My uncle and law partner and I were trying a case together in Bay City, Texas. In Matagorda County. Larry was the lead lawyer and I was there in a ‘second chair,’ supportive role. We represented a company which had fired one of its employees who’d failed a drug test. The man’s position was that he’d been wrongfully terminated and the main issue in the case was whether the test reliable and the firing lawful.
As the trial wore on, despite making good arguments about what evidence would and would not be admitted, we were losing every single ruling that the judge made, and I could see both the judge’s decisions and the judge himself were beginning to get under Larry’s skin.
Trials are pretty stressful and the frustration with each successive ruling was starting to come out in Larry’s body language, then in his remarks to the judge. It wasn’t long before the judge began to pick up on this. While the judge didn’t flat out threaten Larry with contempt, he made it clear he wasn’t far from it.
So, time passed, the trial wore on and yet more rulings went against us and I saw Larry was now about to lose it. I was going to have to step in. I took him aside during a break and told him, “Larry, careful. You cannot get held in contempt. First, I don’t want to have to call Aunt Linda and tell her you’re in jail; and second, I don’t want to try the rest of this case by myself. Larry, repeat after me. No contempt.”
He agreed and things smoothed out. Eventually we not only won the case, but Larry avoided getting stuck in the Matagorda County jail.
I tell you this story because, if we’re up to the challenge God sets out for us, the requirement that we forgive each other, the first thing we’ve got to do is internalize these very same magic words: No contempt.
In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, verses 21 through 35, St. Peter asks Jesus how many times must we forgive those who sin against us. Peter suggests perhaps seven times is the answer. This seems a generous answer, given that as most rabbis at the time had a kind of three strikes and you’re out policy. But Jesus sets a new standard. He responds “No, you must forgive one who wrongs you, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” The point being that the correct answer is not four hundred and ninety times, (if you’re doing the math here), but rather that if your doing the math at all, if you’re counting; if you’re keeping score; if you’re keeping a ledger; if you’ve got the scoreboard lights are on at all, your missing the whole point about grace.
Jesus then launches into a strange story made up of several sequential vignettes. In the first, a master forgives a slave whose indebted to him to the tune of twelve million dollars. Then, in the second vignette, the same slave strangles a fellow slave who owes him just 20 bucks, and those by the way are the correct ratios in today’s dollars, all from which we’re supposed to see, of course, that in light of God’s extravagant forgiveness offered to each of us, our forgiveness of each other’s very human offenses committed one against another, is, de minimis. In a word, it’s required. It’s commanded. It’s obligatory.
In fact, if we take the accompanying parable seriously, it seems Jesus is saying our salvation hangs on it. You have to forgive. It’s that simple.
But it’s not that simple is it— in fact, but might be harder than you think.
Sebastian Junger is a New York Times best selling author and Oscar- winning documentary director and, in his most recent book, entitled Tribe, he writes that a deep inter-dependence with one another was how our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived. In fact, in terms of Darwinian natural selection, it was the groups which learned not only to work together best, but who also most effectively punished those who didn’t cooperate that then outfought, out-hunted, and out-bred everyone else. That is to say, a particular gene pool only truly flourished if the tribe was utterly intolerant of selfishness and all forms of ‘me-first’ behavior.
And though there have been huge changes in how we live since our ancestors lived in small nomadic bands, because it takes genetic adaptations around 25,000 years to begin to change humans, our genes are essentially the same as theirs were a millions of years ago.
This fact may very well may be why, for instance, we still have such visceral reaction to people cutting in line in front of us or cutting us off in traffic. It’s as if some sort of memory’s hard-wired into us of a time when our ancestors were nearly eaten by a tiger because someone pushed us aside and climbed up the tree in front of us. That’s to say, that for our distant ancestors, to tolerate offensive selfishness and ‘me first at the expense of you’ behavior was to court serious injury. To ignore it, or worse yet, to forgive it, only to have it happen again was to make yourself avoidably vulnerable to the possibility of a horrible death.
