Loving Your Neighbor in an Age of Compassion Fatigue

It has been a rough ten years. Last month we marked the anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. Subsequently we saw the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We have been assaulted by images of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was the Indian Ocean Tsunami. And massive earthquakes in Haiti, Pakistan, China. More recently, there was the earthquake and tsunami in Japan with the resulting damage to nuclear facilities. Many of us have watched many of these events unfold before our eyes either live or nearly live. In addition to all of this, over the last three years or so, we have been confronted with a global and national – not to mention, personal – financial crisis.

Add on the stories we each know of family, neighbors, friends, and fellow church members who are struggling with disease, family issues, work difficulties, etc. and it all starts to feel overwhelming.

Even if you are not in the midst of such troubles yourself, knowing about them can become a cumulative burden on your spirit.

I wonder if this isn’t a main contributing factor to the sense I get from talking to people that many of us feel harassed by life.

Information technology and social networking mean we are more connected than ever to the rest of the world. This means we are aware of more pain, suffering, and disappointment than ever.

It takes a toll. I wonder id our whole society isn’t experiencing a mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Or more accurately, perhaps, the related condition of “compassion fatigue”. Compassion fatigue has traditionally been associated with people in the helping professions – doctors, nurses, therapists, police officers, social workers, etc. But, with the increased connectivity and access to images and information, I think it has become more generalized.

The symptoms are:
•disturbed sleep
•intrusive thoughts (unwelcome involuntary thoughts, images, or unpleasant ideas that may become obsessions, are upsetting or distressing, and can be difficult to manage or eliminate)
•irritability
•outbursts of anger
•impatience
•hyper-vigilance (constant scanning of the environment for threats)
•and a desire to avoid people who we know are hurting or who you know will disturb your equilibrium.

Sound familiar? I suspect many of us have experienced several of these over the last few years. And they seem pervasive in our society. I suspect that this explains in part the increased polarization we see all around us. It also explains the pervasive cynicism, anger, and hopelessness.

Some researchers have suggested that all of this leads to a sort of “psychic numbness” that diminishes our ability to engage those around us and the world with compassion. We are tempted to resort to a hunker down mentality and become insular or to throw up our hands in resignation that nothing can change for the good.

And yet, as Christians, we must resist this tendency even as we acknowledge its reality and power. In his summary of the Law, Jesus enjoins us to, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That is a call to compassion, a call to care. How might we respond to that call while avoiding compassion fatigue?

Let us first of all admit that loving our neighbor is not always easy. Not just because some neighbors are hard to love, but because of the nature of love itself. To love someone means to make ourselves available to them –available to their hopes and joys, their need and their fear. That also means we make ourselves vulnerable to their hurt and sorrow. That is the inevitable consequence of love. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. . . . It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The cumulative effect of that vulnerability is what leads to compassion fatigue.

How do we avoid becoming weary or cynical or withdrawing into our own small private worlds? How do we continue to be available and vulnerable in love toward our neighbor in an age of compassion fatigue?

• I suggest it begins with the first commandment – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart mind and soul.” When we orient everything in our heart, mind, and life toward God who is working all for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28) the hard realities in our lives and the world around us are put in perspective. We love God first of all because God is worthy of love. But, because we are made for that love, orienting our lives toward the love at the heart of it all is the foundation of our health and strength.

• Make it a priority to carve out time each day for plant yourself next to streams of living water as the psalmist encourages us this morning (Psalm 1). That means pray. Certainly pray about the things that concern you. But I encourage you to practice the prayer of silence. Be still and know that the Lord is God (Psalm 46:10). Listen for the still small voice of God. Calm and quiet your soul, like a child quieted at its mother's breast (Psalm 131:2)

• And don’t just pray alone. Do not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some, but come to worship where we reorient ourselves toward God and encourage one another” (Hebrews 10:25).

• Keep Sabbath. Take extended time to rest and focus your attention on God. Try this. On Sundays, do not watch the news, do not go on the internet, and rest from the worries of the world. God will continue to tend the world while you rest. Do something restorative – read, walk in the woods, exercise, knit, make something, etc. Some researchers suggest that our capacity for compassion is finite and will become depleted if not restored. Among other things, Sabbath is a means of restoring that capacity.

