Some things only God can forgive

In my truth telling era

“Some things only God can forgive” — Kesha

Years ago, I went through a very heavy Holy Virgin Mother of God phase. Not because I’m a Christian, but because I am one generation removed from Irish diaspora Catholicism on both sides of my family. And I still fuck with Mary. She’s kind of a badass¹. But beyond her anarcha-communist leanings, I love her many faces, and see clearly the pre-Christian Irish Pagan impulse to Goddess worship shining through her. As Our Lady of Mercy she teaches me how to have a gigantic heart. She teaches me that there is no such thing as a human experience, no matter how unthinkable or horrific, that is outside the realm of the human. There is nothing that she turns away. Her arms and her heart are open to everyone. She offers no condemnation, only grace.

Around the time that I was learning a lot from Mary, Kesha’s breakthrough comeback album and groundbreaking single Praying came out. The entire song is incredibly powerful² and the music video is striking. These lyrics in particular rang out through my entire being, resonating deep in my bones: “Sometimes, I pray for you at night / Someday, maybe you'll see the light / Some say, in life, you're gonna get what you give / But some things only God can forgive.” These words speak the deepest truth for me as a survivor: I care for you still, I want you to heal, I don’t know if you will heal, I can’t protect you from the consequences of your own actions, and I cannot accept the responsibility of “absolving” you so that you can avoid facing yourself.

Around this time, while discussing the Virgin Mary, and Kesha’s new single, crying and unpacking child sexual abuse trauma with my then-therapist, my therapist made a stunning intervention. She told me that Mary could take on the role of Our Lady of Mercy, because she is a God, an archetype, an expression of a potential that humanity collectively could manifest: mercy, grace. She has things to teach all of us about how to live with more mercy and grace. But none of us can take on her role of Our Lady of Mercy, forgiving, facing, holding, and transforming all the wrong doing, negligence, cruelty and cyclical trauma in the world. That is a job for a Higher Being, or, if you like, humanity as a collective. As individuals we cannot take on a job so large. As humans, we will remain ambivalent in our grace and mercy sometimes. We will have boundaries and limits and necessary refusals that an archetype or God does not need to have.

It’s not my job to forgive everyone. It’s not your job either. Some things only God can forgive. Or, if you prefer, some things can only be faced and transformed collectively.

I have always been ambivalent about the concept of forgiveness. I have always felt that it sets up a power dynamic in which “the forgiver” has the right to bestow or withhold absolution. We live in a punitive world that denies humanity to the unabsolved and I don’t support any framework that considers the recognition or denial of someone’s humanity conditional. I have also been on the receiving end of desperate pleas for “forgiveness” from someone who can’t even have a conversation about reality without lashing out, denying, and attacking. I understand that these asks for forgiveness have nothing to do with a desire to take responsibility. They are another way to insist that I shut up about the sexual abuse.

I don’t agree with or support the framing that our human dignity and our fundamental belonging to humanity is conditional. I do not believe these things can be bestowed and I don’t believe they can be taken away. Not really. No matter what we have done or what has been done to us: we remain human and therefore fundamentally deserving of human dignity and belonging. This doesn’t mean that every individual person or group has to welcome us, but humanity as a whole has a responsibility to find a way not to turn us away. No matter what. When we threaten people’s dignity and belonging, we terrify them and terrified people can’t learn and can’t change. Therefore, we must show people that responsibility has nothing to do with “absolution.” You don’t have to earn your dignity and belonging, and you can’t. Those are inherent. Responsibility is something else. It is the work of finally facing yourself, telling the truth, finding out what you need to heal, and finding out what you can do to repair. No one can do that work for you. No one can take away your right to do that work.

So I don’t love the power dynamic hiding out in the concept of “forgiveness” but I do support what “forgiveness” sometimes represents for people: willingness to face and accept reality, letting go of grudge holding, deep and profound searching for empathy and/or compassion, recognition of everyone’s humanity, including people who have done wrong, refusing punishment, ending scapegoating, returning to the full complexity of what happened, a desire to understand. Humility, mercy, grace. Accepting the truths that humans are capable of horrible things and trauma keeps perpetuating itself until we are willing to face it. Asking: Where do we go from here? How can we face the truth? How can we all heal?

In this sense, I believe in forgiveness. I believe that, collectively, we have a spiritual, ethical, and moral calling to face, and transform, all the horrors that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other, other living beings, and the world. I believe that collectively, we must find the courage to leave no stone in our collective humanity unturned. There is no human thought, action, or feeling that we can’t integrate into the collective human experience. As long as we leave aspects of humanity in the “realm of monsters”, collectively dissociating and pretending that the horrors were enacted by someone not-quite-human, we will never be able to transform the horrors. We will never transform what we cannot face and claim. We need to look at all human behaviour and say, that’s us, that’s ours, and together we must find a way to change.

No single one of us can be Our Lady of Mercy, offering perfect mercy and perfect grace. But collectively we are capable of creating cultures and containers that can do this work. Collectively, we have the power to face and transform anything human. And if we are going to survive as a species, we must. Steadfastly embodying an ethic of mercy and grace is fundamental to this work. I don’t personally have to help any specific person transform. I don’t personally have to be friends with anyone or forgive anyone I don’t want to. I am sovereign and the fundamental recognition of all of our sovereignty and autonomy is the necessary context that the work of grace and mercy must enter into. I am not an archetype and neither are you. We are human beings. But human beings together create something bigger than any one human being on their own. It is in that collectivity that we have the power to do the work that our archetypes embody. Collectively we have the power to do massive spiritual healing work. Collectively we can find a way to face and transform everything human.

