The Gratuity of Love (Stand Against Xenophobia Part 2)
There is something powerful about shared dialogue around difficult topics.
Perhaps this is a deeply human yearning – to thoughtfully make sense of the world around us.
“In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. Also, since you are Christ’s family, then you are Abraham’s famous ‘descendant,’ heirs according to the covenant promises.”
(Galatians 3:28-29, The Message)
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I had the privilege of joining my first Theology Reading Group this week at Stellenbosch University, a mixed group of theological faculty and graduate students who gather together every couple of weeks voluntarily during their lunch break to discuss topics of faith and culture currently impacting South African society through a theology text everyone reads. It was a robust circle of learners, both grey-haired professionals and young graduate students, bound by a common desire: to thoughtfully dialogue and listen to each other while seriously considering the impact of the recent xenophobic attacks within South Africa.
The topic this week was timely – “Forgiveness at the Limit: Impossible or Possible?,” a chapter authored by Richard Kearney for the recent book What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century?. A mouthful, for sure – and yet I found myself listening to a conversation that was thoughtful, heart-wrenching, stirring, deeply intelligent, and yet not divorced from the realities of the xenophobic struggles, and South Africa’s simmering issues with forgiveness, restitution. A common question: Is forgiveness even possible given the nature of a system such as apartheid, or the anonymity of something as disturbing as xenophobic attacks as one African attacks another? In other words, is this conversation even helpful, let alone hopeful, of producing any sort of lasting transformation within society, or is it merely another futile academic dialogue locked away firmly in the ivory tower?
Many concepts from the reading could be discussed, although Kearney’s concluding passage in particular leaps out to me from the reading, which I quote in full below:
“Cathartic narration can, Ricoeur concludes, help to make the impossible task of pardon that bit more possible without ever allowing amnesty to fall into amnesia. The past must be recollected and worked through so that we can identify what it is that we are forgiving. For if pardon is beyond reason, it is never as blind or made as Derrida suggests. And if it is mobilised by the gratuity of love – which calls for that element of extra – it is never insensitive to the logic of justice. Perhaps only a divinity could forgive indiscriminately. Even Christ, as Ricoeur notes, had to ask his father to forgive his crucifiers: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ As man alone he could not do it. Impossible for us, possible for God” (Richard Kearney, Forgiveness at the Limit: Impossible or Possible).
A few simple takeaways and a pointed challenge to you, dear readers of this blog:
Narration of one’s story, in particular the pain and brokenness experienced either individually or collectively as a people group, has the power to be deeply healing, cathartic even. This cathartic process precedes any ability for lasting forgiveness, pardon, reconciliation, and restitution to take place.
An important phrase to remember discerning how best to address the collective experience of entire populations with trauma inflicted upon them by another people group is the ginger tightrope walk of “[never] allowing amnesty to fall into amnesia.” In other words, being officially pardoned for crimes committed (amnesty) doesn’t mean that a collective loss of memory takes it’s place (amnesia), as if the evil perpetrated never took place in the first place. It did, and something in the memory of that pain – even forgiven – must never be entirely forgotten. Our collective task is to recollect (literally, to gather together again and again) and remember (again literally, to draw disparate members together again and again) what has taken place not to remain fixated upon the past, but in actuality to give justice the sensitivity and seriousness it deserves. This recollection, this remembering, over and over again, helps us to identify both victim and perpetrator as human beings first and foremost, and to return the relational foundation to that place.
What can possibly mobilise us for such a seemingly impossible task as forgiveness, something Jesus himself, the man overwhelmed in the Garden of Gethsemane, had to cry out in anguish about towards his Father in his greatest hour of need? Kearney’s provocative phrasing again: If our pardoning is “mobilized by the gratuity of love – which calls for that element of extra – it is never insensitive to the logic of justice.”
And so, to a nation still shaken by the violent xenophobic attacks and hateful rhetoric of the past few weeks, old wounds bursting open, afresh once again, may I gently suggest the following remedy:
Gather a group of friends and strangers around a table. Pour some drink and serve some food. Prayerfully, empathetically, cautiously enter into a listening posture – and only then, speak. This gratuity of love truly experienced will heal more than you know.
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“When a foreigner lives with you in your land, don’t take advantage of him. Treat the foreigner the same as a native. Love him like one of your own. Remember that you were once foreigners in Egypt. I am God, your God.”
(Leviticus 19:33-34, The Message)