• Acknowledge your own vulnerability. You are a limited, finite creature. You are not God. Only God, who is love, can be infinitely available and vulnerable in love. Our capacity for compassion is limited and can become drained. You cannot give all of yourself all the time to everyone. And sometimes it is OK and necessary to step back for a time. Know when you’ve had enough.

• Remember that God bears it all and bears it with you. You are not alone. Jesus said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." The burden is light because he bears it with you.

• Do what you can and trust the rest to God. Focus your care. Again this is part of accepting our creatureliness. We cannot do everything everywhere. So it helps to decide what we can do and focus on that. Our involvement with the Sudan is an example of this. We cannot address all the needs of the world or even I the Sudan. But, God has placed the people of Renk and Maban in our path and we can do some things for them. And doing that allows us to trust God to rise up others to care for Haiti, Japan, or elsewhere. Doing something somewhere also frees us from despairing of feeling helpless. This is true locally and personally as well. If we are careful not to take on more than we can manage, we can manage, with God’s help, what we are called to take on. In doing so, we can still remain open to People and situations that aren’t already on our radar while discerning what we are called to do and letting go of the rest.

• Find someone to talk to about the hard stuff but who will encourage you. “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). “Bear one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:1).

• Don’t dwell on the negative. Don’t allow yourself to get in a rut of rehearsing all that is bad in the world or the wrongs that have been done to you. “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things (Philippians 4:8).

• End each day naming the good – in your own life and in the world. Give thanks to God for at least three three things. “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Jesus enjoins us to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is difficult and perilous thing as we make ourselves available and vulnerable to caring in a world full of tragedy and disappointment. But, by the grace of Christ’s Spirit working in us and through us we can continue to love our neighbor even in an age of compassion fatigue.

Love your neighbor

"The Christian path is a slow and often painful schooling under the tutelage of Christ, as we learn to welcome the nearness of one neighbor after another."
p. 34

Jesus said, "`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Matthew 22:27-40

"We belong to Jesus completely, in body as well as spirit, because he has become our neighbor through his own radical availability, even at the price of his own life: 'You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body' (1 Corinthians 6:20). But if we belong to Jesus, then we also belong to one another: we cannot have Jesus as our neighbor without also having each other. The Christian task, then, is to find the appropriate ways to live out the fact that we do not belong to ourselves alone. The Christian life is shaped by this challenge and to address it is to devote oneself to the 'affairs of the Lord' (1 Corinthians 7:22)." p. 50

"Our availability to one another can be very frightening, even in the light of the gospel. But we find our help in Jesus, who is God’s yes to our nearness and its sanctification. We profess belief in a savior who drew near to us and suffered the abuses to which that nearness exposed him. The purpose of the Incarnation was not to rescue us from nearness or from the body, but to set our nearness right. Through the Incarnation the Word of God has become our neighbor. As our neighbor, Jesus reveals to us what nearness looks like when it is not corrupted by sin, and bestows on everyone who receives him the experience of a redeemed and justified nearness. We are encouraged by this experience to begin, not naively yet with hope, to embrace our nearness with one another." p. 31

Except for the passage from Matthew, the quotes are from Christian Households: The Sanctification of Nearness by Thomas Breidenthal (now Bishop of Southern Ohio)

C. S. Lewis on Roman Catholicism & Anglicanism

A couple of years ago, the Pope proposed an "Anglican Ordinariate" (Anglicanorum Coetibus) making it easier for disaffected Episcopalians to become Roman Catholic by allowing such "converts" to maintain some Anglican forms of worship. At the time, someone asked me, somewhat tongue in cheek, if I was considering taking the pope up on his offer. I replied that I wasn't, because, among other things, I could not accept as formal dogma some of the Roman church's recent theological innovations, e.g., the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854), Papal Infallibility (1870), and the Assumption of Mary (1950). Of course, this was intentionally impish given that the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion more generally, has sometimes been accused of theological innovation. There is much that I appreciate about Roman Catholicism and have benefited greatly from reading R. C. scholars, theologians, and writers on prayer and spirituality. And, frustrated as I am sometimes with some tendencies in the Episcopal Church, it has its attractions. Still, there are parts of the package I cannot bring myself to accept. I am in many ways a catholic minded Anglican. But, there is more than one way to be catholic.

