Forgiveness May Be Unfinished Chapter

You folks who endure my meanderings on a regular basis know how I can make strange connections between objects, people or situations.

Today, I’ve connected all three. They are Anne Frank, a sunflower and the United Methodist General Conference.

My wife and I were strongly impacted as we reflected our way through the Anne Frank exhibit at Gonzaga University. I don’t have Anne’s famous quotation before me, but it has to do with believing there is something good in every person.

Given her last years, that is an outrageously hopeful and forgiving statement!

Many books, movies and plays have been written about Anne Frank. They all touch on the mystery of forgiveness in and through Anne’s life.

But for those of us who wrestle with the meaning of the chilling stories of the Holocaust, the chapter on forgiveness is unfinished.

I hope that if you have not walked through the fascinating and chilling history of the Holocaust as experienced by Anne, her family and friends, you will make time to do just that. It will be a learning experience in forgiveness you won’t soon forget!

The object in my connection puzzle is a sunflower. Actually, it is “The Sunflower,” another powerful story from the Holocaust.

This story is by Simon Wiesenthal, who became internationally known for his work in identifying Nazi war criminals.

As a concentration camp prisoner, he one day was marched past a military cemetery. On each grave was a ramrod-stiff sunflower.

Plus, butterflies were floating between the flowers.

“Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers,” Wiesenthal writes. “Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave.

“For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me.

“No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.”

Shortly after seeing the sunflowers, he found himself forced to sit with a dying Nazi soldier. The young man, frightened not just for his life but for his soul, confesses to Wiesenthal his part in a horrific killing of a Jewish family.

Then he asks for forgiveness from this Jewish prisoner! What should the prisoner do?

Wiesenthal’s powerful story is only a part of this provocative book. The rest of it shares responses from dozens of famous and not-so-famous people as they try to answer his question for themselves: “What would you do?”

While these men and women wrestle with forgiveness on Wiesenthal’s behalf, they arrive at no unified thought about the place of forgiveness in his life or their own. That forgiveness chapter must always be a chapter in progress for each of us, as it was for Simon Wiesenthal.

The last connecting piece in today’s puzzle is more historically current than Holocaust stories. But the dynamics of forgiveness are no less powerful and complicated for many people.

Our denomination’s every-four-year international conference ended just a week ago, but one of its debates will last for many years to come.

Once again, we wrestled with our collective, contradictory feelings and fears about homosexuality. In the end, the General Conference affirmed the official position that United Methodism has held for many years: that homosexuality is contrary to biblical teachings, that homosexual people are of worth to God, that professing homosexuals cannot be ordained, and that same-sex unions are against church law.

Conflict is endemic in how we deal with homosexuality!

While the legislative results were not all that surprising to me, I was dismayed that the tone of debate was too often filled with stridency and discord. I want my denomination to be a model of reconciliation and hope even in the midst of honest though fearful debate. But we aren’t.

Many church leaders and delegates at that gathering in Cleveland were courageous, courteous and compassionate in how they tried to find a common ground for the polarized factions to identify together. It appears they failed to find that common ground.

Even in that failure, did they discover new opportunities to write more in the United Methodist unfinished chapter on forgiveness? I certainly hope they did.

Without the forgiveness offered and received between members of our church, our denomination could lose touch with God’s forgiveness of us all.

It appears we have learned very little from our brothers and sisters of the Holocaust. We mustn’t forget them even as we struggle with forgiveness at another level, another time.

You have your own unfinished chapter on forgiveness to write in your own life. From where do you draw your lessons, your courage and eventually your compassion?

I hope it is from wherever you are reminded that God gives us all the power to forgive one another and ourselves even when that forgiveness seems like an unfinished chapter in our lives.