THE SILENT SCREAM BEHIND THE SMILE

by Adam Harbinson

If I have a bee in my bonnet it’s my impatience with some religious leaders who tend to resolutely avoid anything that might ruffle feathers. And there’s one particular issue I think the church in general is not good at addressing. It’s this business of forgiveness again. Sunday after Sunday in churches all across the country congregations are led in a prayer in which they declare, ‘Forgive us as we forgive…’

Imagine for a moment how dirty, how contaminated it must feel to have been used for selfish sexual gratification and then tossed to the side. Even having your house burgled can leave you feeling violated. I remember how I felt when a drug-crazed intruder pushed my old parents around in their home and stole a fiver from my mum’s purse.

For such victims or their relatives to have someone wag the finger in their face and demand; ‘You must forgive or you won’t be forgiven,’ only adds insult to injury.

There’s a widely held misunderstanding that in certain circumstances God is unwilling to forgive us, but it’s a misunderstanding based on the flimsiest of evidence, and it’s a very significant cause of depression, despair and guilt among Christians.

For this reason I take issue with a minister whom I some time ago I heard dismissing as foolishness, a leading psychologist’s claim that religion is the root cause of the sad condition of the majority of his patients. There is much evidence to support the psychologist’s claim, none in support of the minister’s. Think about it; someone has done something awful to you; injured an elderly relative, or torn away your child’s virginity, or worse, and you simply cannot bring yourself to the point of forgiveness. Understandable, but it eats you up inside, so you return to the religion of your childhood, hoping to find some crumb of comfort, and what do you hear? The preacher tells you, or he implies that God won’t forgive you because of your un-forgiving attitude.

Think of the pain and anger and frustration that causes, and yet the Bible is so clear on the subject. When Jesus taught us The Lord’s Prayer, his reference to our need to forgive was in the context of answered prayer, it was never a condition for forgiveness.

Several times in Paul’s teachings he says that we should forgive ‘as we have been forgiven’, not in order that we will be. Embrace that, and the pressure’s off, for however hard we try there’s nothing we can do to earn God’s mercy, otherwise it wouldn’t be mercy, would it? And yet there’s this huge contradiction, a vast credibility gap between biblical truth and conventional doctrine, and it’s driving many people away from religion into the arms of the local shrink.

It’s a pity there are so many religious leaders who seem content to let sleeping dogs lie rather than break rank. And it’s a shame that there are so few who are courageous enough to swim against the current of their un-biblical denominational tradition to speak the truth that sets people free.

Meanwhile, hordes of crushed and dispirited pew-warmers continue to muffle their silent scream of pain with a sickly smile. Why does religion maintain it’s deafening silence on the subject?

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