I was thinking about this as I read an entry on Anglican vs. Roman ways of being "catholic" at The Curates Desk, a fine blog by Fr. Robert Hendrickson of Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut.

I was also reminded of this letter from C. S. Lewis to a correspondent enquiring about his views of the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church (I have spelled out some words Lewis abbreviated):

My position about the Churches can best be made plain by an imaginary example. Suppose I want to find out the correct interpretation of Plato’s teaching. What I am most confident in accepting is that interpretation which is common to all Platonists down all the centuries: What Aristotle and the Renaissance scholars and Paul Elmer More agree on I take to be true Platonism. Any purely modern views which claim to have discovered for the first time what Plato meant and say that everyone from Aristotle down has misunderstood him I reject out of hand.

But there is something else I would also reject. If there were an ancient Platonic Society existing at Athens and claiming to be the exclusive trustees of P’s meaning, I should approach them with great respect. But if I found that their teaching in many ways was curiously unlike his actual text and unlike what ancient interpreters said, and in some cases could not be traced back to within 1000 years of his time, I should reject these exclusive claims: while still needing, of course, to take any particular thing they thought on its merits.

I do the same with Christianity. What is certain is the vast mass of doctrine which I find agreed on by scripture, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, modern Roman Catholics, modern Protestants. That is true ‘catholic’ doctrine. Mere ‘modernism’ I reject at once.

The Roman Church where it differs from this universal tradition and specifically from apostolic Christianity I reject. Thus their theology about the B. V. M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] I reject because it seems utterly foreign to the New Testament: where indeed the words ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee’ receive a rejoinder pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Their papalism seems equally foreign to the attitude of St. Paul towards St. Peter in the epistles. The doctrine of Transubstantiation insists in defining in a way which the New Testament seems to me not to countenance. In a word, the whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is. I must therefore reject their claims: though this does not mean rejecting particular things they way.

. . .

Hooker (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity) is to me the great formulation of Anglicanism. But the great point is that in one sense there is no such thing as Anglicanism. What we are committed to believe is whatever can be proved from Scripture. On that issue there is room for endless progress.

From a letter to Lyman Stebbins, May 8, 19454 in The Collected letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol 2. (the recipient become R.C. anyway)

I mostly agree with Lewis. His approach is my default position. But, I wonder if it is altogether possible or desirable for a church to avoid all innovation or development in theological or biblical understanding. Lewis himself notoriously rejected the idea of one innovation, the ordination of women, which I accept as a faithful extension of the gospel. And this is something the Roman church rejects as well.

Perhaps the question is not simply whether or not innovation is faithful, but which innovations are faithful, how is their faithfulness discerned, how are they adopted once discerned, and where does the authority lie to do so? The Roman Catholic Church has some relatively clear answers to those questions. The lack of clear answers to those questions is straining the "bonds of affection" in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

If Necessary Use Words

Today is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the much-loved, but often sentimentalized and misrepresented saint. The phrase, "Preach the gospel everywhere; if necessary use words," is often ascribed to Francis. It's a popular phrase. The problem is, there is no eveidence Francis said it.

Of course the wisdom of that particular saying does not depend upon its source. And I do not think it is without wisdom. Many of us have been on the receiving end of words spoken in the name of the gospel by someone whose life or attitude did not "preach" the gospel. Our lives must bear witness to the good news of Jesus before our words about that good news can make any sense. But to suggest that the gospel can be preached without ever using words is deceptive. We ought to be able to tell the Story that makes the story of our lives make sense. That requires words as well as actions.

If we use this saying attributed to St. Francis as an excuse to never speak words of the gospel to others, it is rather like saying, as one wag has it, "Feed the hungry; if necessary use food."

