Saying I’m Sorry and Making It Right

By Aaron McEmrys

Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara October 5, 2008

Marcella loved to visit her Uncle Rob’s house when she was a kid. Uncle Rob always treated her like she mattered, not just as one of the gaggle of kids that made up her family. They had a lot in common: both loved the outdoors, walking in the woods, canoeing, that sort of thing. But the most exciting thing they shared, from Marcella’s point of view was their shared love of coin collecting. Marcella had been an avid coin collector since she was little. It had started with the old coins her mother agreed to trade her for newer ones out of her coin purse and grew from there. “Old” was a relative thing, of course – and in Marcella’s case that meant any coin older than she was. By the time someone gave her an old Morgan silver dollar she was already in love, the only kid she knew who subscribed to Numismatics Magazine, not that she was foolish enough to advertise that fact at school.

But the adults she knew simply weren’t interested. Tolerant maybe, but that was about it. Except for Uncle Rob. Uncle Rob was also a coin collector and had been for a very long time. Over the years he had built up a very fine collection, the best one Marcella had ever seen outside of the little coin shop whose finger-smudged glass cabinets she peered into on her way home from school. Marcella and her Uncle Rob spent hours pouring over all those old coins, Rob showing Marcella all the little oddities that only real collectors ever notice or care about – both of them enjoying the feel and the smell of old metal between their fingers and the simple pleasure of being together.

One day when her Uncle Rob wasn’t around, Marcella was looking through her Uncle’s collection. She especially loved Ben Franklin half-dollars, but could never save up enough money to by any. Uncle Rob had lots of them, whole rolls of them in fact.

Looking at all those coins, Marcella felt a funny knot in her stomach, and without allowing herself to think beyond, “he has so many, he will never notice, it will be okay” – Marcella took a roll of those Ben Franklins, went home and hid them in the back of her closet. She knew it was a stupid thing to do, but she did it anyway. But as the days passed, those stolen quarters weighed heavier and heavier on her heart. Somehow it didn’t feel good to sit in his closet looking at those coins with a flashlight, starting guiltily at the sound of any approaching footstep. She wanted to give them back but didn’t know how to go about it.

One day Marcella went into her closet to look at the coins and found them gone. Just gone. She didn’t need to look for them. Deep in the pit of her stomach she knew that her Uncle had figured out they were missing – and then come over and taken them back.

Marcella felt terrible. But her Uncle Rob never said a word about it to her, and certainly said nothing to her parents – but she could feel a coldness, a distance, a betrayal, and she was ashamed. She wanted so badly to apologize but couldn’t bring herself to do it, couldn’t bear to see the disappointment she knew she would see in his eyes. And so nothing was said and there were no more long lazy afternoons for them. And that was that. They both got older, Marcella grew up and moved away, a friendship was lost and all these years later unspoken words hang in the air between them like a shadow.

If only stories like this were rare. But they aren’t. We lose so much for want of an apology. We all know how stupid little things can grow into gulfs between people, how silence can stifle and poison even the closest of friendships, how later we can barely remember why we stopped talking. We humans mess up all the time . This is part of what it means to be human – and yet saying I’m sorry and trying to put things right is often one of the most difficult things to do.

All of us are raised to say, “I’m sorry” from our earliest years. This is a good thing in theory, but many of us are made to apologize as a matter of form, of courtesy, regardless of whether we actually feel sorry or not. “Say you’re sorry”, a mother says to her daughter when her sister cries – “but mom, I didn’t do anything! She started it, I didn’t do anything wrong!” “Say you’re sorry”, repeats the inflexible voice and sooner or later the girl gives in with the most sullen, insincere apology imaginable.

And so “I’m sorry”, one of the most powerful phrases in any language can be reduced to a mere formality – a worthless phrase in a culture full of worthless phrases.

We live in a society where blame must always be assigned and where everything is always someone else’s fault; a society in which admitting mistakes is seen as a form of weakness and where we practice the science of punishment instead of the art of forgiveness.

