I once had a girlfriend whose husband was a lyin’ cheat. He was a no-good-sum-of-bitch as my kin folk would say. Even my Christian kinfolk used that term when necessary. “If the shoe fits,” they’d add, with a wry grin.
Now his friends didn’t feel that way about him. They liked him. He was a good ole boy among his buddies. He liked to hunt and fish and drink beer. Lots of beer.
He also liked to get it on, if you know what I mean. My girlfriend had been married to this man for 20 some years when she walked in on him one afternoon, nekkid as the day he was born, and found him humping the church organist.
Just so happened that the church organist was one of her best girlfriends, or so she’d thought, until that moment.
To her credit, my friend didn’t kill either one of them. She didn’t even raise a ruckus. She just quietly turned and walked out of the house, with the nekkid church organist clinging to her feet begging for forgiveness.
My girlfriend felt real bad about that later. Felt like she had done something wrong when, in fact, if that had been me I might have headed for the kitchen in search of a butcher knife. I’d have to cut me somebody.
My husband knows what a hot-headed woman I am. I suspect that’s why he doesn’t sleep around. He knows I’d cut him bad if I ever caught him.
But my girlfriend, she’s the meek and mild type. A real sweetheart of a girl. She was raised up Baptist and has spent her whole entire life trying to do that Jesus thing — love people. So a couple of weeks after she found her husband and her best friend doing the horizontal tango, she baked a cake and carried it over to the home of the former church organist.
Now I have never understood this. Never. I still don’t. But in my girlfriend’s mind she felt like she needed to patch things up, to fix it. So she baked her husband’s mistress a cake and took it to her and asked her forgiveness.
Years later, after about a decade of therapy, my girlfriend realized that there is just something wrong with a woman who feels that much guilt over being wronged by others.
Forgiveness can be a complicated matter. I’m no theologian nor am I any great scholar but sometimes a person just knows that wait up one second, something ain’t right about this.
That’s how I’ve been feeling about some of the remarks that have been made in response to a blog post by author
Donald Miller .
Miller wrote a fine piece about the need for people, leaders in particular, to admit when they’ve been wrong. Where he went sideways with the piece, however, is when he chose Robert McNamara as an example of a man who did a noble thing by admitting that he was wrong.
I said as much in a post on Miller’s site and in another
blog post and I be dadgum if there weren’t people writing in saying how it was that they were going to be praying for me. They assumed that I am harboring some great bitterness toward Robert McNamara. They probably would like for me to bake his family a cake and take it to them.
Now I’m not saying my heart is pure-tee white because it sure enough ain’t. It’s as black as any other two-legged creature walking the face of this good earth.
But Robert McNamara did some really horrible bad things in his lifetime. Things worse than humping your wife’s best gal pal. Though if he did that, too, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn it. The kind of things McNamara did cost men and women their lives. Thousands of men and women. And if he didn’t know that then, he certainly came to realize it in the dark of the night, or at least that’s my hope.
He went on to make a butt-load of money and to live the high life, while those whose lives he helped decimate had a hard time paying the light bill and staying sober. If Robert McNamara wasn’t haunted by his wrongdoings, a whole heck of a lot of other people sure were.
McNamara wrote a book later in life about how he messed things up in Vietnam. He said he was sorry about that. I heard him interviewed on NPR when his book came out. When one public official holding a high flutin’ office in DC was asked about McNamara’s book, she replied that we had not sent our brightest and best to fight the war in Vietnam.
I ain’t going to lie to you. That smarted right bad. My daddy died in that war and while it has taken me years to sort all of this out, that woman in DC who made that remark was just plain sorry, but not in the apologetic way.
In 2003, I went to
Vietnam, to my daddy’s battlefield where I learned all kinds of lessons, one of which was about forgiveness. I came home a changed woman.
I learned things walking the red dirt fields that border the Ia Drang Valley that I could never learn from reading a red-letter Bible. I like to think Jesus sent me there to learn those things. I even wrote a
book about all that.
I don’t mean to repeat myself but it bears repeating: Forgiveness is a complicated matter.
Christians are all the time going about trying to “fix” other people. Trying to patch things up.
That can be a good thing.
But it can be a wrongheaded thing, too.
Robert McNamara went on to make a movie about his role in the Vietnam War. That movie is called The Fog of War. I have not seen it, nor will I.
But my historian husband has watched it and so has my good buddy Joe Galloway. Joe was a military correspondent in Vietnam. He watched his buddies die there. Joe still weeps over all the horrors he witnessed in that war. Joe’s got a good heart. A loving heart. A Jesus heart in many ways.
This is the thing that happens when new generations come along and they don’t learn their history. They see some flick and think, Wow, that was radical dude.
When it wasn’t radical at all — it was just more lies heaped on the ashes of soldiers dead and gone.
I can’t say for sure how sorry Robert McNamara truly was or wasn’t. What I can say for sure, however, is that throughout his life he kept his distance from truth.
I don’t feel that way because of some unforgiveness in my heart. I don’t lie awake at night thinking of ways to cut the man. He’s dead now anyway but even when he was alive, I didn’t do that.
But I don’t for one nanosecond believe that Robert McNamara did a noble thing by apologizing in his book or in that flick of his. Joe says McNamara was just telling more lies.
Maybe he wasn’t apologizing at all. Maybe he was just trying to rewrite history for a new generation that doesn’t know any better. A generation that might one day come to think of Robert McNamara as a man who did a noble thing. A generation who is surely going to have to come to terms with their own legacy of half-truths and bad wars and broken lives.
I agree with Miller in one regard — there is an important lesson to be learned from Robert McNamara. The one I learned from studying him is that forgiveness won’t suffice where redemption is needed.