*This is a preliminary and test material with the objective to show the graphic proposal, the presentation of what we propose and the contents of the “Búsquedas” Magazine.
Author: D. M. Dooling1
When one of his friends asked him a question about God, René Daumal wrote, “I swear to you that I have to force myself to write or to pronounce this word: God. It is a noise I make with my mouth or a movement of the fingers that hold my pen. To pronounce or to write this word makes me ashamed. What is real here is that shame… Must I never speak of the Unknowable because it would be a lie? Must I speak of the Unknowable because I know that I proceed from it and am bound to bear witness of it? This contradiction is the prime mover of my best thoughts”2.
The word forgiveness, also, belongs to the divine. It is God’s act: something other, something that is not ours; and unless we can acknowledge this, the word is only “a noise we make with our mouths”. Its otherness is in its very name: “forgiveness” is “given” – and not only in English and its kindred languages; the French say par–donner, the Spanish per–donar. It is not ours to give, but to receive; the human being cannot create it. We can be certain only that it is beyond us, above us –and we can never entirely know anything on a level higher than our own.
And yet we speak of it. Perhaps like the Prodigal Son returning to his father, knowing himself unworthy, we also al some moment have had the experience of being freed from guilt, accepted and embraced in all our unworthiness. What is it that we have received? What do we mean when we pronounce this word forgiveness?
If we are open to its largest sense, it can be seen as a transforming process; a gift coming from above, accepted by what is open to it below. It is “divine grace,” it is mercy, and both these words mean “thanks.” When the gift is received, an exchange can take place; as though the sin and the forgiving were accepted together, and somehow merged and changed into something like a new quality of being. A new life appears; the past is not done away with, but transcended, and a new beginning is possible.
But in fact, this is not the way we usually speak of forgiveness. Its accepted meaning comes very close to being synonymous with forgetting. “Forgive and forget,” we say, as if the two were inseparable. Forgiveness, we generally suppose, means that mistakes or offenses are to be forgotten, treated as if the had disappeared or had never existed. But when we forget, what can change? How can something new appear?
If forgiving were equivalent to forgetting, it would make it more possible to believe that forgiving is indeed an act that human beings are capable of initiating, since forgetting comes quite easily to humankind; but in fact we are incapable of that large act of acceptance and exchange unless we are acted upon by something greater than ourselves.
This false equivalence also helps to convince us that mistakes and wrongdoings can, and should, be forgiven/forgotten. It is a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of, instead of put to use – no doubt caused by the emphasis we put on doing instead of being. But the offense is just what must no be forgiven or forgotten, since it is precisely through the act of facing what has happened, remembering it, that the possibility of atonement appears and the transforming exchange of forgiveness can come to its fruition. Certainly the churches have contributed to the general confusion by not clarifying sufficiently (perhaps not understanding well enough) their own doctrines of atonement, absolution, and redemption. It is the “sinner” rather than the “sin” that needs forgiveness; the person, whom we often confuse with his acts but whose being is a mystery and always more than his acts. “I can ´judge´ your opinions, external actions, productions, etc. , in relation to you and to our common aim,” said Daumal to his friend. “But I cannot judge you, you, the person.”3.
Walter de la Mare wrote in the epilog to his Memoirs of a Midget, “Of this I am certain: that it will be impossible to free myself, to escape from this world, unless in peace and amity I can take every shred of it, every friend and every enemy, all that these eyes have seen, these senses discovered, with me”. How shall I find the power to loose myself from my friends and my enemies in such a way that I can “take them with me?” This would be forgiveness; but I can forgive, it seems, only as I am forgiven, in an instant when everything is there and it is all accepted “in peace and amity.” In that instant a life can be changed; but what quality must there be in our asking that can open us to this grace, what “purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching?”4
Who is to say? All that can be known is that in that moment, I am free, I am forgiven, and I can forgive – or more truly, forgiveness can pass through me to another.
