At the seed stage, I’ve merely collected words and ideas along the way. The seeds are other people’s words and ideas in their original format; in other words, raw data. They are planted but in their original form.
For Potts, forgiveness is “paradoxically forward facing” in that it both “addresses the past so unflinchingly” and “sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past.” Rather than ease or peace or closure, the promise of forgiveness may be that it makes livable what can’t be undone.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Counter-apocalyptic thinking is a reminder that endings are both inherent to reality and “the only thing in this world that is worth beginning.” And for Savransky, “to suggest that the end of the world must be begun is to affirm that the otherwise must be made, and to proffer an invitation…for an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with divergent modes of inhabiting the Earth.”
Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024, quoting Savransky
I read “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller. In it, she notes the meaning of the word apocalypsos as “unveiling, thus revelation.” For Keller, apocalypse is “disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller
Theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts has called forgiveness more akin to “mourning than miracle.¹” Forgiveness is not about feelings. But if it were, it might be more closely related to lament than relief.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
In accepting “that what has been lost cannot be restored,” forgiveness “aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Potts’ notion of forgiveness as mourning, which is struggling “with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem” and showing us how to live in the wake of that loss.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
To the degree that forgiveness means finding closure or redemption or a way to feel better about this reality it is not just a pointless, but a violent idea. If, on the other hand, forgiveness involves looking unflinchingly at the harms done and imagining “what a wronged life lived well might be,” it comes with clear work to do and an invitation to make life otherwise. It comes with practices and habits and ways to take up, alongside pain that will not go away.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024