The photo above accompanied an article in Plough, a magazine that describes itself as "an award-winning international magazine of stories, ideas, and culture that appears weekly online and quarterly in print." Founded in 1920, "Plough asks the big questions: How can we live well together, and what gives life meaning and purpose in a complex world?"
I am supposing that the rising sun, in the photo, is intended as a talisman of what always comes with a new day: a new chance, a new moment, a time during which we can do things never thought about or contemplated before. The snowflakes, about to be warmed by the rising sun, are symbols of what has been in the past - so often beautiful - but which will pass away, as a new day comes, and as new opportunities and new possibilities appear.
That's my own reading of the image that Plough chose to accompany its story, "The Faculty of Forgiving." The magazine also included the following, from political thinker Hannah Arendt:
The Faculty of Forgiving
HANNAH ARENDTWithout being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities – a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.
The key to the “predicament of irreversibility” is forgiveness.
Our recent election has provided us, now, with a new opportunity to act, and to act together, in a "new moment." Things never thought about or believed possible, before, are now able to step forth onto the stage that is, in fact, the "real world." (Shakespeare did, after all, have a pretty good handle on the profundity of human existence). As Arendt so rightly said, there is a solution to the "predicament of irreversibility," and forgiveness is that secret key.
An article by Adam Kirsch, published in The Wall Street Journal, on Saturday/Sunday, August 17-18, made me think about what Plough (and Arendt) say about forgiveness. The article I am thinking of was titled, "The Ideology Behind Campus Protests Is About More Than Israel." The article spoke to the profound complicity of Americans in what is sometimes called "Settler Colonialism." Kirsch is not only a journalist. He is a poet and literary critic, too, and he well understands that "Settler Colonialism" is not confined to events in Israel and Palestine. The conquest of the North American continent, by the predecessors of people we now call "Americans," has, perhaps, been the model for what came later, all around the world.
However horrible the sins we have committed, time has come (and gone) upon all our past, and we are alive right now. Let us, please, remember forgiveness. Let us, please, find within ourselves the ability to forgive not only those who have wronged us, but to forgive ourselves, for all the wrongs that we have done. As Arendt notes, we need others in order to be able to forgive ourselves.
Let's give it a shot!
Amen.
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