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The Craft of Forgiveness
By L. Gregory Jones

"I have retold the story of Ian in Saint Maybe both because of its explorations of the problems of forgiveness and for its glimpses of the possibilities of a more adequate account. The novel depicts quite powerfully the dangers of fragmentary conceptions of forgiveness-and, more specifically, it exposes the ways in which diverse Christian traditions have tended to distort the overall significance of forgiveness."

Theirs was a world of family values. The Bedloe family of Baltimore, the main characters in Anne Tyler's novel Saint Maybe, consists of a father, Doug, who brings home the family income as a teacher, a mother, Bee, who works in the home, and three children-a girl, Agatha, and two boys, Danny and Ian. "They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful," and that things would always turn out well.¹ And for much of their lives, everything had turned out well-or at least had been open to such an interpretation.

Even when, as a young adult, Danny brings home Lucy, an attractive young woman with two children and a checkered past, the family smiles and welcomes her without asking any questions. After Danny and Lucy are married, and Lucy gives birth to a third child only seven months after the wedding, no comment is offered-even though Lucy and Danny had known each other only for a few weeks before the wedding.

Danny's 17-year-old brother Ian, however, is less receptive to Lucy. He suspects there is more to Lucy's past, and to the problems of Lucy's present, than either Danny or the rest of the family has acknowledged. And one night, when Ian's plans for a romantic evening with his girlfriend-indeed, it is the night he plans to lose his virginity-are disrupted by having to babysit Lucy's kids longer than he was supposed to, Ian becomes enraged. So Ian forces Danny, just home from a bachelor party, to take him home. Along the way, Ian tells his (rather inebriated) brother a few things he suspects about Lucy-including his (mistaken) conclusion that Lucy is having an affair. Little does Ian

L.Gregory Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of Transformed Judgment: Toward a Trinitatian Account of the Moral Life (1990) and co-author,with Stephen Fowl, of Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (1991). He is currently working on a book entitled Transfiguring Forgiveness.

¹ Anne Tyler, Saint Maybe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 8

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know, however, that after being dropped off at home, Danny will floor the accelerator and peel rubber as takes down the street.

Near the stone wall at the end of the block the brakes should have squealed, but instead the roaring sound grew louder. It grew until something had to happen, and then there was a gigantic, explosive, complicated crash and then a delicate tinkle and then silence. Ian went on staring into his own eyes. He couldn't seem to look away. He couldn't even blink, couldn't move, because once he moved then time would start rolling forward again, and he already knew that nothing in his life would ever be the same.²

A year later, Danny's widow Lucy, distraught over Danny's death and her own inability to take care of her three children, dies of a drug overdose. She leaves behind three orphaned children and no traces of any family or friends other than the Bedloes.

The Bedloe family is strong enough that the parents are willing, at least in the interim, to take care of the three children, even though at least two of them bear no biological connection to the Bedloes. Even so, Doug and Bee are getting older and more frail, and they know that somebody else is eventually going to need to take responsibility for the children. The death of their son and daughter-in-law, and the wear and tear of raising a second generation of kids, begins to take its toll on the Bedloes' sense that everything always turns out well.

But that "sunshine" approach to life, where no clouds are ever acknowledged, is unable to account for the darkness that now hovers over Ian's life. He rightly recognizes that the night of Danny's death will change his life forever. Further, because of his doubts over the veracity of what he told Danny, and the very fact that he had said anything, Ian is racked by guilt over his role in Danny's-and now also Lucy's-death.

And so, as Ian faces the future, he also has to come to terms with a variety of issues. For example, how do you deal with guilt, or more generally with tragedy, in the midst of a family where-despite its strength of character and genuine intimacy-everything needs to be perfect? How do you learn to live with a past that cannot be undone? What kinds of everyday relationships need to exist if people are to deal adequately with life when it has gone awry? How, in the Christian tradition, is God's forgiveness related to our lives and to the reconstruction of relationships with ourselves and with others?

Saint Maybe addresses such issues with stark clarity and often with keen insight. As Ian comes to terms with what he has done, and searches for ways to cope with his action, he discovers the manifold ways in which dramatic events change our lives. In the process, Ian slowly, painfully, fitfully, but nonetheless genuinely, learns the significance of the craft of forgiveness.

