Feuds and Forgiveness

 Friends, 

 

This morning, I ran across two very different kinds of essays in my daily morning reading routine. The first was from Father Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. Rohr is currently following the path of his book, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, exploring the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with respect to spiritual growth more generally. Today’s excerpt is about the fifth step, “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Rohr argues that the difficult work of accountability and forgiveness brings liberation to both sides of a broken relationship. 

 

The second thing I read this morning was an essay entitled “Bad Blood: A Musical Feuds Reading List.” It is an unhappy collection of how musicians have feuded long before the most recent song war between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, with stories about feuds between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis, among others. Reading about these feuds was like the antithesis of Rohr’s essay on the fifth of the twelve steps. Within these feuds, confession seems to be treated like weakness, blaming replaces accountability, and retaliation is preferred over forgiveness. 

 

I’m sure the Center for Action and Contemplation, which produces the daily mediation from Richard Rohr, and Longreads, which provided the essay on musical feuds, were unaware that their contrasting messages would lie side-by-side in my mailbox this morning. The proximity of these contrasting ways of encountering differences – to feud or to reconcile – seems to name the challenge that many of us face these days, when we have deep and meaningful differences with one another. 

 

Last Saturday’s shooting was a recent example of how, too often, Americans are prone to turn to violence as a means of addressing deep differences. So was the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Each of these actions, condemnation-worthy in themselves, could provide moments of self-reflection, where we examine our own contributions to the rhetoric, frustrations, and intransigence that lead to violence. Instead, professional spin-doctors flood traditional media outlets with various talking points that distance one side or the other from blame, while ordinary folk flood social media to amplify those talking points. A moment that could lead to reconciliation gets woven into the contours of the feud. 

 

The Christian path is characterized by humility, confession, love of enemies, turning the other cheek, and other virtues grounded in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Christian community, therefore, could be a shining light for reconciliation. At the same time, the Christian path is characterized by justice, solidarity with communities that have long been oppressed, vigorous opposition to impunity among those in power, and other virtues grounded in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. As such, the Christian community is called to stir “good trouble,” to voice concern or make demands on behalf of what is right. Sometimes the Gospel calls us to find unity among our differences; sometimes the Gospel calls us to live in holy disunity. While these paths seem different, the depth of the Christian message is that love and justice are inherently connected. 

 

I know that many of us are struggling these days to find a proper way of connecting our call to love to our call to justice. It has never been easy and there’s a reason why the Christian path is characterized as “taking up our cross to follow.” There are moments when you and I should be slower to respond with a retort and lean in to understand better; and there are moments when you and I need to interrupt systemic oppression, white Christian nationalism, sexism, and efforts to scapegoat the LGBTQIA community. Internally, we have a similar tension between being gentle with ourselves and expecting ourselves to be strong in our faith and our convictions. 

 

I don’t have easy answers for you, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who says they do. Micah calls us to do justice, love kindness, and walk with humility. That tripartite call can ground and direct us, even if the particulars are not always clear. 

 

Mark of St. Mark