Women and Forgiveness

Since it is Easter, columnist Minette Marrin is thinking about forgiveness. And, she admits, she doesn’t get the point. After reviewing the news of the past week, including the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, she writes:

I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.

There is, indeed, a good reason to wonder about the point of forgiveness in the larger social and political context. Evil is evil and must be fought to the death. But I think that the point of forgiveness manifests itself in the small world of the family, in particular in the face-to-face world of the woman and her personal relationships.

Let us try to imagine why forgiveness might be, not divine, but merely practical, and especially practical in a woman’s life and in her family relationships.

In the first place we have the evidence of Marvin Olasky and his 1990 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. He rehearses the system of rehabilitation used by 19th century charity workers in getting people out of the gutter and on to their feet. The first item in the A-B-C-D-E-F-G system as A for Affiliation. Upon meeting a needy person the charity worker would first try to find out about family members or friends upon whom their victim had a claim of support or affection. In other words, the workers were trying to bring together a family that had broken apart. It is likely that success would require forgiveness between the estranged family members.

Secondly, there is the evidence of the Asia Times columnist Spengler. Only half in jest, he laughs at the idea of women priests. “A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never forgive anything,” or indeed forget anything. While it is true that: “Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them,” the same does not apply to relations between women. Can women really afford not to forgive other women? Forgive helps women repair a damaged network of care.

The other reason is surfaced by James M. Ault, Jr. in his sociological study of a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spirit and Flesh. Everyone knows that fundamentalist churches are hopelessly patriarchal. Women are second-class citizens. Well, not quite.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

How might this destructive power have been mitigated? By forgiveness.

I propose that while the destructive conflict of the men’s feud is mitigated by law, women’s conflict is mitigated by forgiveness.

Is it perhaps significant that the major force in the early Christian church was well-to-do Roman women? It might explain why, in Marrin’s words: “Forgiveness is central to Christianity.”