² Ibid., p. 46.

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I

As Ian absorbs the fact of Danny's death, he first acknowledges its harsh reality. His brother is dead. Then comes a thought that is even worse. "He died on purpose." And then follows another thought. "Maybe it was an accident." No. "Face it. He really did kill himself." Finally, he will have the last thought. "No, never the last thought."

The narrator continues:

Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, 'Why sweetheart! Is that all that's bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody's suicide.'

Well, no.³

Ian wishes that causing somebody's suicide was something for which you could go to prison, for at least then he would have an identifiable way of paying for what he had done. As it is, he simply wants to confess what he has done. But then people like his mother, who assume that Danny simply died in an accident, would know that he committed suicide. So, Ian reflects, "That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse.

Indeed, Ian's first attempt at confession, to his girlfriend Cicely, fails because she will not accept it. "It was like some physical object that she kept batting away." Ian gets the point, and so he does not try again-though he is ashamed at how easily he can be diverted away from his confession.

Shortly thereafter, while working a part-time job for a moving company, Ian encounters a deaf man who is installing cabinets in the kitchen of a house. Ian finds himself attracted to this man, even envious of him. "It wasn't just the work he envied, although that was part of it-the all-consuming task that left no room for extraneous thoughts. It was the notion of a sealed-off world. A world where no one traded speech, and where even dreams, he supposed, were soundless."4 Such a world promises a relief both from the dangers of communicating too much, as he felt he had done with Danny, and from the words of confession that, left unspoken, haunt him whether awake or asleep.

Ian begins to wonder whether he can find any relief from his guilt. After hearing about Lucy's death, Ian's guilt intensifies. "Oh God, he thought, how long will I have to pay for just a handful of tossed-off words? ...Can't we just back up and start over? Couldn't I have one more chance?" That question is raised anew at Lucy's funeral. The last time he had been in the Dover Street Presbyterian Church was for Danny's funeral. And now he is back for Lucy's. Ian hears the pastor, Dr. Prescott, pray for consolation for the bereaved: "Let Thy mercy

³ Ibid., p. 83.
⁴ Ibid., p. 86 (emphasis added).

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pour like a healing balm upon their hearts." Ian wonders in response, "Could the balm soothe not just grief but guilt? Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be undone?" In the midst of Ian's yearning, be hears the congregation singing.

"The darkness deepens," they sang, "Lord, with me abide!" The voices ceased to be separate. They plaited themselves into a multistranded chord, and now it seemed the congregation was a single person-someone of great kindness and compassion, someone gentle and wise and forgiving. "In life, in death, O Lord," they finished, "abide with me." And then came the long, sighed "Amen." They sat down. Ian sat, too. His knees were trembling. He felt that everything had been drained away from him, all the grief and self-blame. He was limp and pure and pliant as an infant. He was, in fact, born again.⁵

This is, in fact, where many stories of Christian forgiveness end. People racked by guilt discover in an emotionally satisfying worship service the peace and "healing balm" lacking in their lives. Such a therapeutic healing becomes the means by which we recognize that guilt is bad and that we have a right to be healed of our guilt and our hatred.⁶

But Ian rather quickly begins to realize the inadequacy of such an understanding of forgiveness. This is partly because, with the passage of time, he is unable to recapture the feeling he had at the funeral. He can not summon up the feeling of mercy and forgiveness that accompanied the congregation's single, multistranded voice. That sense of forgiveness had been emotionally satisfying, but such sentiments are difficult to sustain unless they are integrated into the practices and friendships of Christian life. And so, despite Ian's feeling that he had been "born again," he continues to find God's forgiveness to be rather elusive. He knows that a cheap, therapeutic forgiveness is inadequate. But without any other sense of forgiveness, Ian remains trapped in a world where punishment, and more particularly self-punishment, seems the only option.

Ian feels like a hopeless sinner; he aches for a blameless life. Perhaps that is why he is intrigued by the storefront church he passes while walking home from a moving job. The sign in block letters identifies it as THE CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE. Ian hears the small congregation of fifteen or twenty singing a hymn, and he is drawn inside. Ian sits down, curious to see what is going on, and observes the congregation as they begin to ask for prayers. Sister Lula asks the church for prayers for her son Chuckie, a paratrooper who has just died in Vietnam because he forgot to put on his parachute. Upon hearing this, Ian lets out a short bark of laughter. The congregation turns and stares at him. As a result, shame "slammed into him in waves"; though he had said and done heedless things before, this is something new. He has laughed out loud at a mother's bereavement.