And if we attribute only this saying to Francis, we will misrepresent the fact that he, himself, actually used words -- and used them boldly -- to preach the gospel.

Here is a story from the life of Francis of Assisi (emphasis mine):

The people of Gubbio, a town north of Assisi, were troubled by a huge wolf that attacked not only animals but people, so that the men had to arm themselves before going outside the town walls. They felt as if Gubbio were under siege.

Francis decided to help, though the local people, fearing for his life, tried to dissuade him. What chance could an unarmed man have against a wild animal with no conscience? But according to the Fioretti, the principal collection of stories of the saint’s life,

Francis placed his hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, master of all creatures. Protected neither by shield or helmet, only arming himself with the sign of the Cross, he bravely set out of the town with his companion, putting his faith in the Lord who makes those who believe in him walk without injury on an asp… and trample not merely on a wolf but even a lion and a dragon.

Some local peasants followed the two brothers, keeping a safe distance. Finally the wolf saw Francis and came running, as if to attack him. The story continues:

The saint made the sign of the Cross, and the power of God… stopped the wolf, making it slow down and close its cruel mouth. Then Francis called to it, “Brother Wolf, in the name of Jesus Christ, I order you not to hurt me or anyone.”

The wolf then came close to Francis, lowered its head and then lay down at his feet as though it had become a lamb. Francis then censured the wolf for its former cruelties, especially for killing human beings made in the image of God, thus making a whole town into its deadly enemy.

“But, Brother Wolf, I want to make peace between you and them, so that they will not be harmed by you any more, and after they have forgiven you your past crimes, neither men nor dogs will pursue you anymore.”

The wolf responded with gestures of submission “showing that it willingly accepted what the saint had said and would observe it.”

Francis promised the wolf that the people of Gubbio would henceforth “give you food every day as long as you shall live, so that you will never again suffer hunger.” In return, the wolf had to give up attacking both animal and man. “And as Saint Francis held out his hand to receive the pledge, the wolf also raised its front paw and meekly and gently put it in Saint Francis’s hand as a sign that it had given its pledge.”

Francis led the wolf back into Gubbio, where the people of the town met them in the market square. Here Francis preached a sermon in which he said calamities were permitted by God because of our sins and that the fires of hell are far worse than the jaws of a wolf, which can only kill the body. He called on the people to do penance in order to be “free from the wolf in this world and from the devouring fire of hell in the next world.” He assured them that the wolf standing at his side would now live in peace with them, but that they were obliged to feed him every day. He pledged himself as “bondsman for Brother Wolf.”

(as told by Jim Forest in The Ladder of the Beatitudes, p. 116-117)

Holiness and the Spiral Dance of the Liturgy

Over at Haligweorc, Derek Olsen poses some interesting questions. He writes, "In the Hebrew Bible, worship is intimately related to encountering the holiness of God and its potentially lethal consequences. Not only can worshiping the wrong way (Numbers 16) or wearing the wrong clothes at worship (Exodus 28:1-43) get you killed, merely touching holy things even for a good purpose can get you killed too (2 Samuel 6:6-7)."

"The biblical text contains a strong sense of holiness as a tangible power—a potentially deadly power. As has been written here before, early medieval Christianity also nurtured a strong sense of holiness as tangible power no doubt drawn from these biblical texts."

Olsen asks these questions:

"What do we do with it? I think most often we dismiss these narratives and write them off as either 1) primitive perspectives reflecting a view of God we don’t believe in any more, or 2) manipulative texts written by a privileged group who use tales of divine punishment as a means of bolstering their own hegemony."

"Are those the only two options? Should we expect more from our encounters with holiness?"

I think these are good questions. My response is that 1) and 2) are not the only two options. Nor do I think they are particularly good ones. As Derek implies we should expect something more from encounters with holiness than I suspect we typically do. But just what should we expect from such an encounter?