I am a writer and I am a spiritual worker. Like all artists, I make art about humanity. I write about my personal, individual, human life, my subjective thoughts and experiences, but I use my words to crack these experiences open to expose something bigger and more universal. That’s what all artists do. I am called to the work of what I call the unflinching gaze. I am called to use my words to find a way to face what is. I am called to bring my readers with me on a journey to the underworld to face the things we have locked in the basement, dissociated from, and cast outside of the realm of the human. I am on a mission of returning these disavowed experiences to our collective humanity so that we can face them and transform them.

I am a truth teller. I tell truths that the culture is often not ready for, just like I told truths that my family was not ready for. I am a cycle breaker and a black sheep and I am not afraid to go first. Well, I am afraid. But I do it anyway. Truth telling is not the same thing as a lack of privacy or boundaries. I have discernment about what I say in my writing and how I say it. I write in a way the respects my own privacy and that of the people I write about. I write to pull the truth from the bare experience, to make it something that can be said, can be known, can be changed. This is not truth telling the way that a court produces truth. This is truth telling the way that artists produce truth. By finding a way to say what the world has not yet found a way to say. By breaking all the rules to get at the thing that needs to be witnessed, felt, seen.

I have always avoided writing about certain experiences and certain elements of my experiences, in order to prevent the punishment and dehumanization of the people who have hurt me or wronged me. My ethic as a literary nonfiction writer is to respect anonymity as much as possible. This is not journalism and this is not the tabloids. In most cases you don’t need to know who I am talking about, and it is important to me to do my best to protect the anonymity of the people I write about, including those who have hurt me or wronged me, whenever possible. I feel strongly about this for a lot of reasons, but in particular, because of cancel culture. We live in a culture that encourages frenzies of public shaming, dehumanization, and exile. I don’t want that to happen to anyone, including the people who have hurt me the worst.

Kesha embodies my perspective perfectly: “You brought the flames and you put me through hell / I had to learn how to fight for myself / And we both know all the truth I could tell / I'll just say this is "I wish you farewell."” To me this says: what happened was real and it was really that bad, I survived, and I take no revenge on you. It says: we both know that I could use the truth against you, but I won’t. I let you go: with mercy, with grace. I have achieved this forgiveness. I want no revenge. I seek no punishment. And I am willing to let go. I wish for those who have hurt me or wronged me everything I would wish for myself. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be free.

All of this I embody and believe in. But while the past can be forgiven (faced, integrated), the present is still happening. When the present is violent, it cannot be forgiven (faced, integrated), it must be intervened upon, opposed, and if possible, stopped. Part of this work is truth telling, bearing witness, calling things by their true names, calling for justice. Truth telling is essential to intervention, and a necessary part of integration and transformation as well. The necessity of truth telling is often used as a justification for punitive cancellation campaigns. And yet — our obsession with punishment and dehumanization actually prevents truth telling. My hesitance to tell the truth about many things results from me not trusting the public not to use the truth as a justification for their abusive, cruel, dehumanizing behaviour. When things are on the internet, they are out of your control, and they can easily be turned into anything by the gossip mill, and used to justify anything by people who are looking for justifications to stalk and harass people.

I am at a stage in my healing journey where I need to tell the truth. I am in the final stages of undoing the deep structure of dissociation that developmental trauma and incest created within me. I am committed to this undoing so that I can be the healthiest and most responsible I can be, and so that I can end the cycle of intergenerational trauma in my family line. In order to do this, I must tell the truth. I will do so carefully and responsibly, protecting the anonymity of people wherever I can, and discouraging my readers from stalking behaviours, parasocial relating, dehumanization, or harassment of any kind. I want the context of my work as a fierce advocate of everyone’s humanity to structure my truth telling. I want to challenge my readers to hold the whole truth at the same time. I want to challenge my readers to bear witness to the horrible things human beings can do, to the ways trauma repeats itself until it is faced and transformed, while steadfastly holding on to our recognition of everyone’s humanity.

I am in my truth telling era. I am trusting my readers to come on this journey with me, to practice our skills of holding painfully complex truths. I am trusting my readers to stay in reality with me, to practice the unflinching gaze together. I am trusting my readers to hold mercy and grace alongside their anger and pain, to hold curiosity in their hearts whenever they stumble into seductively simple blame. I am trusting my readers to behave in a principled way by respecting everyone’s irrevocable human dignity and fundamental belonging. I am trusting my readers not to dehumanize anyone.

We can tell the truth without dehumanizing anyone — and when we are dehumanizing someone we are not telling the truth.

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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1. From the Magnificat:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor on His humble servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed, the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name. He has mercy on those who fear Him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.”

2. Praying lyrics:

Well, you almost had me fooled
Told me that I was nothing without you
Oh, but after everything you've done
I can thank you for how strong I have become

'Cause you brought the flames and you put me through hell
I had to learn how to fight for myself
And we both know all the truth I could tell
I'll just say this is "I wish you farewell"

I hope you're somewhere praying, praying
I hope your soul is changing, changing
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your knees, praying

I'm proud of who I am
No more monsters, I can breathe again
And you said that I was done
Well, you were wrong and now the best is yet to come
'Cause I can make it on my own, oh
And I don't need you, I found a strength I've never known
I'll bring thunder, I'll bring rain, oh
When I'm finished, they won't even know your name

You brought the flames and you put me through hell
I had to learn how to fight for myself
And we both know all the truth I could tell
I'll just say this is "I wish you farewell"

I hope you're somewhere praying, praying
I hope your soul is changing, changing
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your knees, praying

Sometimes, I pray for you at night
Someday, maybe you'll see the light
Some say, in life, you're gonna get what you give
But some things only God can forgive

I hope you're somewhere praying, praying
I hope your soul is changing, changing
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your knees, praying