Midweek: The Work of Forgiveness

This week's reprint is from Patricia Raybon's wonderful book, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness. Growing up in the birth pangs of the civil rights movement, Raybon experienced racism and hate toward her and within her. In a chapter called Finding, she talks about first realizing her need to forgive, to forgive her father for teaching her the necessity of being "extra" --extra good and extra clean --so she could make her mark in a world antithetical to blacks and black culture, to forgive herself for being so angry she had failed him, to forgive white people for being white and all that came with it, and to wrestle with why God had allowed racial hatred in the first place. She quotes C.S. Lewis and says she was ready to do "the hard work of forgiveness."

But I still felt incomplete in this work, experimental and flawed. Like a pretender. I was mucking around in something true and golden, but my efforts felt insecure and inconsistent. And small.

God help me.

I prayed the prayer that started this sojourn.

God help me.

I liked the sound of this prayer. It reminded me that something bigger than me would enlighten this process.

God help me.

A beautiful prayer. I prayed it daily. Upon awakening. At the end of long days. Maybe even as I slept. I breathed this prayer, entreating divine powers. Blatantly, I just asked. God help me to find this way, to walk this path. Even when it's hard. God help me. Even when it's vicious. When the hate mail comes... and when the cold, suspicious stares follow me down American streets and into American stores and across American highways. Help me to understand other people's suspicions, not to mention my own. Help me to speak compassion to the malevolent, grant understanding to the hateful, give charity to the spiteful, healing to the hurting, love to the loveless.

God help me.

To understand my father's pain and fears. To see that he and his generation, white and black alike, were working with a flawed script, but it was the only one they knew. And my generation, black and white alike, with our flawed reactions, have taken those cues and done our own harm --as citizens, as sons and daughters, even as parents ourselves....

God help me.

I can't do this thing without You, Lord.

There's too much history and reason and precedence for hanging onto the past --for clinging to the sweetness of hurt.... Help me first... to 'name' my injury --to point at racial assault and call it all the awful thing it is: a murder of the soul, an attack on hope and faith. A spiritual rip-off.

Help me to see, as others have, that forgiveness isn't a contract with somebody. It doesn't have to take both parties. It only takes my willingness. God help me to be willing to forgive.

Help me, indeed, to honor the belief... that wounds and pain actually have a sacred quality --and that the purpose of wounds, in turn, is to call forth a sacred gift or sacred calling... recognizing any good that may trickle out of the pain you are enduring.

God help me.

~ Patricia Raybon