When was the last time our government has apologized, asked forgiveness for anything? When Bill Clinton apologized to African Americans for the terrible institution of slavery he was roundly attacked by white people who were outraged, furious at the implication that slavery and persistent racism, which is its child, might be something they should feel sorry about, and more recently President Bush has famously denied ever making any mistakes at all making all apologies wholly uneccesary.

Just a few weeks ago US aircraft bombed a small village in Afghanistan. They thought they were targeting militants, but ended up killing almost a hundred defenseless women and children. Despite investigations by the United Nations and the Afghan government and a host of NGOs proving that this is indeed what happened, our government has continued to claim that they successfully hit a village full of militants, period. Nothing to apologize for, despite the keening wails of women who have lost their children and the glassy shell-shocked stares of the latest batch in a long line of orphans.

We are living in the world of “not me.”

The wider social context of our lives definitely makes it harder for us to say I’m sorry, but in the end every apology and every act of forgiveness is still a purely personal choice. And this, I think, is where the real dragons live. Remember what it feels like to ask for forgiveness – the rush of blood to the face, the hard-beating heart, the fear. Oh yes the fear. In the space between “I’m sorry, please forgive me” and the other person’s response lies a terrifying abyss. In that space we are entirely vulnerable, entirely defenseless. The four most vulnerable words in the English language have to be, “Will you forgive me?” Because the answer might be, “no.” And then we are left alone and ashamed, hollowed out and feeling profoundly unworthy of love we need like oxygen because love and forgiveness go hand in hand and where one is missing, so is the other.

I once met a police officer at a conference in Minnesota. He has started a restorative justice program, where the object is to work with juvenile offenders to create opportunities for genuine forgiveness and restitution instead of more punishment for punishment’s sake. He told me this story.

A teenage boy stole a neighbor’s boat. He took it out on the lake for an alcohol-fueled joy ride with his friends. They sailed around all night and then trashed it, really trashed it. They broke every window, tore up every bit of fabric, even managed to smash gaping holes in the body of the boat itself. The covered it with hatefully spray-painted graffiti and abandoned it on the other side of the lake like an unwanted baby.

The boy was caught just a couple days later. It wasn’t hard, as he had, like the idiot he was, bragged about it at school. The officer I met went out and arrested him. But instead of throwing him in jail, the boy was given the option of participating in the restorative justice program. This meant he would have to apologize to the man whose boat he had stolen, ask his forgiveness and then offer whatever restitution the man demanded.

The boy’s neighbor was absolutely furious, but he did not want to see the boy go off to jail, so he reluctantly agreed to participate in the program too. In the courtroom, the boy tearfully apologized to his neighbor and asked his forgiveness, and the man accepted his apology, more or less – but it was all very formal and courteous and hollow. The boy was being forced to apologize and the man felt he had to accept, at least in word. Otherwise the boy would go to jail.

Then came the kicker. The judge ordered the boy to not only pay for the damages to the boat, which amounted to over ten thousand dollars, but also to something much more difficult – to physically work with his neighbor to put the boat back together again. The boy had no choice but to accept.

At first the two barely talked. Every morning the boy’s mother dropped him off at the lake, and the two would work all day long. The boy knew nothing about tools or repairing things or working with wood – and knew even less than nothing about boats. So the neighbor had to teach him. I can’t imagine how hard this must have been for both of them.

But in time their relationship began to change. As they toiled over raw boards with hand sanders or wood sealant day after day they began to talk. It turned out that the man’s father had built that boat by hand over the last decade of his life. The man and his father had never gotten along and after a particularly bad falling out had stopped talking altogether. They were still not talking when his father died, and the weight of all that had gone unsaid was very painful. So the boy’s neighbor had taken the boat and kept it up and sailed on the lake and loved it as he grew into old age himself. That boat was the only connection he had to his father, the only good thing they shared. And so what that stupid boy did was far, far worse than just stealing a boat.

And the stupid boy heard him, he saw the lines of pain and lost love in his neighbor’s face and when he went home that night he went to his room, closed the door and cried. The man was learning too. He could see in the boy’s braced shoulders and sad tough guy act just how scared and alone the boy felt. He understood that nobody had ever spent the kind of time with him that he needed, never told him that he was worth anything.