I don't know. And that is why it is so unnerving. Among other things, God's holiness is about the otherness of the divine. It is an otherness that confounds all our efforts to make God useful for our personal or public agendas. It is an otherness that confounds our every presumption. It is an otherness that also confounds our tendency to create domesticated idols of God. As C. S. Lewis famously wrote of Aslan, God is good, but not tame. In fact it is the absolute goodness of God that is another wild, unpredictable, unnerving aspect of God's holiness. What I do expect from ecountering the holiness of God is transformation. Indeed, only transformation will make any of us able to bear it.

Whatever we make of the passages from the Old Testament referenced above, they remind us that God is not our heavenly buddy. Nor is God a warm, fuzzy, spiritual affirmation of our perceptions of our own inherent swellness. When we encounter the holiness of God we encounter an awe-full Power, Goodness, and Beauty. Over and over again in the biblical record those who encounter it respond with fear. We do well not to take it lightly.

And it is not only about being sinners in the hands of an angry God. Our sinfulness does make us unable to bear the presence of the Good. But, also, fragile as we are, we cannot endure the presence of the Power. And, weak as we are, the glory and splendor of the Beauty is unbearable. I suspect that even without the problem of sin, we would have to be transfigured just to bear the Beauty of God. I think Dante is onto something in the Paradiso. Beatrice, now among the blessed, has been transformed and "transhumanized" by grace and incorporated into the presence of God. She has been "inGodded". Because she now has taken on some of the glory, she withholds her smile from Dante because the sheer, awesome beauty and joy of it would burn him to a heap of ashes. But Beatrice also represents the promise that we too can be transfigured to bear and enjoy the holy presence of God.

To be sure, as the author of Hebrews assures us, in Jesus we have a High Priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses, and one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. So, we can with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15-16). But the same author also warns, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31) and says, "let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:28-29).

Here is something I have posted before about how the liturgy recognizes this:

It is sometimes suggested that since the Eucharistic table is God’s table it is not for us to decide who can participate. But, given the logic of the liturgy, one might more reasonably suggest, that because it is God’s table, we should not be glib in our own participation nor in inviting others to participate. Indeed, one might wonder if an open invitation is not more presumptuous in its certainty of our own adequate knowledge and goodness, or at the very least, that it presumes a particularly cheap grace. It suggests a notion of God that is altogether domesticated and sentimental.

Annie Dillard famously warns against presuming that God is tame:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
- Teaching a Stone to Talk

If, as we often claim, we “believe what we pray” (lex orandi, lex credendi – the rule of prayer is the rule of belief), we would do well to attend to the logic of the liturgy which suggests a certain caution in coming to the Lord’s Table. As Moses drew near to the strange sight of the burning bush, he was commanded to remove his sandals for he was on holy ground. Just so, symbolically, as we move through the Eucharistic liturgy, we stop periodically to remind ourselves that we are approaching holy ground and that doing so is an awesome thing. The One into whose presence we are coming is awe-inspiring and, while not wholly unknown, remains a mystery beyond our comprehension. We are aware that in our ignorance, we are like children playing with nitroglycerine. We are also aware of our failure to live lives of love and truth and trust, and thus of the distance between us and God. The Exhortation found before the Rite of Holy Communion found in the Book of Common Prayer warns against coming to the Eucharistic table unprepared.

The liturgy is like an elaborate spiral dance in which we symbolically circle around and around the altar drawing closer and closer to the great mystery of the Eucharist. At intervals along this spiral dance, we stop to "take off our sandals" and acknowledge our ignorance and sinfulness. And we ask for God’s mercy as we proceed deeper into the holy mystery. In the Collect for Purity, we ask God to cleanse the thoughts of out hearts that we may perfectly love God and worthily magnify his holy Name. And we dance a little closer. Then we sing the Gloria, the Kyrie, or the Trisagion; each of which asks again for God’s mercy. And we dance a little closer. After hearing God’s word read and proclaimed, we confess our sins against God and our neighbor and receive the promise of God’s forgiveness. We exchange the peace, recognizing that we cannot go to the altar of the Prince of Peace unless we are being and making peace. And we dance a little closer. In the Sanctus we declare that we know that the one in whose presence we are is holy. And we dance a little closer. Before the breaking of the bread, we say the Lord’s Prayer in which we again ask for forgiveness. And we dance a little closer. Again and again, we acknowledge that we do not really know what we are up to, that the One with whom we are dealing is holy, and that we are ignorant, sinful and broken people in need of mercy. By God’s amazing grace we are invited and encouraged to “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). But that confidence is born in baptism and is not the same as presumption. Our liturgy reminds us that we are all always in need of mercy if we are to gather in the Presence.

