Sabbath Devotional :: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Peacemaking

I no longer feel overwhelmed with emotion when I think about a particular evening this past year, but I still remember the pain I felt. It was an unfamiliar feeling for me — one of deep betrayal and disappointment.

Cruel, untrue things had been said about me because of my work with Mormon Women for Ethical Government. And it stung because the attacks were so personal.

My closest friends comforted me, and I tried to shake it off because I had important work to do. But initially, I really struggled to put it in perspective. Through the power of prayer, I was very quickly able to soothe the stinging and to focus on my work, but that was only a temporary measure. I needed time and study to process and heal.

During that time, additional attacks came and added to the burden I carried, but I slowly was able to find some peace and wisdom. One of my primary motivations during this time has been my care for the members of MWEG. From your private messages, as well as your comments and posts on social media, I know that far too many of you have also been verbally bruised and battered during this difficult time.

I pray for you every day and ask the Lord what I can do to be a good and caring leader. This devotional represents my attempt to guide you through my journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking in hopes that it will bring some small insight that you can use on yours. I will first walk through the “why” of forgiveness, especially in a messy communal context. This will be followed by some examples of the sort of spiritually creative solutions that are required to live within a diverse community. Next is a short study of the role that conscience has played in my personal accounting for my words and actions. I conclude with the help of Elder Holland, re-focusing on the big picture of the atonement and peacemaking.

Why we forgive

As I began an intensive theological study of forgiveness over the past year, I quickly narrowed my focus to the messiness of reconciliation within a community of people who think and act differently and, therefore, are at constant risk of injuring each other. Doing so has required self-reflection as I examine the role I may have played in escalating discord.

Through focused and pleading prayers, I was able to very quickly gain some general insights about those who were spreading rumors about me. Without excusing their behavior, I clearly saw that their religious and political identities were wrapped up with each other, and they were therefore being threatened by my “divergent” words and actions in the political sphere.

Learning about how the personal experience of perceived vs. real threats are experienced in a similar way enabled me to find a measure of compassion. In addition, it made me reconsider the ways my words and actions may have felt unnecessarily threatening. I suspected there was some room for improvement on my part, and that gave me some hope.

It is important to note that while many others have written about forgiveness from the perspective of one who has been abused or oppressed, usually in the context of a power differential, this will not be my focus. But I have drawn from some of the lessons about boundaries that are contained in those experiences. For example, I recommend Deidre Nicole Green’s “Becoming Zion” in BYU Studies for some beautiful insights about forgiveness, love, and restorative justice. I credit the following thoughts of hers for influencing my own as I have considered the “why” of forgiveness:

“As an aspect of authentic communal life, particularly for a community striving to become like Zion, forgiveness allows a diverse group of imperfect people to remain cohesive.”

“Forgiveness renews the individual who has been wronged and makes her growth possible.”

“Forgiveness makes it possible to see others and ourselves not as static and trapped but as susceptible to renewal and worthy of love. . . . [I]t involves seeing ourselves and others as what we are: fallible human beings rather than idealized versions of ourselves that can exist only in our minds.”

“. . . forgiveness is how we ensure that violence, however it manifests in our own lives, does not become the master of us all.”

Perhaps the most convincing argument of all came as I evaluated the state of my own heart in the aftermath of the most stinging incident. I knew I must freely forgive if I wished to be forgiven myself (Matthew 6:14-15). But my heart felt hard for a long while as I considered the hurtful words of others. It became clear that my “unforgiving heart [had placed] a barrier between itself and God’s forgiveness” (Jennie Brimhall Knight, “Forgiveness Is like Mercy,” in “At the Pulpit”).

I needed to think of forgiveness as described by Hannah Arendt as “the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.” In other words, I need to be creative.

Spiritually creative solutions

While I have some past practice with conflict, forgiveness, and reconciliation, the experiences I describe here were stunning in their breadth, depth, and frequency! I could tell pretty quickly that I was going to need to dig deep and get creative if I was to emerge with wisdom. The potent discontent I felt meant I was running the risk of losing myself in resentment toward others. My usual habits and “tricks” were not working, which had the effect of turning me to prayer and study for new and fresh ideas.

My first step toward forgiveness was to just think about those who had offended me. In her book “See No Stranger” Valarie Kaur gave me a word for what I was doing: wondering. She teaches that “wonder is where love begins” and that “we can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say — as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.” I spent some time just asking myself questions about their lives and wondering about their hopes, fears, and experiences.

Spending too much time thinking about those who hurt us can be counterproductive if it constantly brings to mind feelings of betrayal. As this happened, I realized I needed to very specifically petition the Lord to help remove some of my resentment. I prayed for opportunities to feel love and care for my “opponents” and to be able to feel, at the very least, neutrality when their names or faces came to mind. Over time, this prayer was answered, and the barrier of bitterness was slowly removed. I can’t say I instantly felt love, but at least I no longer felt anger.

