Women And Forgiveness

SINCE IT IS Easter, columnist Minette Marrin is thinking about forgiveness. And, she admits, she doesn’t get the point. After reviewing the news of the past week, including the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, she writes:

I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.

There is, indeed, a good reason to wonder about the point of forgiveness in the larger social and political context. Evil is evil and must be fought to the death. But I think that the point of forgiveness manifests itself in the small world of the family, in particular in the face-to-face world of the woman and her personal relationships.

Let us try to imagine why forgiveness might be, not divine, but merely practical, and especially practical in a woman’s life and in her family relationships.

In the first place we have the evidence of Marvin Olasky and his 1990 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. He rehearses the system of rehabilitation used by 19th century charity workers in getting people out of the gutter and on to their feet. The first item in the A-B-C-D-E-F-G system as A for Affiliation. Upon meeting a needy person the charity worker would first try to find out about family members or friends upon whom their victim had a claim of support or affection. In other words, the workers were trying to bring together a family that had broken apart. It is likely that success would require forgiveness between the estranged family members.

Secondly, there is the evidence of the Asia Times columnist Spengler. Only half in jest, he laughs at the idea of women priests. “A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never forgive anything,” or indeed forget anything. While it is true that: “Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them,” the same does not apply to relations between women. Can women really afford not to forgive other women? Forgive helps women repair a damaged network of care.

The other reason is surfaced by James M. Ault, Jr. in his sociological study of a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spirit and Flesh. Everyone knows that fundamentalist churches are hopelessly patriarchal. Women are second-class citizens. Well, not quite.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

How might this destructive power have been mitigated? By forgiveness.

I propose that while the destructive conflict of the men’s feud is mitigated by law, women’s conflict is mitigated by forgiveness.

Is it perhaps significant that the major force in the early Christian church was well-to-do Roman women? It might explain why, in Marrin’s words: “Forgiveness is central to Christianity.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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