“Forgiveness: Composting the Pain” – Lay Sermon by David Allen
UUMidland member David Allen received his Interdisciplinary Arts Ph.D. from Texas Tech in 1995. After a stint teaching in the theatre departments Tech and at Palm Beach Community College, he moved to Midland in 1998 to assume the role of Drama Director at Midland College. Now retired, he spends his time writing, playing golf, frolicking with is dog, ZuZu, and taking long naps. David is currently (2019) a member of our board of directors and serves on the Building and Worship Associate Committees.
Please forgive me, but I want to talk about forgiveness. Not the kind I just asked for. That kind of forgiveness is a surface thing, a social grace thing. The kind I want to talk about is the deeper kind; the kind given in the face of deep hurt. To do that, though, I must first tell you about my father.
On New Year’s Eve, 1929, a thirty-eight-year-old woman came home from a party and her forty-eight-year-old, slightly intoxicated husband became unexpectedly amorous. “You’ll be sorry,” she told him. Nine months to the day later my father, Merton, entered the world. Nana, as we called my grandmother, always said how embarrassed she was that everyone would know what she had done New Year’s Eve. Today we might say, “So what.” But Nana had been born in 1891. She was raised in a Victorian style in which talk of sex was verboten – forbidden. She was also raised in a style that had strict rules for raising children, a parenting style she used on her first child, a daughter 18 years older than my father named Mildred and her second child – Dad.
There are many ways to describe my father: golden-hearted and loving; stubborn and irascible; nobody’s fool and a fool in love; impatient and short fused; a proud veteran and (in his own words) a super-patriot; an expert angler who caught many a fish and a lousy hunter who killed or maimed more animals with his car than with his gun; fairly deaf to the voices around him and completely deaf to the tone of his own voice; loyal to his friends and fierce in the defense of his family; a maker of big hugs and sloppy kisses; an artistic talent and oh so brilliant; and an obstinate son, ever-true husband, fabulous father.
Dad grew up with a father who was essentially an old man who didn’t do things like camping, fishing, hunting, Cub Scout pine-car derbies, or much of anything else with his son. Dad was determined to be different. He would do anything for his sons.
In the spring of 1961, nine-year-old son me waited for him to return from a business trip. He was late, and I was very anxious. It was a Friday evening and we were supposed to drive up to Lake George, about 90 miles north, to meet our Indian Guides Tribe at the YMCA camp called Chingachgook. The sun was setting, and Dad still wasn’t home. I was afraid that we would not be able to go. Just before dark, Dad got home, exhausted from his trip. I figured that, with night coming on and Dad tired, there was no way Dad would say yes to going, but he did because it was his son’s desire. We put our camping gear in the back of our station wagon and headed north to a place we had never been before.
It was pitch dark when we got to the Camp Chingachgook. There were no lights on. Dad drove around looking for a parking lot. In those days up in the Adirondack Mountaians it wasn’t unusual to find dirt roads. Dad found one of those and drove down it. In a minute the car was bouncing wildly over something. What – we didn’t know. Dad said it would be best if we stayed where we were and slept in the back of the car. In the morning we woke to the faces of campers and their fathers looking in at us. We got out of the car and realized the we had parked on a long gravel stairway right in the middle of the camp.
Another time I complained to him about a rock in our neighbor’s yard that often ruined our football games. The neighbors had tried to dig it up, but it turned out to be a huge boulder.
A few days later, Dad came home from work with an army surplus ammo can. He went in the house, changed out of his suit and marched across the street into the neighbor’s yard. We kids gather around wondering what he was up to.
Dad ran an extension cord into their house, came back out, pulled a drill from the ammo box and proceeded to drill a small hole in the boulder. Then, he took some green putty out of a bag and filled the hole with it. Well, you probably know what he was doing, but we still didn’t. He put wires into the putty. He made us all hide behind a fence. He inserted the wires to the extension cord and took shelter behind the fence. He shouted in all directions, “Fire in the hole!” Then, he counted down “3-2-1”. At 0, the women of the house flipped a switch in her kitchen and KA-BOOM!
Through the fence slats we saw the earth explode just like in every war movie we had ever seen. Dirt rained down on us. It was WAY COOL!! The rock was never a problem again.
My childhood was filled with incidents like these orchestrated by my father for the pleasure of his sons. Dad sure was different than his father, but that wasn’t always a good thing.
Though I never met my grandfather, I am told that he was a quiet, unassuming man with a poor heart. Dad was anything but quiet and unassuming. Not because he tried to be different than his father but as a reaction to his mother.
To call Nana domineering would be an understatement. She was a force of nature. When she was 16, she lied about her age to take a job as a secretary in Mark Twain’s publishing house. Today, that seems only a bit forward, but don’t forget in 1907 most secretaries were men. She was a member of the steering committee for the republican’s in New York City, and she ran her household with an iron fist. Yet, for all her 20th century liberation, she still raised my father as if it was 1890.
Castor oil, prunes and sitting on the toilet until he produced, no matter how long it took, was business as usual. He stayed in short pants well into his adolescence. Today, the length of one’s pants matters not, but back then, short pants meant childhood and long pants meant one was grown up. Nana took him by the hand and walked him to school in his short pants every day until he was 14, and taller than she was. And she would not just leave him in front of the school. She would walk him into the school and see him safely to his teacher.
