Hungry Ghosts and Forgiveness

I have many gifts. I am a good writer. I have a completely adequate choir voice. I am very good at comforting people. I’m a natural at milking goats. I can get bathrooms very clean.

I am not very good at forgiving. I forgive small slights easily and I anger slowly, but what my grandma calls “soul bruising,” the hurts my mom talks about passing through the heart—those take me a while.

My patriarchal blessing, the personal prophesy each member of my church receives, says something along the lines of, “Improve your capacity for forgiveness. It will make you more useful.” Every time I read it I grimace a little bit at this part. Oops, I think.

Sometimes I try and try and try to forgive and still come up wanting after years of effort. Sometimes, instead, I refuse to look at the pain. I sweep whatever calls for forgiveness under the rug so that I don’t have to go through the emotional labor of working it through. “Nothing to see here,” I insist, my back to the horse-sized lump in the rug. “Everything is A-OK.”

I think both of these responses occur because I often try to ram my way through forgiveness. I shove at it with all the pressure and effectiveness that I might a giant oak door, like if I just push a little harder, if I just shove my anger down a little more, then voila! Eureka! Forgiveness!

Fleabag, Series 2, Episode 1

This has literally never worked for me. I admit to some skepticism that it works for anyone. Like, when Nephi says, “and I did frankly forgive them” after his brothers temporarily stop trying to kill him, I tend to roll my eyes. “Nothing to see here,” I see Nephi saying, his back to the rug. “Everything is A-OK.” (Nephi and I start getting along a little better in 2 Nephi 4, when he starts actually talking about his feelings and doing the work of forgiveness.)

Anyway, this is probably why that I was especially attentive the day we talked about forgiveness in Black Women and Divinity, The Best Class that Ever Was Or Ever Will Be. C’mon, I thought, give me something that helps.

Near the end of the session, one of my classmates started talking about the Hungry Ghosts. In Chinese Buddhism, Hungry Ghosts are spirits those that suffer perpetually from lack of food. These ghost’s bloated stomachs cannot be satisfied, because food burns up in their mouth, and their throats are thin as needles. Their hunger defines them every day until their next reincarnation—every day, except one a year. During the Hungry Ghost festival, observers gather to feed these ghosts. They put out food and drink and burn money for the desperate departed, taking care of needs that cannot otherwise be filled.

There are a lot of origin stories for these ghosts—they’re those that died violent deaths or ghosts whose family’s have forgotten them. The origin my classmate proposed was another traditional one: killing, stealing, raping, etc. Their hunger is the punishment for the worst of human crimes.

My classmates explained these ghosts as the origin of her theology for forgiveness. She said that because time is long and the reincarnation wheel spins eternal, all of us have sinned in awful, unforgivable ways that we cannot remember. All of us have been or will be hungry ghosts. The Hungry Ghost festival, then, is an exercise in communal, ritualistic mercy. It is practiced in the hope that such mercy will be extended to us and our loved ones when we are in similar moments of damnation. For my classmate, forgiveness was another way of hoping and recognizing that all of us have in past lives or will in future lives done something at least as bad as what we’re being asked to forgive, so all of us must forgive in the hope we will be forgiven too.

The Hungry Ghost Festival in Hong Kong, photo by Sam Tsang

I loved divinity school specifically for these kinds of conversations. I love hearing new stories, new ways of seeing the world, new ideas that motivate us toward goodness. I loved her theology—but it wasn’t mine. I could admire it, but I couldn’t have it. As we talked, I noticed a gap in my own theology. I knew God commanded that we forgive so that he’d forgive us, but I didn’t really know why. Not really.

There are a lot of ways to make sense of forgiveness in an LDS context. A lot of really true ways, and I’d love to hear what yours are. I’m collecting them, now. The one that occurred to me that first day, though, as I sat there, thinking about the people I needed to forgive, was consecration.

My favorite definition of consecration is receiving with an open hand all that is given to you. That is, to hold what has been given us lightly, with the recognition that it is not really ours, and we may need to give it back or pass it on. It is the recognition that everything we have is really God’s, not ours.

Everything is God’s because are only two kinds of things in the world: the created and the paid for. The things that are created are the good. They are our bodies and souls, mountains and seas, Christ-like love and very good chocolate. They are anything that is of God. They are the things God and Christ created with love and priesthood and all of physical space.

The things that are paid for are often embedded in the things that are created. They are the evil, the sins, the mistakes, and the hurt. Broken bones and broken families, cancer, geonocide, people not having enough food. These are the things that the Atonement covers, and it covers all of them. These are the things that Christ paid for with his blood and his agony.

So there are only two types of things, the created and the paid for, and all of them are God’s, and consecration is the act of giving it all back to Him. Forgiveness, then, is the recognition that whatever hurt or sin or mistake I am working through, it was paid for by Jesus, and therefore is not really mine. It’s the process of digging it out of myself and handing it back to him, bit by bit, hurt by hurt, and saying, “What would you have me do with it, Lord?” It’s his, so he gets to decide. He gets to tell me whether to forget about it, whether to address it, whether to walk away.

This is what I like about this theological route into forgiveness: it can lead so many different places. It asks me to sit and counsel with the Lord, and it keeps open the possibility that what he wants me to do is let go of the hurt or sometimes let go of the person. In either case, I can entrust whatever I am giving up to God. He can take care of the person; He can take care of the hurt.

For me, forgiveness always comes as grace. I’ll work and work at it, I’ll think I’m done and then find, ah, nope. I still have anger swirling. I still wouldn’t feel comfortable standing in a prayer circle (a ceremony that mandates only the best of feelings) with them. And, then, one day, understanding and love will sweep me. I’ll see whoever it is as a person again, outside the context of our conflict, and instead wrapped in glorious, confusing, complicated humanity. I’ve stopped shoving against the door, and there it finally is. Voila! Eurika! Forgiveness.