrinal. Maybe, given the alarming rate at which the broader church is fragmenting, it’s worth considering which stream of the church we are going to draw from for our sustenance. To me, the stream of Christianity that challenges and questions has always seemed the purest, though I am also aware of how important it is to stay grounded in the faith. You have to know what the basics are before you become too provocative and experimental. Just as all runners need rest and healthy food, so all Christians have to commit to the basics. You have to say your prayers, do penance, recite the creed, receive the eucharist.

Of course. I grant all that. But I also think there is a viable stream within Christianity that sometimes appears divergent to those in some of the other streams. I honestly did not set out to join that stream, but it is, shockingly often, the one I feel most at home in. I have never been able to feel at home in a certain brand of Christianity. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than it’s a little campy and they like to ‘own the atheists’ and toss shibboleths around in order to suss out who else is in their tribe. It’s always felt alien to me. So it seems good and right to put into writing where my allegiance lies: to Christianity, yes, but more specifically the stream that flows turbulent at times. Why should a Trump sycophant get to determine what the faith looks like? If JD Vance can be so bold about his understanding of the Christian faith, perhaps the rest of us can, too. Perhaps it’s our only real hope of staying Christian.