Wednesday is Veteran’s Day, the day we honor all those who have fought for our country. Veteran’s Day was established on Armistice Day, the day the Great War ended, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Now we are engaged in two dreary and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars in which American deaths have been relatively low. Still, we feel those deaths keenly because they have been so unnecessary. Regardless of the conflict, we honor our veterans, no matter what war they served in, or whether they served with enthusiasm or out of necessity. We honor the commitment our soldiers, marines, sailors and airborne make to their country. Many of you have family members in the armed services, some of whom are overseas, or have been, or will be. I offer them my thanks for their service. Their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way to serve their country protects me and makes possible the arts of peace. Whether their wars are just or not, their service is noble.
Whatever reason women and men have for signing on to defend their country, however, they never expect to be attacked by one of their own. On Thursday afternoon, at 1:30 p.m. Central Time, an army psychiatrist allegedly opened fire on his Army base in Fort Hood, Texas. He killed twelve soldiers and one civilian, and thirty other people were wounded in the ensuing fight. The soldiers were being prepared to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan when they were shot; the psychiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, had recently learned that he, too, was to deploy to Afghanistan. The shootings represent the worst incident of soldier-on-soldier violence in United States history. Major Hasan was wounded himself in the incident, and is recovering in an army hospital under guard. Now, the country is mourning with the families of those killed and praying for the fast and full recovery of those injured. In time, however, when Major Hasan recovers and must answer for his crime, the much harder work of understanding and reconciliation must begin.
Not that the victims, their families, or we as a country should excuse what Hasan did. His actions were horrific. His cousin Nader, speaking for the family, expressed sorrow and shock at his kinsman’s actions. The men and women killed and hurt in Hasan’s attack were serving their country faithfully for all the usual reasons: because they are patriots, because they are working for a better life for themselves and their families, because they believe that America can make a difference in the world. Hasan himself was the son of immigrants and a twelve-year veteran of the army. The men and women Hasan killed knew that they might be asked to give their lives in battle, in service to the needs of their country. They never expected to lose their lives on the seeming safety of their base in Texas.
In his role as a psychiatrist, Hasan heard soldier after soldier describe the horrors of war as he treated them for post traumatic stress disorder. He treated soldiers maimed by war. He was taunted for his Islamic faith. He begged to get out of his deployment. He asked a lawyer whether, if he paid back the army for the cost of his medical training, he could quit. The answer was no. Someone with his name, in the days before the shootings at Fort Hood, had posted opinions on the writing website Scribd which were sympathetic to suicide bombers overseas. There is no way of knowing, at this early stage, whether that writer Nidal Hasan was also Major Nidal Hasan. None of these traits explain or excuse what Major Hasan did. He is not the only soldier to want to avoid deployment, to want to escape the army before his time is up, or to be ridiculed by his fellow soldiers. That servicemen and -women serve their country faithfully and well despite these obstacles is why we honor them and their service. What Hasan did is horrific and inexcusable.
It is inexcusable, but is it unforgivable? What does it mean to forgive someone of their wrongs? I think there are three kinds of forgiveness, each harder than the one that comes before. Forgiveness is a spiritual posture in the world, a commitment we make to ourselves and to that which we hold most sacred. It is never a single act but a way of being and responding to those around us. The first kind of forgiveness is to forgive slights and insults as they happen, barely even hearing the wrong before we have forgiven it. This is the kind of forgiveness John Ames espouses in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. His wife is decades younger than he is and he met her when she was a new member of the church where he served as minister (although perhaps that was less scandalous in 1950s Iowa than it would be today). “If a few people did make remarks [about my marriage],” Ames thinks, “I just forgave them so fast it was as if I never heard them, because it was wrong of them to judge and I knew it and they should have known it (230).” Ames–who struggles with forgiveness for the entire novel, which is itself, along with its sequel Home, is an extended meditation on forgiveness–tries to encounter the world with the posture of forgiveness. His goal is to pardon before he even hears. He tries to assume the best of other people. You can imagine his thoughts when people said something slightly insulting of his wife. “They don’t really mean that,” he might think, or, “They’ve already realized that wasn’t a kind thing to say.” Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of forgiveness. It imposes a barrier between the two people, a barrier that almost seems like superiority. Ames does not tell these unnamed “people” that their words have hurt him; he just shrugs off their petty insults and goes on his way. A moment for authentic human sharing was lost in the name of cordial relations. Good for society, but not the basis of a close relationship.