In New York City, there are few neighborhood places for kids to play in so they play in the street. Dad wasn’t allowed to play in the street, much less cross one on his own. Unless Nana was there, he had to stay on his block on his side of the street. If she was present, he could play under her supervision which included instructions to the other boys.
These are only a few of Nana’s rules. She had numerous others, many of which today we would label as abusive.
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When he was 14, his sister, Mildred, talked Nana into letting Dad spend the summer with her on Long Island. During this stay, Mildred taught Dad ways of thwarting Nana and her fear-driven rules and let him have the freedom to go where he wanted when he wanted all summer. He played on the beach and in the water, something Nana never let him do because it was too dangerous and too germy. He met a girl and they walked the boardwalk hand-in-hand. Dad learned what an adolescent’s life should be.
By the end of the summer of 1944, Dad had radically changed. He had learned that to survive, he had to verbally strike back at Nana and her strong-willed mindset. He would no longer take any garbage from her. He learned to tell Nana, “I don’t care what you think. What are you going to do anyway?” He learned to curse and yell and stand up for himself.
The result was freedom. He crossed the street alone, rode the subway alone, and walked across the George Washington bridge to New Jersey alone. He was, as he said himself, “reborn”.
Unfortunately, the anger did not go away. It stayed festered inside Dad for a lifetime. He never learned that he did not have to curse and yell at those who did not do as he wanted. As he wrote himself:
…my personal vendetta against my mother and the world-at-large, has made me a very strong-headed and argumentative person. I fly off the wall when someone tries to tell me what to do or how to do it. I treat people poorly by always looking out for ME and not considering their feelings at all … I don’t even know I’m reacting badly until after it happens, and it’s pointed out to me.
So, that was the father I grew up with. A man with a heart of gold and a warped worldview. In short, I too grew up in an emotionally abusive home and paid the price just like my father had. I too became angry and argumentative.
Though Dad softened a bit in his senior years, he never found solace. He died at 89 this past Christmas day as angry and bitter as he was at 14.
Dad’s life could have been quite different, but he could not let go of the anger, the pain that Nana’s garbage inflicted on him. The only way he could have changed was to have forgiven his mother, something he never figured out how to do. He could never just let the anger go so that something new could bloom. He never realized that forgiving his mother would be an act of kindness to himself, not to her.
I think forgiveness is a form of composting. Which, according to Wikipedia, is “a process [that] recycles various organic materials otherwise regarded as waste products and produces a soil conditioner.” In other words, you take left over rubbish (i.e. garbage) and turn it into fertilizer. When we forgive, we turn the refuse, the pain and anger, into fertilizer that helps us grow as humans.
Dad’s stubbornness, his view that he was always right because his mother had to be always wrong, got in the way of forgiving. To him, in order to forgive her he would have to, on some level, admit that he was wrong about her; admit that she wasn’t a monster, admit that she was only a human trying to do what she thought best for her son using the tools she had. He never understood that there is a difference between forgiving and condoning her actions – a difference between forgiving for the sake of the offender and forgiving for one’s own sake.
Dad’s inability to forgive made him miserable and effected his entire family. For my part, I could see that piece of Dad in me and detested it. I vowed to be different than my father as he had vowed to be different than his. The center of the my vow was my decision to not have children. How could I do to them what he had done to me. A wrong-headed idea and a decision I now regret, but that’s another story. On the other hand, one thing I can do that Dad couldn’t is to forgive.
When I was in my mid-thirties, Dad began to open up about his childhood. As a result, I began to see why he was the way he was; that he was just a human being trying to do the best he could with the tools he had. I realized that the anger he had showered on me was not about me. It was about his mother. With that in mind, I was able to forgive Dad for his sake AND my own.
After that forgiveness a new relationship bloomed between my father and me. We became much closer. Yes, there were setbacks. Dad, after all, never stopped being Dad, but he became a bit easier to take. When he died, I can honestly say that he was one of my best friends.
Ironically, Dad’s obstinate refusal to forgive, taught me the value of forgiveness. I try to practice it all the time. I forgave Dad. I forgave my wife for divorcing me. And, though I do not condone or forget, I forgave the man who molested me when I was 6. Afterall, they were/are just humans trying to do their best to cope with the world.
There is only one person I have been unable to forgive – myself. My ex and I used to joke that when one failed to apply a rule to oneself that applied to the other, it was “different because that’s me.” In the end, she forgave me for the hurt I caused her, but I never have been able to forgive myself.
Writing this has made me reflect on that. I have been holding on to “that’s different because it’s me.” I don’t deserve self-forgiveness. But then, again, I too must admit that I too am only a human doing the best I can with the tools I have and as a human I am bound to fail sometimes. So, today I officially forgive myself. I will let the anger I feel toward myself, the garbage I carry over hurting my ex-wife go with the hope that it will fertilize my life and that I will continue to grow into a better person.
And so, in closing, I ask each of you to learn the lesson my father taught me. Forgive those who have caused you pain, including yourselves, for your own sakes not for theirs. Forgive not as a social grace but forgive in the soul-cleansing way. Compost life’s garbage and use it to grow into a better person.
– David Allen, UUMidland member