⁵ Ibid., p. 102.
⁶ Such is the thesis of Lewis Smedes' popular Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

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So, though he hadn't planned to say anything, Ian speaks up.

"I used to be good," he said. "Or I used to be not bad, at least. Not evil. I just assumed I wasn't evil, but lately, I don't know what's happened. Everything I touch goes wrong. I didn't mean to laugh just now. I'm sorry I laughed, Mrs...."
..."Pray for me to be good again," he told them. "Pray for me to be forgiven."⁷

Ian feels a powerful silence in response, and he knows the congregation is taking his request for prayers seriously. How can God not listen, Ian wonders, when this whole congregation is praying for his forgiveness?

As the service ends, Ian feels somewhat ambivalent about this church. While he appreciates their prayers, the "language these places used made him itch with embarrassment (Blood of the Lamb, Died for Your Sins ... )." After the service, however, the pastor-Reverend Emmett-asks him pointedly, " 'What was it that you needed forgiven' " Ian is incredulous, thinking this an inappropriate inquiry into a person's private prayers. But he somehow also recognizes the importance of confessing the truth, and so he summons up the courage to tell Reverend Emmett the whole story.

At the conclusion of telling Reverend Emmett the story, Ian indicates that his sense of responsibility and guilt for his brother's and sister-in-law's deaths is why he asked for the prayer of forgiveness.

"And I honestly believe it might have worked. Oh, it's not like I got an answer in plain English, of course, but ... don't you think? Don't you think I'm forgiven?"
"Goodness, no," Reverend Emmett said briskly.
Ian's mouth fell open. He wondered if he'd misunderstood. He said, "I'm not forgiven?"
"Oh, no.
"But ... I thought that was kind of the point," Ian said. "I thought God forgives everything."
"He does," Reverend Emmett said. "But you can't just say, 'I'm sorry, God'. Why, anyone could do that much! You have to offer reparation-concrete, practical eparation, according to the rules of our church."
"But what if there isn't any reparation? What if it's something nothing will fix?"
"Well, that's where Jesus comes in, of course."
Another itchy word: Jesus. Ian averted his eyes.
"Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be," Reverend Emmett told him. "He helps with what you can't undo. But only after you've tried to undo it."⁸

Reverend Emmett goes on to tell Ian that God's test for him is to be willing to take care of the three orphaned children, even if it means dropping out of college and giving up his plans for his life. Ian is astounded by this prospect, and so he asks:

⁷ Ibid., p. 119.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 122-123.

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"What kind of cockeyed religion is this?"
"It's the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness," Reverend Emmett said. "It's the religion of the Second Chance."⁹

Ian accepts Reverend Emmett's advice, perhaps because he has finally encountered a seriousness about forgiveness, even if-or especially if-it involves concrete reparation. So Ian becomes a member of the Church of the Second Chance, takes responsibility for the three children, and sets about remaking his life.

Ian comes to recognize that any forgiveness worth having ought to be linked both to repentance and a changed way of life. In so doing, he also recognizes that forgiveness is not simply, and perhaps not even determinatively, about his own guilt. It is also, and more centrally, about the brokenness the sin has created. Ian's "second chance" involves making amends for that brokenness through concrete reparation.

As part of Ian's new life, he goes to work for the deaf cabinetmaker. Ian is attracted to working with inanimate objects that, he thinks to himself, can be repaired if he messes up. Ian also envies the cabinetmaker his "insular, impervious life." Ian thus becomes an apprentice in the craft of cabinetmaking, but he does so hoping to find an insular world of inanimate objects. Such a desire signals an intensified withdrawal from the vagaries of human communication and the vulnerability of human relationships.

Ian participates fully in the Church of the Second Chance's program of Good Works, and he takes full responsibility for raising the three children. Unfortunately, Ian seems to think he ought to do these things in order to earn forgiveness. After rightly insisting to his father that Christian life requires a commitment of one's entire being, Ian mistakenly draws the wrong conclusion. The changes in his life, he tells his father, are "something I have to do for myself, to be forgiven." Rather than seeing a changed way of life as a consequence of God's forgiveness, Ian sees forgiveness as something one has to earn through an extensive penance.

