Forgiveness as Ritual

I recorded a podcast Friday night with Papa on the topic of love, forgiveness, and the divine. I don’t know when it’ll be published, but some things came up during it which I am still sitting with, somewhere in the many parts of my soul. The podcast is linked in the header and footer for the site, and very worth a listen for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that these are the kinds of conversations we have, from time to time.

The conversation started with an assertion which I’ve become increasingly convinced of: that humanity has no capacity for forgiveness. We have no capacity to forget, and to let what has happened be gone instead of keeping it alive in our imaginations, in the form of history.

This lack of capacity is, in part, because we have only poor substitutes for love and absolutely no idea what love means. Those substitutes include possession, both the body of and a “paper doll” of someone in our imagination, from which we fashion our expectations.

You know you don’t have anything resembling love if you can be offended by the person, because your offense is a sign that you made expectations of them and that they did not perform as expected. You don’t know them. You just… want to play with a doll.

Divine love, to the shallow extent that I understand it, cannot be offended.

What are you gonna do to the divine that could possibly violate the divine’s expectations or cause harm to the divine?

What can you do to god?

Divine love is, instead, unstinting. Eternal. Endless. As impossible to stop as the divine itself, which is where that love comes from. Forgiveness is not a part of divine love because offense, blame, and the like are not necessary. No offense can be done to the divine.

Papa said the degree to which a human being may love and forgive is the degree to which the divine nature of the person is the greater influence on them.

I am struck how often, in ceremonies or parties, that we come needing the ritual of forgiveness. We come needing the lwa to enact for us something that expiates the energy of blame, shame, and offense which clings to us. We need them to be angry. We need them to show mercy, which is also not a part of divine love for the same reasons. I’ll probably write a post about that later.

In perfect, divine love, the lwa come to punish and act out forgiveness for us.

It’s all we understand of love.