"Though justice be thy plea, consider this:

...That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy..."
- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Being raised Christian in America is an interesting paradox.

Aside from being taught that God is just, Christians are taught that He is merciful, and they should be merciful as well.

Americans live under a government with a powerful justice system. Wrong-doers are punished, as they should be - as is fair.

Mercy, though - mercy isn't fair. Mercy is absolving wrong-doing wholly, even when it isn't deserved. There is no punishment. No retribution. Just forgiveness, freely given. There is no justice in mercy.

And I don't mean to say that the teaching of mercy is limited only to Christians. Anyone with a strong moral compass may believe in being merciful. Yet even these people, I'm sure, at some time or another desire justice. Not revenge, not pay-back - only justice, fair and simple. Yet how can they desire justice and mercy at the same time? And which road should they take?

Because then, isn't justice sometimes necessary to acceptance, and consequently to receiving closure? Aren't there times when mercy and forgiveness don't result in closure? How do you get it then?

Furthermore, where is the line between forgiving mercifully and forgiving out of, indirectly, fear? Avoidance is a form of fear, and avoiding confrontation thereby a motivation born of fear. True, forgiving someone just to avoid having to confront them isn't true forgiveness and therefore, not true mercy, but for the sake of this thought, how do you determine whether or not you are forgiving someone to be merciful and truly forgive them, or if you're forgiving them merely to end or avoid a conflict?

And after all that...why does it matter?

Yes, this is seriously the kind of stuff I think about when I'm bored or alone. Or sometimes even when I'm not alone. Haha.

Duh.

I am madly in love with Alan Shore and his amazing closings.

I'm just saying. That wasn't what I wanted to write though.

My point is:
I'm retarded.
All that stuff about forgiveness.
Yeah, of course it's about letting go.
And what is letting go about?
Closure.

Seriously, how could I have forgotten that.
On Boston Legal the other night, Allan Shore argued that a mixture of revenge and justice can give a person the greatest and most satisfying closure.
Merriam-Webster says closure is, "an often comforting or satisfying sense of finality closure; also : something (as a satisfying ending) that provides such a sense."
In other words, it's understanding and acceptance.

And those two are pretty closely linked. For the most part, understanding is key to acceptance. Which is where the difficulty lies. How can you accept what you don't understand? And how do you come to understand what you cannot comprehend?
Sometimes, I think it just takes a bit of help from someone else. A different perspective.
But other times, I think you simply can't. In certain situations at certain times in certain places, you just can't. At which point, you just have to accept the fact that you can't understand, and therefore can't accept.

On the whole, it's not easy, is it?
Then again, what in life is?

"There are many things that we would throw away...

...if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."
- Oscar Wilde

Okay, so I was musing about forgiveness a while back, but it was completely illogical in practical application, which I realized even then. Saying the words and meaning them are two different things, obviously.

In a way, forgiveness is all about vindiction - it's all about letting go. And I've come to wonder if the act of letting go is something to be achieved, or something that just occurs. Can you make yourself let something go? Can you force yourself to drop a grudge or erase bitterness? Or is it something that just happens, something for which you need to wait? And if it is possible to make yourself let go, how do you go about it? What do you do to make yourself forgive and forget?

I feel like it isn't possible to be able to force yourself to let go of something, be it pain, bitterness, anger, or even love or desire. You can't insist that you forgive someone - if you try, you'll only be saying the words, going through the motions - for all intents and purposes, you'll simply be lying to both yourself and the person seeking or deserving your pardon. And you may honestly know they deserve it: you may be aware that you should be able to let go, forgive, and move on. You may be a bit ashamed that some kind of immaturity is holding you back from letting go. But emotionally, you can't. How do you come to terms with those emotions, let go of the bitterness, drop the grudge, forget what has upset you?

Though, is it really immaturity? What is it, exactly, that stops us from from wanting to forgive? In adults, it certainly seems like it's immaturity. It's exploited for comedy at times - in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry can't forgive Harmony for sleeping with his best friend when they were in high school 'cause she'd promised not to, even though that was probably a good 15, 20 years earlier, and he can't stop repeating, "You slept with [him]." It's a really funny sequence, and it makes him seem like he's a teenager trapped in a man's body, who's being really immature. But is that really accurate? Why is that so "immature"? Is it really, or has society just labeled it as immature?

It's difficult: why can't we let go? Do we just have to wait it out? Does it simply vary from person to person - is it easy for some, harder for others? I guess what you're letting go factors into the equation, too. If all you can do is wait for the feeling to pass, wait to want to forgive, what do you do in the mean time? How do you handle what it is you want to let go?


One night several weeks before Daniel had taken her out to dinner and asked for a divorce, she'd woken up and seen that he wasn't in bed. She found him in the living room, in the armchair, looking out at the rain. The wind was shrill against the windows, rocking the trees. Sylvia loved a storm at night. It made everything simple. It made you content just to be dry.

Obviously it was having different effect on Daniel. "Are you happy?" he had asked.

This sounded like the start of a long conversation. Sylvia didn't have on her robe or her slippers. She was cold. She was tired. "Yes," she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to keep things short. And she might be happy. She couldn't think of anything making her unhappy. She hadn't asked herself that question for a very long time.

"I can't always tell," Daniel said.

Sylvia heard this as a criticism. It was a complaint he'd made before--she was too subdued, too reticent. When would she learn to let go? Water poured from the gutters onto the deck. Sylvia could hear a car pass on Fifth Street, the shhh of its tires. "I'm going back to bed," she said.

"You go on," Daniel told her. "I'll be along in a minute."

But he wasn't, and she fell asleep. She had a familiar dream. She was in a foreign city and no one spoke the languages she spoke. She tried to call home, but her cell phone was dead. She put the wrong money in the pay phone, and when she finally got it right, a strange man answered. "Daniel's not here," he told her. "No, I don't know where he went. No I don't know when he'll be back."

In the morning she tried to speak to Daniel, but he was no longer willing. "It was nothing," he said. "I don't know what that was about. Forget it."


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Listening to: Mandy Moore - All Good Things