July 24, 2015

The Surprising Power of Sorry

What do we do with broken history?

There is no going back and fixing the atrocities of the past, nor denying that they play a powerful role in shaping the present. None of us can disentangle as individuals from stolen land, enslaved lives, supremacist ideologies, devastating wars.

We can, and hopefully do, work against injustices and oppression in the present. What to do with the past is harder.

Two recent experiences made me think.

First, my family became Germans.

My husband’s grandparents were Jewish refugees from Germany who made it to the United States after having their citizenship stripped by the Nazis. My mother-in-law has their passports: swastikas on the covers, large red “J”s stamped across the photo page, new middle names that were assigned to identify them as Jews.

Germany has a law that allows the direct descendants of people whose citizenship was taken by the Third Reich to apply for “re-naturalization” or restoration of citizenship. My very American brother-in-law and husband applied, and my children were included in the petition.

I went with them to receive their naturalization papers. The ceremony was very short, and surprisingly moving. The German consular official, born well after the end of the war, sat with two Jewish families and apologized on behalf of his country. He used the story of his own family to speak of how Germany has changed, what Germans have had to give up in order to regain their place in the international community. He said it was an honor for Germany to be given a second chance by families that never should have lost their citizenship to begin with. He was, very simply, sorry. He did not in any way suggest that Germany could fix the past, or reduce the suffering it had caused with any act of restoration in the present.

The second event, in the same week, was a conversation about reconciliation that took place at my church. The presiding bishops of The Nippon Sei Ko Kai in Japan, The Anglican Church of Korea, and The Episcopal Church spoke about working for peace in the context of broken history. The Japanese bishop spoke about the temptation to distance himself from World War II atrocities because he is part of the post-war generation. He spoke about realizing the power of owning that history and his part in it, the power of being a teller of truth and a receiver of anger and sorrow. The Korean bishop spoke eloquently of the open wounds that his generation has inherited from years of colonial domination and atrocity at the hands of Japan. They work for peace together because they are neighbors who share a commitment to the gospel, not because they have fixed the history between them. They work together through anger and frustration and sorrow and the attempts of their own governments to obscure and manipulate the truth. Several people of Korean descent who were present said that it was the first time that they had heard a Japanese person acknowledge the pain of their history.

In the US context of slavery and genocide and land theft and racism, we often gloss over “sorry” as unhelpful. Sorry doesn’t fix the past, and it assigns responsibility to descendants of perpetrators, which to some people feels unfair.

My insight from the last week is that sorry matters. For those of us who have benefitted, willingly or unwillingly, from the fruits of broken history, it is worth pausing at sorry, and repeating it, and being sorry as we move ahead in our attempts to repair and restore. As I said to my daughter, a thousand years of German sorries will not undo the Holocaust. But we both agreed that hearing the words spoken with truth behind them was powerful in ways that surprised us.

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