During this process of wondering about and praying for individuals by name, it became clear to me that I needed to be even more imaginative about the next step — that is, to forgive “from [my heart]” as the scriptures require (Matthew 18:35). I took the opportunity to customize my reaction to the individual situation. Here are some of the actions I took, as inspired and depending upon the circumstances:

Attempt at reconciliation. In one case, I was the recipient of a particularly hurtful personal attack. When I responded privately to indicate the way it made me feel, she insisted that was not how she meant it but did not offer what I felt was a sincere apology. Skeptically, I prayed about the next step, after which I felt strongly that my job in that case was to treat her as though her apology was sincere and to reach out in love. I did so and was able to feel a large measure of peace afterward.

Strong boundaries. There were at least two cases where I felt clearly that I needed to stay completely away from the individuals involved. Relieving myself from the burden of direct (and likely impossible) reconciliation at this time has been the right approach.

In each case and as a general exercise, I have also prayed to know if I may have offended or been careless with my words in ways that hurt others. Specifically, as MWEG leaders were working on our pledge not to weaponize or leverage faith for political gain, I had an opportunity to evaluate the times I may have veered into dangerous territory as I spoke or wrote about my faith and politics. As I pondered the very real pain I felt when others weaponized my faith against me, I felt a renewed commitment to watch myself with vigilance to avoid doing the same.

In addition, I felt inspired to carefully consider the ways in which I might have tried to demonstrate intellectual superiority over others, thereby weaponizing my intelligence and education and causing them to feel defensive and inferior. Those gentle corrections were a much-needed outgrowth of my sincere attempts to think creatively about forgiveness and reconciliation.

Avoid “quieting” conscience

“The pull will always be to quiet the conscience because you can’t afford what you fear it may ask of you. In that direction lies disaster. The problem is not that you will find yourself moving in ways you never wanted to move—but, rather, that you will not notice at all how you are moving. You will not even see that you are chasing the ‘Inner Ring’ of whatever crowd to which you want to belong, to whatever goal you want to achieve, until only after it is too late do you see that you no longer recognize yourself.” — Russell Moore

My efforts at a humble assessment of my own follies were accompanied by an evaluation of my conscience. Opposition, especially when great in frequency and strong in intensity, gives us a chance to evaluate whether the thing we are standing for is worth it. In my case, over and over again, I have asked the Lord this question and received a strong witness that I needed to carry on in spite of the challenges. More often than not, this confirmation came in the form of something written by an MWEG member. Your expressions of relief and joy at having found us, your beautiful op-eds, and your eloquent and kind efforts to be peacemakers on social media are inspiring and they truly strengthen my resolve to carry on.

You inspire me to do an honest accounting of my role as an executive director who wishes to lead with courage and sincerity. If we, as leaders, ask you to speak the truth when it is hard, to make peace when your instincts tell you to contend, and to utilize your faith as a creative, rather than destructive force, then we must be willing to do the same.

Peacemaking

“A clear conscience does not lead, as we imagine, to inner tranquility, at least not right away. A clear conscience is a conscience that is alive — and thus is vibrating with prompts to repentance and redirection and pleas for mercy. But, in the long run, a clear conscience leads to peace — because it casts out fear. If your ambition is your standard, you are enslaved to whatever can take away your ambition. If your belonging in your tribe is your standard, then you will be terrified at any threat of exile. But if your mission lines up with your conscience and your conscience lines up with the gospel, then you have no need to live in paralyzing fear, and you also have no need to live in defense of yourself.” — Russell Moore

We talk about peacemaking all the time in our MWEG spaces. It is at the root of everything we do. And efforts at love and reconciliation flow from inner peace. This can be a challenge for Latter-day Saint women, in particular, and I am no exception. So many of us mistake peace for general contentment or the absence of any tension or conflict. So we struggle to find inner peace when something — or sometimes ALL the things — is not quite right. Through the experiences I described here, I have learned that even in the presence of sorrow and unresolved conflict, I can still access peace. My Savior has made it possible.

And so I join with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in testifying “of the tranquility to the soul that reconciliation with God and each other will bring if we are meek and courageous enough to pursue it. . . . [F]riends, in our shared ministry of reconciliation, I ask us to be peacemakers — to love peace, to seek peace, to create peace, to cherish peace. I make that appeal in the name of the Prince of Peace, who knows everything about being ‘wounded in the house of [His] friends’ but who still found the strength to forgive and forget — and to heal — and be happy.”

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Emma Petty Addams is the executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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