Welcome, creatures! Let’s do this thing.
Intercession as rebuke
I liked the British Museum’s presentation on “The musical world of Thomas Becket” a lot, and especially liked their desire to present a wide variety of medieval musical interpretations of the saint’s story, from the liturgical to the political. (If you click for English subtitling you can see translations of the lyrics.) The moods range from heartbreak to exhortation. The one I want to look at here is the motet, around 17:00 in the video, which lets you know what it’s here for right from the first line: “O cruel, wicked nation, worse than a snake.”
The entire motet, though it appears a century after Becket’s murder, addresses his murderers directly. Through intertwining voices, the motet first notes that Thomas has not been harmed, but rather has gone to his reward. Then: “To lament your crime, you must reproach yourself.” One voice warns that those who destroy God’s lambs will “go, weeping, to the shades of Hell,” while the other depicts what penance might look like: “[N]either look at the heavens nor uncover your face. Hide in the earth, fall down to the earth, spurn pleasures and eat hemlock [!].”
“But if you put an end to your badness/and pray to the saints for mercy/you will have more knowledge of God than the former.” (I’m not sure if “the former” here is those who do penance but don’t also change their ways, or the saints themselves???, or something else I’m missing.) And then, with the vocal line rising upward in triumph: “It follows, if you repent your wickedness, the charity of Thomas will save you from Hell.”
In other words, not only did you fail to kill this man, but you have now put yourself in such peril that you must hope for rescue from him. And in fact this rescue is guaranteed, if you only turn toward the outstretched hand of the one you martyred.
Thomas is vindicated, and in this vindication lies the hope of his murderers. This is at once a fierce assertion of Thomas’s holiness and the murderers’ guilt, and a reminder that the escape hatch from Hell into Heaven is being held open from above, precisely by their victim. It’s a rebuke which could not be more stinging, and at the same time a promise which could not be more reliable. It isn’t gentle, but it reminds those who have harmed others that gentleness is possible for them—that they are not required to stay in the living death of cruelty.
I was rambling to myself about this motet and wondered where we might find something like it today. Where are both rebuke and promise presented with equal intensity? And the obvious answer, I think, is a furious, harrowing pop song about the anguish of being harmed and violated by someone who still has shown no repentance, the long journey to reestablish some kind of trust in a loving God, and the knowledge that those who have harmed you can also find the restoration you have found—if they undergo a parallel shattering and humiliation of the self. I don’t think I’m reading too much into it; this is all in the text of Kesha’s “Praying.”
I hope you’re somewhere praying.
I hope your soul is changing.
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your knees, praying.
Stories of Long Forgiveness
“Praying” isn’t a song “about forgiveness.” Forgiveness comes up in the song as one aspect of the larger journey toward healing of someone who has been brutally harmed. It isn’t imposed as one more burden to bear, or proposed as a solution. It’s a problem and the problem hasn’t been worked through yet; maybe it won’t be. “Sometimes, I pray for you—in a dream. ….Some things, only God can forgive.” “Praying” takes place in a world where restoration is possible for wrongdoers, in part because it takes place in a world where their victims are not expected to generate forgiveness from within, as a method of psychological cleansing or a moral duty to make things easier on other people or even a show of strength.
It does have this in common with stories actually about forgiveness: It is more interested in the experiences of the person who has suffered harm than in those of the wrongdoer. And it’s more interested in the post-harm journey than in the harm itself. You can’t think of the narrator of that song as an object, “just a victim,” or whatever thing people fear becoming in the aftermath of suffering harm. That narrator is the protagonist, and her journey has its own moral arc: its own temptations, possibilities, questions, and discoveries.
In that redemption-arcs essay, I noted that we tell a lot of stories about wrongdoers’ redemption, but we rarely tell stories of the long journey to forgiveness. I had a hard time even coming up with examples of stories about forgiveness as a problem, not a solution. You can argue that Marilynne Robinson’s Home is about forgiveness but imho that book (like me, its reader) is too besotted with its prodigal to really focus on those who might forgive him; and his own journey to forgiving his family hasn’t begun, because he isn’t yet able to reckon openly with their wrongs. Eric Charles May’s prodigal-son parable Bedrock Faith is a better example of a book in which the prodigal’s return is really the catalyst for the complex and often thwarted attempts of the community to forgive him. My Beautiful Laundrette is covertly a story structured by forgiveness, in which forgiveness and repentance (both unspoken… so good, not everything has to be explained) intertwine with the more conventional structure of the romance. But what else is out there?
What are your favorite examples of stories about forgiveness as a challenge, a plot, a character arc?
Depiction of Henry II doing penance for the murder of Thomas Becket via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Just finished Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim, and it kind of fits this model. It's a riff on the story where a girl needs to weave nettle shirts for her brothers to save them from being swans forever. There's a forgiveness arc for the stepmother, who is the one who transformed them. She isn't as malevolent as the one in the original story, so it is *partially* finding out there is less guilt than the protag first suspected.... but she still causes a lot of suffering! Even if she felt like her options were limited. I still think actual forgiveness is what is required and ultimately what is offered.