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