Time passed, and the boy learned a lot about boats and tools and fixing things from his neighbor who had never realized he knew so much worth teaching. The boat came along and was soon seaworthy again. The restitution was almost over.

But on that last day, the man did something unexpected; he offered to take the boy out on the lake to test out their handiwork. And out on that lake, on that beautiful green lake girded by tall green pines the boy finally apologized for real, pouring all his pain and shame and long dammed-up tears in one long babbling stream. He was so truly sorry. There was a pause, a long pause, and then the man, his own voice too choked up for talking took that teenage boy and hugged him, saying over and over again, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I forgive you.”

And so they were healed. Healed in ways that went far beyond the repair of a vandalized boat.

What a miracle. Imagine what would have been lost, for both of them, if the neighbor had done what he must have been sorely tempted to do – let the kid go to juvie, leave him to take his medicine, and leave the boat to rot on the dock like a scar. Nobody would have blamed him for it, and the world would barely have registered the birth of yet another lost, angry and hopeless young man behind bars and yet another bitter and fearful old man living alone in a house no one comes to visit. But he didn’t go that way – and so two lives were saved.

There is no act more healing or more powerful than this – to ask for forgiveness, to forgive, and to know you are forgiven. Truly forgiven. This is tough stuff, this is hard work – and it is essential work for every single one of us.

We can’t keep score in this, real apology and real forgiveness cannot be tallied up somewhere in an accountant’s spreadsheet. It is freely given or it is nothing. In asking for and giving forgiveness love acts. For as we all know it is easy to love people when they are loveable, but to show people our love even when they aren’t loveable, even when they fail us – this is active love on a whole different scale – healing, saving, redemptive. This is love that says, “I know you fell down – but I will not cast you out.” What greater gift could we possibly give one another than this?

But saying sorry isn’t enough, no matter how sincere we are. The ways we hurt one another inflict real damage, and our words are only words until we begin to atone – to try and make things right again. It is through atonement that our feelings, our love, becomes manifest. When we hurt one another it is as if a mirror shatters. Where we were once seamlessly connected to one another we are now broken up, shattered, isolated from one another by the spider web of broken glass. We are no longer at one. Forgiveness, atonement is the only thing that can heal these cracks.

And here is the best part – it is never too late. It is never too late to say I’m sorry, never to late to start trying to put things right again. Not all apologies will be accepted and some hurts are too deep to reach. But even in cases like these there is a freedom that comes with asking for forgiveness and trying to atone that does not need a response. In simply stepping out from behind our armaments and our pride and our shame, in simply reaching out, standing alone in the light – the shadows must begin to lift.

Our Jewish sisters and brothers will be celebrating Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in just a few days, on October 9^th. For the whole week leading up to this, one of the most beautiful of the High Holy Days, people are called to reflect upon all those they have wronged in the year gone by. They remember, they reflect and then they go to all those people to say “I’m sorry” and to try and make things right again while also forgiving all those who have wronged them. Then, on the day of Yom Kippur, all is celebration because so much has been forgiven, so many cracks in the mirror of community repaired. Yom Kippur is a day set aside out of all the year because the accumulated wisdom of Jewish history and tradition has not only taught them how important this process is, but also how very difficult it is for us to do.

I am convinced that any society that can do this, can withstand anything. What will our families, our communities, our society look like if we can start doing this? What becomes possible for a girl who returns a handful of stolen Benjamin Franklins to her favorite uncle? Or for a vandal who learn how to fix a boat? What might be possible if we could really apologize to those innocent children in Afghanistan, to our African American brothers and sisters, to all those drowned in floods generated by the global warming of our endless consumption? What might be possible if we can start to say I’m sorry, start to make things right right here, right now? What becomes possible when we see forgiveness and atonement as the most important building blocks in our spiritual and ethical lives?

Anything. Anything becomes possible for a people who can do this. And so, let us begin.

Amen.