Hence, when his father asks why Ian needs forgiveness, and Ian tells his parents the whole story, the confession fails to connect with his parents. It is something he announces rather distantly, rather than a confession that enables the healing of wounds. Indeed, as he leaves his parents, "for the first time it occurred to him that there was something steely and inhuman to this religion business." All he has left is to go and do things like throw away his Playboy magazine. In the meantime, the only change in his relationships-especially his interior life-seems to be a marked deterioration in their quality.

In part, this is the problem of the Church of the Second Chance. It rightly emphasizes the disciplines of holy living, stressing that Christian faith involves a way of life-not simply empty words or proselytiz-

⁹ Ibid., p. 124.

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ing. Yet those disciplines are separated from the work of Christ whose forgiveness gives those disciplines their intelligibility and prevents them from becoming forms of self-punishment. Reverend Emmett had been determined to found "a church without symbols, a church without baptism or communion where only the real things mattered and where the atonement must be as real as the sin itself." Further, The Church of the Second Chance seems to be concerned only with right actions independent of a person's interior life-their thoughts and feelings.

Consequently, Ian is more sanctimonious than sanctified. He has been leading an "upright" life in his actions, but it has made him more distant from others-including himself. He even finds himself resenting the children, and he begins a futile search for the father of the first two of Lucy's children. He had known that taking care of the children would not be easy; at the same time, however, he wonders why his life-and specifically his sense of guilt-has not shown considerable improvement. "But then why didn't he feel forgiven? Why didn't he, after all these years of penance, feel that God had forgiven him?"

During one worship service, in the midst of the time called "Amending" where people confess serious sins to the whole congregation and discuss all possible methods of atonement, Ian's thoughts wander. He leaves unspoken the thought that troubles him the most, thinking that to leave it unspoken is to practice righteousness (since only actions, not thoughts, count as sin).

I've been atoning and atoning, and sometimes lately I've hated God for taking so long to forgive me. Some days I feel I'm speaking into a dead telephone. My words are knocking against a blank wall. Nothing comes back to show I've been heard.¹⁰

As a result, despite Ian's best efforts, his life remains a mess.

Indeed Ian finds that his life is, in some sense, getting darker and darker. When an older woman comments that "lately it seems the whole world has passed on," Ian thinks to himself that "It did seem that way, at times. At times, it really did." In the midst of this darkness, Reverend Emmett tells Ian to view his burden as a gift. Ian assumes the burden must be the children, but Reverend Emmett tells him that he is mistaken. The burden is that Ian must learn to forgive his brother and sister-in-law.

Ian takes a step forward in recognizing that forgiving and being forgiven are inextricably interrelated. But the focus is still on Ian's efforts, Ian's good works. As Ian concludes his conversation with Reverend Emmett, he feels that he is "an arrow-not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end." But the focus is still on the human effort to reach God, rather than God's effort through Christ to reach human beings. Despite Ian's recurring

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 201.

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avowals that the Church of the Second Chance had "saved" his life, it is not clear that Ian's life has been saved at all-for he still seems to be trying to earn God's salvation.

In the process, Ian has become very cautious in his life. It is difficult, Ian thinks, to discern when something is a moral decision and when it is scar tissue. But in either case, Ian is living primarily to avoid making mistakes. He is derided by Lucy's youngest child, Daphne, as "King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe." And isn't that part of Ian's problem? Shouldn't God's grace enable one to embrace the future with an increasing openness to new life and the risks such life entails?

Ian does discover some of that grace precisely through the ordinariness of his life. He recognizes that "You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and ... well, life." Even more, Ian discovers a sense of new life through his encounter with, and eventual marriage to, Rita-a woman hired to "unclutter" the Bedloe house.

Despite Ian's aversion to having any more children, Rita becomes pregnant. Ian begins to prepare for this change in his life, perhaps most markedly by carefully using his carpentry skills to build a cradle of fine wood for the baby. In so doing, he has to develop a new appreciation for his craft.

