Of Dogs, 9/11, and the Difficulty of Forgiveness

Any day that starts with homemade cinnamon rolls, ends with homemade cheesecake, and includes novel writing has to be a good day. So at bedtime last night, I sighed with contentment. “Now,” I said, “if only we all sleep through the night.”

(The best-laid plans…)

This morning, Catholics around the world heard this, from Sirach:

Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the LORD’s vengeance,
for he remembers their sins in detail.
Forgive your neighbor’s injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.
Could anyone nourish anger against another
and expect healing from the LORD?

And this, from Matthew:

“Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive?
As many as seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

The connection to the anniversary we mark today seems clear enough; no need for me to take up band width on it. I don’t have any personal loss or wound to forgive in the 9/11 attacks. I know no one who died, no one who lost a loved one. So for me to stand on my soapbox and tell everyone else they need to forgive is more than a little presumptuous.

Besides, this is what I need to forgive:

Last night, we went to bed just before ten, spent a few minutes talking, and said a quick prayer before settling down to listen to the cool night sounds outside our window: crickets, katydids…the dog next door…

It took thirty seconds to register how unreasonable the level of barking was. Another five minutes, waiting for the owners to intervene, before I got out of bed and slammed my window shut, hoping to mute the noise enough to allow me to go to sleep. Another minute, and Christian did the same on his side of the bed. Three minutes after that he went downstairs, out on the deck, and yelled at them to shut up (guess how effective that was). He closed every aperture in the house, while I lay in bed, my classically-trained brain analyzing the bark pattern: RUFF!…RUFF-ruff-ruff-(ruff)-(ruff)-ruff-ruff RUFF! Rinse and repeat, repeatedly. Occasionally joined by the other next-door dog. Occasionally by a chorus of most of the dogs in the neighborhood (also, presumably, telling them to shut up).

“They want to be let inside,” Christian said when he returned to the room. “No one’s home.”

I put in my heaviest earplugs. I couldn’t hear Christian, but the barking got through. Was there anywhere in the house you couldn’t hear it?

I got madder and madder. Mad at the dog. Mad at the owners who went off and left their dogs outside for hours when people were trying to sleep. Mad at myself, because really, this is so inconsequential. How many people are living a dozen to a room, or in a tent in a refugee camp where there is no such luxury as privacy, let alone a quiet night’s sleep?

I went down to the couch, where I finally I fell asleep. Sometime later, I woke up and pulled out one earplug, testing. Still barking. The next time…ah, quiet. I went back upstairs to find all the sheets and blankets in piles: Christian had taken refuge on the hall floor, beside a fan, to drown out the racket.

The night’s angst got me thinking about people I haven’t forgiven. Roommates who treated me unfairly, whose simple mean-spiritedness and lack of consideration bewildered, hurt, and eventually reduced me to tiptoeing through my only “home.” It’s a memory I revisit too often. I know no conflict is one-sided, so I try to puzzle out my culpability. But usually I’m pretty good about recognizing and admitting my guilt. Why do I continue to come up blank in this case?

There are other people. People whose habitual behavior has hurt or angered me so many times that I can no longer separate the person from their actions. I have to interact with them, but I guard every word, every reaction, lest I damage the relationship by calling them down for being themselves. Because really, then, whose fault would the conflict be?

If I truly forgave these people, surely it wouldn’t keep affecting my attitudes about and behavior toward them. And yet…a single offense can be forgiven and left in the past. The constant battering makes it hard for wounds to heal. Pick at a scab long enough, and it turns to scar tissue.

Where does this leave me? Praying for grace, mostly. Wishing the world was a different place. That Osama wasn’t so broken a man that he could fall down and praise God when three thousand people died. That we weren’t so broken that we could take to the streets and have a party when Osama died.

Wishing that I could leave my wounds alone instead of reopening them to examine them.

Wishing that forgiveness was as easy to do as it is to say.

Forgiveness is hard. It’s natural to react to wounds with anger and bitterness, with a desire for what we call “justice,” even though it isn’t.

Forgiveness is hard. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep trying.