April 30, 2004

• For various reasons I've been thinking about forgiveness lately.

  My mom, you see, started up this program at her church, where mentally-challenged folks can come and hang out once a week, and their caretakers can go do things as if they had a normal life. And part of what they're doing is to teach these folks about theology. It'd make an interesting doctoral thesis to analyze what they've been able to teach and how and why and so forth, but I won't go into my observations about that here.

  The point is is that she asked me in an email: How do you teach someone who is deficient in 'theory of mind' to forgive other people? 'Theory of mind' is the ability to imagine what's on someone else's mind, or what emotional state they might be in, so if you lack it, you're going to have a hard time understanding that someone who was just mean to you is now sorry and wants to make friends.

  For various and sundry reasons, she asked me about this in terms of Buddhism. I gave a typically pretensious non-answer:
  

  Buddhism says that true enlightenment comes through compassion, which by definition can't hold one person above another. That *could* take the form of forgiveness, though there's a certain hint of arrogance to forgiveness, where your needs are more important than another's, and you're forgiving *their* transgression, rather than seeing your own inflexibility. So the real task is to focus on one's love for the world and one's love for the other person, and move forward into the present and future. If you need to forgive, then do that, but do it with humility.

  But I got to thinking about it (one might say I perseverated on it for a while), and the next day came up with this:
  

  I was thinking that in terms of autism, forgiveness might be approached as an outcome rather than an ideal. More like a skill than a way of being. More concrete, less abstract.

  The skill of forgiveness yields an outcome of a renewal of a relationship (in the best case). My relationship with someone who has slighted me might change for the better if I forgive them, right?

  So if forgiveness is a skill, then it's also a performance. It's something you have to do. You can't simply decide that you've forgiven someone without telling them, or the relationship won't be changed.

  I think the difficulties presented by disabilities would be the communication aspect, and also being able to imagine a better future relationship. Or being able to handle the uncertainty of the *possiblity* of a renewed relationship, without knowing what it will be. I think a big part of autism is inflexibility, where a rejected forgiveness would end up being a risk not worth having taken.

  So to teach it you'd have to show that relationships could change, and that if you feel slighted by someone but still wanted to be their friend, you could forgive them. That's a lot, actually. Not many non-autistics seem to have figured it out, either.

  Another problem is that for lower functioning autistics, it might be that lots of work has gone into teaching the person that there are things that are simply wrong, and that it might be better to not forgive some people who are actually bad. Someone in that position might not be able to understand that there are times when forgiveness is appropriate and there are times when it's better to avoid bad people. The obvious hypothetical that pops into my mind is someone who has been abused, where it might be better to teach them the simple equation of avoiding abuse than the complicated one of how to forgive while still protecting themselves.

  So all this is a roundabout way to ask readers to offer their opinion on forgiveness. Are there things that are unforgiveable? Have you ever felt like a small, small person because you didn't forgive someone? Have you forgiven someone who didn't ultimately deserve it?

  Any comment appreciated, considered ones doubly so.

  • 11:08 pm
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