Redemption and forgiveness

I asked a patient the other day about his concept of redemption and forgiveness.

“I don’t go to church much,” he replied to me.

“I’m not asking about church,” I said. “I want to know whether you think that there is redemption and forgiveness in the world. Because what happens next in your life depends on whether you think you can be redeemed and forgiven.”

We had seen each other in the elevator, and I had been asking someone else how they were doing, or how the patient they were calling on was going. Some of the most effective chaplaincy work is done relating to people in the corridors and the elevators.

“Are you a chaplain?” he asked. “Can you come and visit with me?”

I wrote down his room number on my client tracking sheet, and his name, just in case, he had said. It was good thinking for him to give me his name because he was unsure whether he had the room right, and that way I could look him up.

He told me that he had taken a bus to Tampa from Connecticut and that he had no money and no place to go. “I really need to talk with someone,” he said.

“I guess so!” I responded, smiled and told him I would see him later.

When I met back up with him, he told me, after I asked a couple of times, (“So you got on a bus in Connecticut and came to Tampa, how was in that you ended up in the hospital?”) that he had been doing cocaine for the past 30 years. He had no family, no place to go, and was looking to finally changed up his life. That’s why he came to Tampa, in one sense to thrust himself into a place which was new and where he knew no one, and where it would be very difficult to get high.

We talked about how huge his situation was: no place to go, no money, no family, no friends. He told me he was embarrassed, shamed. I talked his intention to begin anew; and that what he needed to hold tight to was his desire to not get high. There was this one thought, albeit a huge challenge, that he needed to stay focused on. The rest, I said, would fall into place. And this, holding onto the thought that after 30 years of bad choices he could begin to make new ones, healthy ones, was dependent on his belief in forgiveness and redemption. The forgiveness and redemption of himself.

Wayne Muller, in Legacy of the Heart, writes that forgiveness can set us free and that our fears and our rage, our reaction to our childhoods and our current situations, need to be nurtured and invited, and never pushed away. We have to embrace all of the pieces of ourselves, and in the embrace—of the bad thoughts, the awful experiences, the deep hurt, the betrayal, the abandonment away—a space will open up and a reconciliation can occur. The ancient Greek language, he writes, has two words for time: chronos, meaning chronological time, the measurement of minutes and hours and years and kairos, a sense of time that describes the deeper readiness of things to be born. Kairos is a time when an opening appears and an opportunity for a healing, a redemption and a forgiveness can occur.

Crisis, whether they are medical or whether they are impromptu urging to get on a bus and begin life anew, open a space for kairos and an opportunity for us to recognize and honor the painful pieces of ourselves, to hold ourselves and others in compassion and empathy. And I believe that in exploring our connection to the spiritual values of salvation, redemption, forgiveness, we may get a glimpse of the underlying values that we will hold ourselves and others accountable to and for. This kind of reflection opens up a space that cleanses and becomes expansive so that joy, wholeness and health can come in.

“I saw a lot of chaplains today, in the halls, around the hospital, and I just felt that I wanted to talk to you,” my patient told me.

“You have a lot, an overwhelming reality, in front of you,” I told him. “But you only have to think about one thing,” I made a small circle with my forefinger and my thumb and pointed to it, “which is totally within your control,” I said. “And that is that you are making the change in your life that you desire, a change that you set into motion when you got on a bus in Connecticut.”

In one sense, it’s the choice that we each have, each moment, to be the change that we desire in the world. So often we look to your circumstances, to all of the people who have hurt us, to all of the situations that we have had to face in what is often a terribly unfair world.

And we need to remember one thing: that we are worthy, that no matter the choices that we have made, we have the opportunity to begin anew and achieve the peace and love that we so clearly deserve and desire.

This is what I told my patient from the elevator. This is hopefully why the patient chose me: to affirm and support his new beginning and to offer him unconditional redemption and forgiveness.

May it be so.