There is a spiritual that sings:
It’s me, it’s me, O Lord,
Standin’ in the need of prayer;
Not my father, not my mother, it´s me, O Lord,
Not my sister, not my brother, it´s me, O Lord
Standin´ in the need of prayer,
Standin´ in the need of prayer.
There is no other place to stand to face the possibility of forgiving or being forgiven. It is I who am in need of prayer; and is there any other prayer than “Lord, have mercy on me”? I open to this need for a gift, for a grace that I cannot earn, for which I can only give thanks. Forgive us as we forgive – and I perceive that this may not mean the sequence of cause and effect that I used to consider it: that we must first forgive, in order to be forgiven. It seems more true that there can be a simultaneous, reciprocal action, in a given moment, of exchange between the human and the divine. What it is that I offer is not at all clear, nor how it is produced; but sometimes, something comes from me, and sometimes – though it is not guaranteed – the gift is given.
A poem that speaks powerfully about forgiveness and atonement, without ever using these words, is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” illuminating with a vividness almost visual the agonizing exchange between levels that (if we recognize its existence) we may call the process of transformation.
Whatever else Coleridge may have sought to convey in this complex and beautiful poem about the mystery and drama of spirit worlds, its real resonance for me, and I am sure for many others, comes from the universal human experience of sin and remorse and payment, and the description –as beautiful as any that exists in English–– of that moment of divine forgiveness.
The Mariner, idly, it seems, for lack of anything else to do, perhaps on a bet or to show his skill or for any of the reasons and no–reasons behind our acts of automatic destruction, shoots the friendly, half tame albatross that is following the ship. The others of the crew, like too many of the rest of us in analogous circumstances, are first shocked, then condone the killing; and by this attempt to forgive what must not be forgiven, they enter into the Mariner’s guilt. Later, when the ship is becalmed and all their lives endangered, they blame the catastrophe on his action, and the body of the bird is hung around his neck in reproach. After “a weary time” without water, under the blazing sun, one by one the other members of the crew die of thirst until the Mariner is alone in his horror and suffering.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.5
And then, the miracle: instead of “slimy things” crawling on “the rotting sea,” instead of the ocean’s colors and phosphorescence appearing to him as “death fires” and “witch’s oils,” suddenly there is an inner event; and he sees everything differently. He sees beyond himself and his present situation:
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water–snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind Saint took pity on me
And I blessed them unaware.
The self–same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
He is freed; he sleeps, and the rain comes. He has been forgiven. But like everyone else he must bear the consequences of his action. It has caused the death of his companions; and
The pang, the curse with which they died
Had never passed away:
He must endure that and make what reparation he can.
When by a series of miraculous events he is saved from the sea and returned to his home, he is seized with a “woful agony” that forces him to relive and describe the whole experience, first to the holy hermit who has helped to save his life and bring him ashore; and then, on his further wanderings, to each of the series of strangers whom he recognizes as needing to hear his story. But now he tells it, he relives it, in the light of a new knowledge: he knows what he did not know before, he understands the need and the power of love for life, and after each telling, he is again “free”. He must pay, but he is on the road to deliverance.
“Deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.” To be truly aware of the kingdom and the power and the glory and to know that they are God’s (the Mariner seems to be telling us), to see their beauty, even for an instant, and feel love for it, is the door that can open to save us.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small…
And by continuing to pay the penalty for his sin, he is renewing the approach, which has always to be renewed, to that momentarily glimpsed and now more and more continually longed–for connection with life, remembering its taste and recognizing without faltering the darkness of its absence.
- From Parabola. The Magazine of Mith and Tradition. Forgivnees, Volume XII, Númber 3, August. 1987, of the Society for the Study of Mith and Tradicion (N. E.). D. M. Dooling is Foundation Editor of Parabola. The Magazine of Mith and Tradition (N. E.) ↩︎
- Chaque Fois que l´Aube Paraît. René Daumal. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets by T. S. Elliot. ↩︎
- Quotations from the Ancient Mariner are taken from The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). ↩︎