All his years here, he had worked with straight lines. He had deliberately stayed away from the bow-backed chairs and benches that required eye judgment, personal opinion. Now he was surprised at how these two shallow U shapes satisfied his palm.... [H]e took special pride in the cradle's nearly seamless joints, which would expand and contract in harmony and continue to stay tight through a hundred steamy summers and parched winters.¹¹

As Ian learns to use eye judgment and personal opinion in the craft of carpentry, so also does he begin to glimpse the importance of such judgment in the craft of forgiveness-and the ways that craft enables new life.

Further, Ian learns the importance of vulnerability. He had married Rita in part because she seemed invulnerable, someone who could not be harmed. Yet in the midst of Rita's labor, Ian recognizes the significance of Rita's vulnerability as she works to welcome a new baby into the world. Shortly thereafter, Joshua Bedloe utters his first cries as he enters a world no longer marked so much by Ian's sense of darkness as by a newly found light.

The novel concludes with Ian descending the stairs of the Bedloe house, carrying Joshua in his arms.

He was halfway down the stairs when he felt a kind of echo effect-a memory just beyond his reach. He paused, and Danny stepped forward to present his firstborn. "Here she is!" he said. But then the moment slid sideways like a phonograph needle skipping a groove, and all at once it

¹¹ Ibid., p. 315.

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was Lucy he was presenting. "I'd like you to meet the woman who's changed my life," he said. His face was very solemn but Lucy was smiling. "Your what?" she seemed to be saying. "Your, what was that? Oh, your life." And she tipped her head and smiled. After all, she might have said, this was an ordinary occurrence. People changed other people's lives every day of the year. There was no call to make such a fuss about it.¹²

People do change other people's lives every day of the year. But whereas some of those changes bring about cycles of despair, violence, and vengeance that destroy life, there are also changes that bring about joys and the possibilities of new life. Ian's own life is marked by the transition from changes that destroy to changes with Rita and now Joshua that bear the promise of new life-or so we are left to hope.

But even more importantly, in that final scene Ian is able to remember the faces of those against whom he has sinned. No longer is he overwhelmed by their death; he is able to remember their lives. Through such remembering, Ian shows an acceptance of forgiveness. As Rowan Williams has described the relationship between forgiveness and memory:

The formulation, "Repent and believe," stresses that God's forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and "return" to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are, It is the process in which memory becomes my memory, the memory of a self with a story of responsibility. And to remember in this way is to have restored to me part of the self that I have diminished.¹³

Or, as Williams puts it later:

If forgiveness is liberation, it is also a recovery of the past in hope, a return of memory, in which what is potentially threatening, destructive, despair-inducing, in the past is transfigured into the ground of hope.¹⁴

In this light, a sign of Ian's discovery of forgiveness is his ability to remember the past in a way that provides hope rather than despair.

To be sure, Ian has a great deal still to learn about the craft of forgiveness. His experiences with Rita, and with the birth of Joshua, more likely reflect a "secular parable" about God's forgiveness than a specifically Christian articulation.¹⁵ It is unclear whether Ian will be able to identify how his newfound sense of "eye judgment," vulnerability and the grace of the particular, and the recovery of the past in hope are linked to a more adequate understanding of the craft of forgiveness.

¹² Ibid., p. 337.
¹³ Rowan Williams, Resurrection (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982) pp. 19-20.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 32.
¹⁵ I take the notion of "secular parables" from Karl Barth. See Church Dogmatics IV/3.1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961). For provocative treatments of Barth's account, see Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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II

I have retold the story of Ian in Saint Maybe both because of its explorations of the problems of forgiveness and for its glimpses of the possibilities of a more adequate account. The novel depicts quite powerfully the dangers of fragmentary conceptions of forgiveness-and, more specifically, it exposes the ways in which diverse Christian traditions have tended to distort the overall significance of forgiveness. So, for example, Ian rather quickly recognizes the inadequacy of many "mainline" American churches' attempts to rely on a sentimentalized, therapeutic conception of forgiveness grounded primarily-if not exclusively-in the words spoken and sung in worship.

Such words and music are important, but they too easily become simply a way to try to make people feel better rather than engaging in the craft of remaking people's lives as a response to God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ. This is particularly the case when the words and music become detached from specific friendships and practices of Christian life-practices such as baptism, eucharist, confession, and accountable discipleship.