Not that this kind of preemptive forgiveness is not a part of our closest relationships. Healthy marriages, after all, are built on the ability to let your spouse’s many deficiencies go unremarked. But close relationships sometimes require a more searching kind of forgiveness. In our ongoing relationships with family and friends, we use a second kind of forgiveness: really getting over the hurt involved. Time sometimes does this for us. I had a good friend in college, my roommate for one year, who stayed in New York to live with her fiance after graduation. Of all my friends in college, she was one with whom I seemed to have least in common. She was African American and from a poor family in Texas; I was white and middle-class. Her room was always tidy; mine has ever been cluttered. She wrote and rewrote her stories and essays for class, crafting them to perfection. I wrote often at the last minute, hoping my thoughts would coalesce coherently on the page. We hardly knew each other before being thrown together as roommates in our second year, but we became fast friends. We discovered passions we held in common, especially for philosophy. We would go into each other’s bedrooms to discuss Plato and Locke at all hours of the day and night. We both loved reading good books. I visited her and her fiance in New York after graduation. Then, a few times after that, I came down to New York but stayed with a different friend. I tried to make plans with my roommate, but on two different occasions she wasn’t there at the agreed time and place. After the second time, as I made my way back to Boston, I decided I’d had enough. Let her get in touch with me for once, I thought.
She never did. We haven’t seen each other in about ten years, but I still remember our friendship with love and regret. Now, all these years out, I wonder if the fault lay completely with her. Was I was attentive a friend as I could have been? Didn’t I tease her fiance a little too pointedly on some occasions? All friendships are a two-way street, after all; what could I have done differently? And were two misunderstandings about getting together worth the loss of a cherished friendship? I have forgiven my friend and wish we could know each other again. We are now somewhat past the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur, when observant Jews think of all those whom they have wronged over the past year and seek their forgiveness. But thinking on this topic has led me back to that Yom Kippur practice, and I have written to my friend to see if we can reconnect. I would like to put aside the awkwardness of our lapsed friendship and try again. This kind of forgiveness involves forgiving myself as well as the other person. Part of it is realizing that I, too, bear responsibility for my hurt feelings–that, in fact, there may be hurt feelings on both sides. In my experience, awkwardness and wondering if I’m doing the right thing is part of what forgiveness of ourselves and others takes. The relationship requires that we reach out to one another despite all the reasons we can think of not to.
One writer has said that in forgiveness we must give up our right to righteous anger. Sometimes we are truly righteous in our anger. The families of those soldiers killed last week must feel anger burning through them, fighting for room inside them with their grief and disbelief. As a country, we feel this anger, that one man could wreak so much destruction on his fellow soldiers. Liberalism can sometimes get itself tied in moral knots trying to find reasons in the personal histories of those who commit atrocities to explain, if not excuse, their actions. If we were to discover that Major Hasan endured years of belittlement for his faith, or suffered a pathological fear of warfare, or even suffered from mental illness, those things might explain the murder he committed, but they would not excuse it. Unlike so many alleged mass murderers, Hasan survived his rampage. He is in the hospital and will likely recover. If indicted, he will face trial and our society will punish him for his crimes. As a society, we must condemn these actions, even as we seek the reasons behind them and seek to make them ever rarer.
Yet though they can’t excuse his actions, Hasan’s victims and their families may someday forgive him. Three years ago, on October 2 2006, a man shot and killed five girls in an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. The sadness of that community is unimaginable. The girls ranged in age from seven to thirteen. Just two days after the shootings, the girls’ families and community said they were, with God’s help, forgiving the gunman and praying for his wife. Enos Miller, the grandfather of two of the girls who were killed, said that “in his heart” and “with God’s help” he was forgiving the gunman. Forgiveness like this, the third kind of forgiveness, has nothing to do with not feeling hurt anymore or “getting over” a wrong committed. It is all about refusing to let another person’s wrong actions eat away at your soul. It is doing your own work, through prayer, meditation, or counseling, to keep your sacred self whole regardless of what has been done to you. This forgiveness understands the Tao Te Ching, that if we treat another person as our enemy and actively fight against him, we damage something in ourselves. If we refuse to see the holy nature in another person, then it is obscured in us. If we, personally and as a country, are to find peace, it will be through the spiritual practice of forgiveness.
Please pray with me.
Holiness which is within us and around us, which some name mystery and others call God, hear our prayers this morning. Be with all those who suffer, and especially with those who are recovering from wounds in Fort Hood, Texas. Be with the families of those who died. Be their comfort and their strength in the hard weeks and months to come.
Be with all those who have lost loved ones to the violence of war, in this country and everywhere in the world. May they remember their children, their brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives, with love. May we honor the memories of those who have served their countries.
Help us find strength in our hearts to forgive one another when we are wronged, and to seek reconciliation with those whom we may have hurt. Help us not be too hasty to blame, and not be too proud to acknowledge when we have done wrong. Do not let our own worries stand between us and a friend. Be an encouragement to us as we seek to live in harmony with our neighbors and our enemies. Amen.
Collins, Dan. “Amish Forgive, Pray, and Mourn.” CBS News.com. 4 Oct. 2006. Accessed 6 Nov. 2009.
Dao, James. “Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment.” nytimes.com. 5 Nov. 2009. The New York Times A1. 6 Nov. 2009. Accessed 6 Nov. 2009.
Gjelten, Tom. “Hasan’s Story Won’t Be Easy to Sort Out.” NPR. All Things Considered. 6 Nov. 2009.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004.
Tao Te Ching. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: HarperPerennial, 1988.