As "stewards of the mysteries of God" 1 Corinthians 4:1), it is indeed the Church's vocation to see that those who come to those mysteries are sufficiently aware of what they are doing and assure that they are prepared through initiation into those mysteries via baptism.

More on Forgiveness from Charles Williams

Last week I posted an extened quote from Charles Williams' essay on The Forgivenss of Sins. I like Williams. Reading him regularly conjures the feeling of Christmas. Here are two more quotes from the same essay, which can be found here.

Forgivenesss is not normally a thrilling or an exciting thing. The metaphor which our Lord used has a particular aptness--it is the taking up, the carrying, the Cross, not the being crucified: it is the intolerable weight of the duty, and not its agony, which defeats us--'the weight of glory'. p. 192-193

. . . .

Many reconciliations have unfortunateley broken down because both parties have come prepared to forgive and unprepared to be forgiven. Instruction is as badly needed in this as in many other less vital things; that holy light which we call humility has an exact power of illumnination all its own. p. 193

Heroic Sanctity of Forgiveness

Heroic sanctity is required perhaps to forgive, but not to forgive is ordinary sin. There is no alternative; the greatness of the injury cannot supply that. It becomes–an excuse? No, a temptation: the greater the injury, the greater the temptation; the more excusable the sin, the no less sin.

The injury done to many in this kind of war is greater than the injury done to one in private, but the result, from a Christian point of view, cannot be other. That must be, everywhere and always, the renewal of love.
- Charles Williams.

Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a member of the Inklings, the literary discussion group that included J. R.R. Tolkien and C. S Lewis. He is a favorite of mine (see here). He was an editor and author of several strange but wonderful “supernatural thrillers”. He was also a lay theologian – mostly self-taught, idiosyncratic, but orthodox. He wrote several theological books and essays. His writing style is not always easy to follow, but what he has to say is almost always wise, evocative, and worth the trouble.

The following is from a book he wrote, On Forgiveness of Sins, which he dedicated to the Inklings. It was originally part of a series of books that included The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis. It was published in 1942, in the thick of World War II. The point he makes is no less challenging or pertinent for Christians today:

Forgiveness of all injuries is demanded of the Christian because of the nature of our Lord, and it is demanded entirely. The phrase ‘things that cannot be forgiven’ is therefore to him intellectually meaningless. But it may in fact mean a good deal all the same. It is true that few of us are, fortunately, in a position to understand that meaning; no injuries of which the forgiveness seem unbelievable have ever been done to us. But probably there are at the present moment more persons alive in Europe than for many generations to whom such injuries have been done. . . . The massacres, the tortures, and the slavery, which have appeared in Europe of late that have impressed themselves upon us. In the ruined homes of Rotterdam–or indeed of England–among the oppressed thousands of Poland, there are those to whom the phrase ‘things that cannot be forgiven’ has fearful meaning. Must they nevertheless be forgiven? They must. Must vengeance, must even resentment, be put off? It must. There is certainly a distinction between the desire for private vengeance and the execution of public justice. But there is no excuse for concealing private vengeance under the disguise of public justice. . . .The injury done to many in this kind of war is greater than the injury done to one in private, but the result, from a Christian point of view, cannot be other. That must be, everywhere and always, the renewal of love. But in such states as we are now considering, that renewal means little less than heroic sanctity. It is upon such heroic sanctities that the Church depends–depends in the sense that they are the rule, its energy, and its great examples. . .

Heroic sanctity is required perhaps to forgive, but not to forgive is ordinary sin. There is no alternative; the greatness of the injury cannot supply that. It becomes–an excuse? No, a temptation: the greater the injury, the greater the temptation; the more excusable the sin, the no less sin.

He Came Down From Heaven and Forgiveness of Sin, p. 165-167