But Ian also learns-albeit more slowly and painfully-the dangers of trying to earn God's forgiveness through reparation and atonement. The Church of the Second Chance, and those who stress the (theo)logical centrality of penance, confuse and/or conflate Christ's atonement and our response to that atonement. Contrary to Reverend Emmett's advice, our lives ought not to be understood as atonement for sin.¹⁶

This mistaken notion creates Ian's hope, and eventual despair, of finding God's forgiveness simply by doing things. When the disciplines of Christian life are detached from the larger christological narrative, and more specifically from the practices of Christian life that recall that narrative-for example, baptism, eucharist, the interpretation of Scripture-then they all too easily invite either self-righteousness or self-despair. As a result, rather than God's forgiveness enabling the recovery of the past in hope and thus new life in Christian community, people remain trapped in their own sin.

Tyler's novel is powerful in pointing out both of those destructive tendencies: a sentimentalized, cheap forgiveness on the one hand and a rigorist attempt to earn forgiveness on the other. In so doing, the novel also implicitly criticizes conceptions of the consequences of sin and the importance of confession that are too often found within Christian life and thought.

Ian understands the consequences of his sin primarily in terms of guilt rather than the brokenness of human relationships. That is why he is so surprised by Reverend Emmett's conviction that forgiveness is not as easy as Ian supposes it to be. There are three orphaned children

¹⁶ And, on this point, see also some of John Milbank's formulations of "atonement" in an important essay about the relationships among christology, ecclesiology, and forgiveness. See "The Name of Jesus: Incarnation, Atonement, Ecclesiology" Modern Theology 7/4 (July 1991), pp. 311-333.

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who need a family. But Ian does not fully understand the significance of sin as brokenness, for he is unable to see how his efforts at reparation end up only exacerbating the brokenness of his relationships with others-including himself.

Thus, Ian also finds it difficult to confess his sin in a way that enables truthful community rather than destroys relationships and lives. He recognizes the importance of confession, both to "unburden" his own conscience and to test his reading of the situation with others. But Ian initially finds it difficult to do so, primarily because his family and girlfriend do not want to bear the burden of bad news. Or, more strongly put, they might not want to face the truth of what Ian has done.

Ian begins to make progress when he finally succeeds in confessing to Reverend Emmett what he has done. But because of the Church of the Second Chance's confusion about the relationship between sin and forgiveness, Ian's confession does not really enable the healing of wounds and the renewal of community. Indeed when he attempts to confess to his parents after his initial encounter with Reverend Emmett, Ian concludes that this religion can be a "steely and inhuman business." And such inhumanity is a reflection of the self-righteousness and self-punishment (which, after all, are mirror-images of each other) of Christian discipline without the presupposition of forgiveness. That is why people's lives and relationships are so easily destroyed when confession is seen primarily as an act designed to earn forgiveness rather than (as it should be) a practice integral to the craft of responding to God's grace through lives of forgiving and being forgiven.

Thus far I have suggested ways in which Saint Maybe offers important criticisms of the tendencies to fragment our conceptions of forgiveness. The novel also offers glimpses of a more adequate account of forgiveness. As I have already hinted in the above analysis (and in the title of the essay), those glimpses are best seen in relation to Ian's developing appreciation for the craft of woodworking.¹⁷

As Ian learns to attend to the particulars of woodworking, he also begins to recognize the importance of the particular in human life. More specifically, he is better able to recognize the significance of particular human lives-and the vulnerabilities of human relationships and human communication. The craft of making a cradle, attending to the bows and bends, helps Ian prepare to recognize the bows and bends of life. He is thus enabled to embrace Rita's vulnerabilities (and his own) as they welcome a baby's new life into their midst. Through such attention to the particular, and specifically the particular other, Ian is drawn out of himself and drawn into the possibilities of new life and new relationships. He is able to see his particular past, and to accept forgiveness for it, in a way that enables hope for new life.

¹⁷ For a similar account of forgiveness which draws on analogies with the craft of woodworking, see George Eliot's novel Adam Bede.

