Trespasses

This year I spent the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 in New York City.

I stayed at The House of the Redeemer, an old Vanderbilt mansion a block away from Central Park that was willed to the Episcopalian Church when the original owners died.  It features a kitchen, dining hall, chapel and library, as well as small rooms on the 3^rd and 4^th floors that guests can rent for a modest fee.

I was hoping for some writing inspiration during the weekend I was there, but instead I got the worst case of writer’s block, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.  So I spent a lot of time walking around Central Park in the warm September sunshine, praying and thinking and absorbing the New York vibe.

The first evening I was there, I walked down the spiral staircase from my room to the chapel and took a seat in the last of four pews to participate in the evening vespers service, hoping I didn’t seem too out of place in my jeans, T-shirt and ballet flats (I grew up Baptist, and we Baptists don’t have vespers services, so I wasn’t sure what to wear.)

The priest was a thin, elderly black man with a rounded British accent. There was a 40-something-year-old black man in a printed shirt and linen pants and a pasty, portly white woman in jeans in the pew in front of me. An elderly black woman with a brightly-printed turban and robes sat a few feet away from me in the last row.

We read some passages in the prayer book together, ending the service 30 minutes later on our knees, praying the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory,
for ever and ever.

At the end, I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross over my chest to remember, even if I couldn’t always stay in a room just above a chapel, even if I was in a writing dry spell, even if I stayed blocked forever and never wrote again, that I belong to God, and am living into Him always.

When the service finished, the Barbados-born priest left the chapel with his wife, the woman with the turban who’d been sitting in my pew.  The other woman followed after them.

Soon it was just me and the 40-something-year-old man left in the chapel, each of us on our knees in silent contemplation. After we finished praying, he walked over to me and introduced himself.  He was an Episcopalian priest from Rwanda who was here to deliver a sermon at a NYC cathedral to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary.

I asked him what his life was like in Rwanda, and he told me he runs a reconciliation center that unites victims and perpetrators of the recent genocide.  His job is so dangerous, he sent his wife and three children to live in Florida with relatives, and he only sees them a few times a year.

“And what are you speaking about tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’m here to tell Americans to love and to forgive,” he said.

I nodded slowly, and thought about the Lord’s Prayer we’d just recited, especially the line about being forgiven of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  I wondered how many million times that prayer’s been recited on U.S. soil, and how, in the end, we really don’t mean it.

The first Caucasian settlers who came to America in search of religious freedom ended up committing genocide against millions of Native Americans.  Under the guise of Manifest Destiny, we waged war on innocents to satisfy our greed for land, and then enslaved Africans to do all of our manual labor for free.

Hundreds of years later, we try to forget our dark past and move on toward a peaceful, democratic future.  But our current actions show we haven’t really changed.

Terrorists crashed planes and killed about 3,000 Americans on a single day – and in response we invaded a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, leaving more than 600,000 of their innocent civilians to die in the process.  In trying to seek justice (or revenge?), we also lost 6,000 of our own servicemen.

We tell the world that diverse ethnic groups in Israel and in Bosnia and in Rwanda should live together peaceably in spite of their differences – unless, of course, the ethnic groups in question are American and Mexican.  In that case, you should build a fence.

We roll our eyes and tell Sunnis and Shiites to get over it already and figure out how to run a unified government, but ask a Democrat to work with his Republican colleague and you risk being crucified by both of them.

It drives me crazy (in case you couldn’t tell), and so I stayed up late that night writing a rant about the American church’s hypocrisy.

***

This fall our church has opened the small prayer chapel behind the main auditorium for about 30 hours a week, and it’s open to anyone who wants to pray.  I went there last night to pray for the homeless and refugee populations in Portland, whom I’ve affectionately named The Invisibles.

I knelt at a table of lit candles, and started to pray for people living on the streets – our modern-day lepers whose rough appearance, drug addictions, hostile posture and mental illnesses make “normal” people want to keep their distance.  I prayed for documented and undocumented refugees who are often underserved and overlooked.

And then I thought about Richard Rohr’s admonition that we can’t truly love lepers until we come to terms with what he calls “the leper within.”  The sick, sinful soul in each of us incasts that needs Jesus just as much as the outcasts do.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I thought back to my harsh words for American foreign policy and for the cantankerous politicians at home.  And then I looked even closer to home, at myself.  At my rigid personal sense of right and wrong, at the personal offense I take up every time someone’s wronged me – even if they didn’t know it, or didn’t mean it.  At the fierce grip I hold on past hurts and scars.  At the grace I often expect but rarely extend.

When I started thinking about forgiveness in my personal life rather than in terms of institutions and nations, it became a much more difficult proposition.  To forgive like God forgives me would actually cost me something.  It would cause me pain.  It would crumble the walls that protect my fragile ego.

As I knelt at the table last night, praying for the leper within me, I prayed the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer:

Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.

Richard Rohr wrote that when he teaches people to meditate on this passage, he tells them they can’t pray “Thy Kingdom Come” without in the same breath praying, “My Kingdom Go.”

The problem is, I kind of like my kingdom.  Violent people who commit heinous crimes, people who cause me pain, snooty socialites and corrupt politicians get put in their place, while victims and myself and everyone I like make out pretty well.  But to let my kingdom go is painful.  It means acknowledging that God loves blowhards on Capitol Hill as much as He loves me.  That He invites both perpetrators and victims of violence to Himself.  That He wants me to forgive people who’ve hurt my feelings as much as He wants warring ethnic groups in Rwanda to reconcile.

Letting our kingdom go is one of the most difficult things God calls His followers to do, but in the end, it’s the key that opens the door to forgiveness.  It’s when we let go of our kingdom that all of us – the lepers, the homeless, the hijackers, the marginalized, the jihadists, the abused, the churchgoers – have the opportunity to experience the mercy of Kingdom Come.