To learn from another’s ill treatment of you and then to ration second chances judiciously is probably nothing less than a survival instinct for us. But if that’s what helped us to survive, if it’s what literally got us here, what do we do now when we know better than to hold on to our grudges, but still can’t seem to let go and forgive, both about the big things like betrayal at the hands of family and friends, or even about the less crucial, though still corrosive matters of our daily life.
In our modern world, what do we do in those moments our blood boils when indeed, we are cut off in traffic, or someone expresses an opinion different from ours about an issue of the day, or (heaven forbid) favors a candidate with whom we vehemently disagree. What do we do about all this in the context of our faith? How do we even approach this most demanding seven times seventy forgiveness requirement which Christ sets up for Peter and for us?
Writer, Arthur Brooks, in his book, Love Your Enemies, introduces us to John Gottman. Gottman is a social psychologist and a professor at the University of Washington. With his wife, Julie, he founded the Gottman Institute, which is dedicated to improving the relationships of married couples and saving their marriages. The Gottmans have helped thousands of couples to date. First, John asks couples how they met, about their highs and lows and then about how their relationships have changed over the years. Then, he asks them discuss a contentious issue, and after watching them interact for just one hour, he can predict with 94% accuracy whether the couple will divorce within 3 years.
Brooks points out that Gottman does this by observing the couples closely. By watching them carefully, knowing it’s not anger that predicts divorce but contempt. Sarcasm, derisive sneering, hostile humor and worst of all— eye rolling. He says love can be recovered against all odds. Reconciliation can be had despite almost any sin and brokenness, but eye-rolling, disdain, contempt— these are sulfuric acid to forgiveness and thus to all hope of recovering love.
So with contempt as our north star, let’s try to begin to construct a sort of environment of mind; an ecosystem of the heart; to develop antibodies, if you will, against the sulfuric acid of contempt from emerging so corrosively into our lives, both in cases when we’ve been sinned against egregiously, but also even when someone simply does something which makes our blood boil. Let’s consider how we can avoid falling to the temptation of turning against them in contempt, such that even with stiff genetic headwinds against us, we can become a people not of hate and dissension, but of grace and of forgiveness.
Now I know that when we raise the issue of forgiveness, there is a broad spectrum of things that come to mind. Many of us struggle with the little things— a tendency to be impatient, to fly off the handle when we’re behind a bad driver, or caught up with obnoxious people in line at the grocery store. We’re sinfully impatient, sick and need help. We know this. Others of us struggle with things connected with social media— people who we don’t see eye to eye on about politics or about how they live their lives. We all need help. Finally, and most seriously of all, there are some of us who struggle mightily with terrible betrayal, abuse, or negligence at the hands of parents or spouses or friends. But no matter what camp we’re in, how we’re triaged, the pertinent question is how do we forgive is how do we avoid a contemptuous heart.
Let’s start with those who’v suffered the most egregiously from betrayal and the darkest of sins against them. If you’re in this position, first of all I’m sorry. As you find away forward through the temptation of contempt, I want to present what I know may be a painful question for you, and really it’s a question for all of us: Do you think people are doing their best.When they wake up in the morning and get our of bed, do you believe as a general matter, are people doing the best they can?
As Brene Brown, writer, researcher, and now podcaster extraordinaire, tells us, if you ask this of enough people, you’ll find a real split. Half say, “no way, people are horrible. They’re lazy. They’re mean. They’re sadistic. They’re evil. People are just awful.”
Well, if this is your belief, like me sometimes, Brown suggest you take a moment and picture that person, that person you think is all those things — lazy, means, evil awful, and now imagine God telling you about this person— he, she, they— they’re doing the best they can.
If indeed that’s true, isn’t it the case that our hatred, our contempt, our irritation, our pain, at least to some degree begins to morph, to change, to transform into something else. Compassion. Think about this with respect to the person who hurt you. If true, perhaps it’d mean you would have to stop being angry and start grieving their loss and your loss, and as that happens suddenly, surprisingly, contempt is in retreat.
Brene Brown asked her husband this very question. She asked, “Richard, do you think people are doing the best they can?” And he responded to her, “I don’t know. Honestly I have no idea. But the one thing I do know is my life is better when I assume they are.”