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This new life, these new relationships, serve as the beginning of a "secular parable" for the Christian understanding of forgiveness and reconciliation wrought by Jesus's cross and resurrection. We ought not to denigrate the significance of forgiveness and new life wherever it is found; but we also need to identify its source and full context if we are to be able to discern authentic forgiveness from its simulacra. As Rowan Williams has suggested,

The challenging and saving presence of Jesus may be encountered in many places-wherever authentic and creative forgiveness occurs and is seen to occur. But the Church is able to say explicitly where this forgiveness has its source, what it is that definitively interprets and locates forgiveness: the resurrection of the crucified.¹⁸

In order so "to say explicitly where this forgiveness has its source," however, Christians need to be able to interpret, proclaim, and embody the whole Gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation. And that requires recovering the friendships and practices that enable us to embody forgiveness and reconciliation and come to terms with our own capacities for sin and violence.

III

While a full understanding of the Christian account of forgiveness can not be developed here, I do want to draw, from themes in Saint Maybe, some suggestions about what would be involved in thinking about Christian forgiveness as, in response to God's forgiveness, the crafting of renewed communal life.

First, this account suggests that the focus of God's forgiveness in Christ is less on a word that is spoken to assuage guilt and more on a transformation of relationships-with God and with other human beings. As such, it does not aim to try and "undo" a past that, after all, cannot be undone-as Ian learns rather painfully. Rather, it aims to provide a healing of the brokenness of the past so as to enable new and renewed community in the future.

But such healing takes time, requires discernment, and ultimately requires a willingness to learn to speak the gospel of reconciliation. This is attributed to the work of the Spirit, whose task is to guide, to judge, and to enable Christian communities to appropriate Christ's forgiveness. As Williams suggests, "In the resurrection community, the fellowship of the Spirit, the creative and sustaining power of God is shown to be identical with the compassion and forgiveness that renews and reconstitutes the relations of human beings with each other."¹⁹

From this perspective, Christian life is an ongoing communal activity of learning, by the power of the Spirit, to live into the forgiveness that characterizes our relation to the Father as that has been restored by Christ. And we engage in such learning through such communal practices as baptism, eucharist, the ongoing interpretation of Scripture,

¹⁸ Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p. 62.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 71.

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hospitality to strangers, and love of enemies. That is why Reverend Emmett's attempt to found a church without symbols or rituals, such as baptism or eucharist, results in a distorted conception of the atonement, Christian forgiveness, and even the disciplines of Christian life.

Further, the Spirit enables people to learn to speak a new and renewed language. Ian experiences all too easily the destructive power of words. And so he seeks the insularity of inanimate objects, and mistakenly thinks that a deaf person is immune from the vagaries of human communication. But for communication to survive the perils of words, the solution is not to retreat from words. Rather, it requires the recovery of a language, the recovery of words that are appropriate to the Word whose resurrection promises new life and renewed community. Again Williams's observation is instructive. With regard to Christian speech, he notes:

There is not one moment of dumbness or loss followed by fluency, but an unending flow back and forth between speech and silence; and if at each stage the silence and the loss and emptiness become deeper and more painful, so at each stage the recovered language is both more spare and more richly charged.²⁰

When we attend to the particulars of people's lives and specific situations, including rather horrifying evils and destructiveness, we continually need to learn-hopefully, by the power of the Spirit-when to be silent, when to speak, and how to speak so that forgiveness and reconciliation may be advanced.

Finally, then, we are in a position to see how and why confession is an important practice of Christian community. When it is bound up with other practices such as those named above, confession links our ability to tell the truth about ourselves-both as praise and in penitence-to God's forgiveness and the promise of community. We learn how to confess both our faith and our sin in the friendships and practices of a community that knows that forgiven-ness, and not self-righteousness or self-punishment or penance or vengeance, is the first and defining mark of Christian life.

If, and insofar as, Christians are able to recognize that forgiveness is a way of life rather than a simple word to assuage guilt, then we will be on our way to embodying the wholeness of the gospel through mastering the craft of forgiveness. As such, as those whose lives are identified in the liturgy as "forgiven and reconciled people," Christians will not need the caution of a "Saint Maybe." For then we will be able to discern more clearly our own calling to be the saints of God, witnessing to God's forgiving and reconciling love.²¹

²⁰ Ibid., p. 73.
²¹ This essay originated as the 1992-93 Winslow Lecture at Allegheny College. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Cartwright and the Department of Religious Studies for the invitation to deliver the lecture and to the members of the audience for their stimulating and engaging responses.