“Forgiveness” from the old English forgiefan: 'for' meaning “completely” and 'giefan' meaning “to give”..Unless you've been on another planet or immersed in Netflix, you know that the Pope is in Canada this week. Yes, the head of the one billion believer Catholic church—the religious institution that draws a straight line back to St Peter and Jesus, the institution that is arguably the foundation of Western civilization—yes, that leader, has been traveling around Canada on a 'penitential pilgrimage' and in the oft repeated words of mainstream media “begging forgiveness.”.That said, looking on all these happenings has been weird. I feel embarrassed, like I don't belong in this intimate setting with the hurting and the one representing the hurtful. How can I even understand this, what gives me the right?.I look sheepishly across the aisle at the left-leaning secular media and their wall-to-wall coverage, also, and I feel like they don't belong here either. Awash in the colonialist mindset endemic to elites, they have voiced their opinion on these things already, never wasting a chance to slag the church. What are they doing here?.And then the Pope says he's begging for 'forgiveness', and I gulp. Do we even know what that word means anymore?.Remember Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? Here you had two camps – one side wanted to drag Clinton through the mud and remove him from office, no matter how many times he said, "I'm sorry". They would place his sin on him like a tonne of bricks until he breaks. His apology didn't go far enough. His act was unforgivable. Somehow they'd forgotten Sunday school..Then there was the left. They didn't see the wrong as "truly wrong" and so didn't need to forgive anything; they would gloss over the fact that he cheated on his wife and abused his office to take advantage of a young girl. They said, effectively, "Ah don't be too hard on him, we'd all do it. He's human." This side just accepted..This is the side across the aisle from me, as we watch the Pope and pretend we understand..In The Lost Highway David Adams Richards perfectly describes the left's take on forgiveness. His central character, Alex, proceeds through the process of enlightenment and enculturation at a modern university: “Then he realized something. In this new age, people were actually expressing something they might not realize. It was this: at least among the people he admired, forgiveness was no longer an essential part of man’s hope. What so many people had, as borne out by these privileged and radicalized young men and women, was one of two possible states. These two possible states were simply approval or disapproval. That is all that was required. This new unspoken proclamation went on in all departments and in all circumstances. That is, approval or disapproval had replaced justice and humanity, while posturing as the exact same laws.”.Whether you are Wendy Mesley, a forty-year veteran of the CBC who used the "n-word" and was tossed to the curb, Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, a specialist in Feminist and Critical Theory, who made the same life-altering faux pas at Ottawa U, or a white male who makes the wrong gender-related slip in this age of tolerance, our diversity class does not know forgiveness; it knows only approval or disapproval: fall out of line and you are canceled..No one gets forgiven..No, how it works these days is this: When full reparations are made that I am happy with, I might accept it. When you have included indigenous spirituality in the mass, I might accept it. When you make women priests, accept that you are subservient to the state, accept that truth and tradition are fluid. When, frankly, you are not what you are anymore, I might accept..Until then the Pope and the church he leads are under the gavel. They are sinners in the hands of an angry—and merciless—God..This week, every time someone pushed back against the apology of the Pope there was a kind of gleeful “let's-front-page-this!” reaction. When a tearful and hurting indigenous woman sang a song to the tune of O Canada and said later “I was rebuking the Pope!” it was everywhere..Pope begs. Pope gets rebuked. "He doesn't deserve forgiveness!".If that's what we're left with, we're all screwed. In all of the 94 recommendations in the Truth and Reconciliation document, forgiveness is not mentioned once..What the Pope was begging for this week was a posture antithetical to the modern leftist. Its damned hard. It requires—as he intimated—the help of God. Forgiveness is damned hard..In her essay “Forgiveness”, June Callwood, whom some have called “Canada's conscience” probes into the various approaches to the concept of forgiveness, from examples of Simon Wiesenthal and Desmond Tutu to the son who was beaten by his father for being gay. Notably, this journalist and social activist, and receiver of the Order of Canada, does not come to terms with forgiveness..She does say this, though: “Forgiveness is hard work. A woman, a devout Roman Catholic who forgave the man who tortured and killed her seven-year-old daughter said, 'Anyone who says forgiveness is for wimps hasn't tried it.' The reward for giving up scalding thoughts of reprisal is peace of mind. It is worth the candle.”.I agree...though its worth more than a candle..“Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition and therefore beset as all humankind is beset,” says Marilyn Robinson. “Rather they imagine that their defects result from their being uniquely the products of a crude system of social engineering.”.None of this fosters forgiveness..I can't ever forgive until I recognize the worst of the human condition in me..I have not arrived..At the end of the day, I think the devout, struggling survivor of those schools knows more about forgiveness than any of us smug lookers on..I think we should try another venue, though, not this stadium with the paparazzi. We need to sit around a table, perhaps have a pint, with all the other adulterers, Christ-deniers, drinkers, liars, tax-collectors, tax evaders, n-word spouters, and doubters..Prigs and Puritans though?.So glad I don't get to decide.