You who have been betrayed badly, take Jesus’s guidance about forgiveness seriously. Perhaps start there and let grace begin to work.
Now. Social media. Social media is a contempt generating machine. Don’t have arguments on it. You’re not changing anyone’s mind. But nevertheless, here’s a tip.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and an expert on moral foundations theory. Haidt’s research is based on survey data from hundreds of thousands of individuals. That’s all to say, Haidt is brilliant, his data exhaustive, and we should give hi, a listen. He suggests human beings have five different innate moral values. He calls them moral taste buds. Here they are: fairness, care for others, respect for authority, loyalty to group; and purity/sanctity
We all have all five, but a more liberal person, like Haidt himself, has mainly a two channel or two foundation morality which elevates fairness and care for others above the other three, while a more conservative person, while also believing in fairness and care for others, also places a high value on the moral values of respect for authority, loyalty to tribe, and moral notions of purity and sanctity— that is, they have a five channel or five foundation morality. Haidt’s quick to point out, you’re not more moral because you have five channels, or less moral if you elevate only fairness and caring for others either. The important thing is to internalize that we’re just different, we’re just wired differently, and how we see things is not due to our own heroic individual moral efforts in developing a moral compass, but mainly due to temperament, genetics and perhaps somewhat in how we’ve been brought up. Just knowing this helps you push back against both your own sense of moral superiority and the potentially emerging contempt you might feel as you deal with people who don’t see things as you do.
That’s all to say, it’s crucial to recognize, the vast, vast majority of us are moral creatures encoded to value compassion and fairness. We all want our families, our friends, our country, our world to flourish. As again, Arthur Brooks points out, we mostly agree on the “why” of most arguments, we just differ on the best “what” that will best help us reach our shared why.
What this discovery should remind us of is that it’s just not reasonable to argue that malevolence or hatred are the animating forces behind the half of the populace who disagree with you, those who perhaps you see as an opponent or an enemy, morally deficient, hateful or stupid. Let that fallacy go.
And if you must engage on social media employ the debating principle called Rapaport’s rules: Before saying anything critical of another’s opinion or position, you should be able to re-express their position and its basis, so clearly, so vividly, so fairly, that if present, they would say to you, “Thank you, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” In other words you should not straw-man your opponent’s positions. ‘Steel-man’ them.
And if you really want to establish an environment of mind; an ecosystem of the heart that’s becoming more and more contempt-free, then limit your intake of social media and cable news. Once again, Brooks book, Love Your Enemies, points out, they’re addictive, contempt purifying drugs that drive you toward something called, motive attribution asymmetry, the common belief that your own ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate. This, he says, inevitably leads to contempt.
Finally for you “road rage-aholics”; for you who’s blood is easily brought to the boiling point by what you deem to be contemptible behavior all around you, here’s some advice: Reflect on the brevity of life. None of us know how much time we have and taking this to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present or it should, and it can bring a resolve not to suffer over stupid things.
Think about road rage. It’s the classic example of mis-spent energy and it’s impossible if you’re being mindful of the shortness of life. As author, Sam Harris puts is, something as pointless as road rage (or grocery store line rage, or you fill in the blank) becomes clear and undeniable, when you keep in mind the brevity of life. He urges us to step back and consider “you’re going to die and the other person there on the road is going to die, and you don’t know when, but you do know you’ve got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, when your consciousness is bright, and you and those you love are alive, and you’re driving and you’re not in some failed state where people are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands, and the person in front of you, who you will never meet, who’s hopes and sorrows you know nothing about but which if you could know them, you’d recognize them as impressively similar to your own— is just…driving…a little…slow.”
Harris reminds us that, “we’ve each had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to us that we love them in a way they can feel it and in a way that we can feel it, and that we’ve missed most of them and don’t know how many more chances we’re going to get; that we’re all in a game right now, and we can’t see the clock.” He wisely directs us to slow down and meditate on the preciousness and the beauty of life, and not to waste another moment on contempt.
Please, no contempt.