Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE FORGIVENESS
Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
FAQ 4
Ready to Get Started 5
Conversation Starters 6
• A Time to Forgive by Stephen Pope 7 Conversation Starters 8
• Returning to Forgiveness by Stephanie Quade 9 Conversation Starters 11
• God’s Forgiving Love by John Baldovin, S.J., 12 Conversation Starters 14
Gathering Prayer 15
The C21 Center Presents
The FAITH FEEDS program is designed for individuals who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Participants gather over coffee or a potluck lunch or dinner, and a host facilitates conversation using resources from the C21 Center.
The FAITH FEEDS guide offers easy, step-by-step instructions for planning, as well as materials to guide the conversation. It’s as simple as deciding to host the gathering wherever your community is found and spreading the word.
All selected articles have been taken from material produced by the C21 Center.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?
Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.
Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?
You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10–12 people.
What is the host’s commitment?
The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.
What is the guest’s commitment?
Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.
Still have more questions?
No problem! Email church21@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.
READY TO GET STARTED?
STEP ONE
Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.
STEP TWO
Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.
STEP THREE
Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.
STEP FOUR
Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the discussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!
STEP FIVE
Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…”
Here are three articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. For each article you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads.
This guide’s theme is: Forgiveness.
A TIME TO FORGIVE
by Stephen Pope
One day during Lent, I was giving a talk at a parish about sin and forgiveness. After the talk, a guy named Seamus came up to me. He was about 80 years old, a first-generation American whose parents had come from Ireland. Seamus told me, “I wish I’d heard that talk 65 years ago.” I asked why, and he explained:
“When I was 15 years old, my brother John was always beating me up. I told my parents, and my father said I’ve got to toughen up. My mother had eight kids and was trying to work two jobs, so she had no time to pay attention to me crying. I kept telling my brother to stop, but he was older and a lot bigger and stronger than I was. So one day I said, “I’ve had it.” I had been beaten up again and felt humiliated. I left the house in tears, and I never came back. I talked to my parents and to my other siblings, but from that day I never spoke a word to my brother.
Well, about a month ago, my sister called me and said I ought to go see John. He’s in the hospital dying of cancer. So I was going back and forth. I didn’t
know what to do. I thought, OK, I’ll go see him, and then I pulled back: If I go there, he’ll just insult me again. I can’t face that humiliation. I’m not going. I go back and forth, back and forth for three or four days. Finally I go to the hospital. I arrive at my brother’s room, and he’s not there. He had died a few hours before.
I wish I had not been so unwilling to forgive. I wish I could’ve put the relationship ahead of my hurt. I’ve been carrying the burden around my entire life, and it would have been the time for me to be free of this anger toward my brother. But I’m still carrying it today because I never got to talk to him. I’ve gone to confession and been absolved, but I still have the feeling.”
Seamus’s is a cautionary tale.
Stephen Pope is professor of theology at Boston College.
“A Time to Forgive” was originally given as an Agape Latte Talk.
A TIME TO FORGIVE
“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Summary
Stephen Pope, in this Agape Latte excerpt, shares a story about “running out of time” to forgive someone. Through one person’s struggle and heartbreak around forgiving a sibiling, Pope reminds us of the timeliness of forgiveness. We are left with a cautionary tale about the baggage of hurt across time.
Questions for Reflection
:
1. Think of a time in which you had an opportunity to extend forgiveness to someone. What helped you in that process? What factors made it challenging? How did feel after you had done it?
2. Have you ever been in need of forgiveness? Describe the experience of receiving that gift.
3. Seamus is left wishing he could forgive his brother, do you think its possible to really forgive someone after they have died? How is forgiveness timely? How might faith guide us through such experiences of losing someone before we can reconcile with them?
RETURNING TO FORGIVENESS
By Stephanie Quade
In Terry Gilliam’s 1991 film The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges plays Jack, a narcissistic shock-jock. While auditioning for a television show, Jack is given a tagline that becomes his mantra throughout the rest of the film, simply “Forgive me.” At various times, Jack yells, whispers, cries—giving various readings to the imperative, trying it on with accents, with attitude, but he has trouble seeing it as more than a line reading.
As dean of students, I often find myself being asked for forgiveness, in cases where it seems as out of place as it does to the character in the movie. I encounter students and their families after there has been an alleged violation of university policy. In these at times tense meetings, the student is frequently grappling with many emotions: embarrassment, regret, sadness, anger. It is usually after these conversations that the question of forgiveness is introduced. In fact, it is typically after a challenging conduct decision has been made that a student or his or her parents reminds me that Marquette is a Catholic school, built on the responsibilities of conscience and then on forgiveness and mercy.
I do not mean to suggest that these calls for forgiveness lack genuineness—when facing a significant disciplinary outcome that may have longlasting consequences, they are understandable. But
from my vantage point, forgiveness is not really what’s at stake. Let me explain: Like most colleges and universities, our conduct system is grounded in our being an educational institution, meaning in any given situation, our goal is to maximize the learning from the situation, in an attempt to help guide future behavior. So, forgiveness doesn’t really have a place in the equation.
Or does it? And, how does our Catholic identity inform this work?
Most of the students who enroll in our schools do not have a lot of experience of “being in trouble.” They worked diligently in high school and kept on the straight and narrow in order to enroll in a good college. Starting college, often away from home, students find themselves facing all kinds of decisions that can test their mettle and moral development, many involving underage use of alcohol or illegal drugs. And, while peer pressure is something most students will have dealt with in high school, now they are in a new environment, testing boundaries and striving for independence away from family members and other support systems.
More often than not, when a new student is documented for a violation of the code of conduct, the
student accepts responsibility almost immediately. A little experimentation, a hearing with a minimal outcome, and we never see the student in the conduct system again. Lesson learned. A minor moral developmental task accomplished.
But, in order to uphold our educational imperative, we cannot just let the student “check the box.” It’s not just pay a fine and move on: We want to engage the student’s conscience, to help the student consider his or her decisions in a larger context. We are in the business of looking for teachable moments—of capitalizing on dissonance to help a student grow as a moral agent. If a student holds his or her hand up right away to say “I did it,” the administrator conducting the hearing looks for other openings in a dialogue with the student in order to maximize learning. In our hearings, this is done through a “developmental conversation.”
In a very simple sense, one way the Catholic identity of our schools is brought to life is through these conversations, which help students realize that the focal point of a hearing is not their poor decision, but themselves—their adjustment to college, their interests and aspirations, and developing their own conscience. One of the key goals of these encounters is that the student experiences being treated as a whole person, not defined by a poor decision.
The goal is never to shame the student for making a poor decision, but instead to try to understand what led to that decision: How do you see yourself in terms of the broader community? Tell me a little about the friends you’ve made since you’ve started at Marquette: What is your role in your friend group? Often, there is tremendous dissonance between the leaders students see themselves as and the followers they seem to become in group situations. Typically, when a conduct administrator hears the truth in the situation, expressed often as vulnerability or even surprise from the student, that little kernel becomes the basis for the outcome assigned following a hearing. These outcomes include a host of possibilities, such as follow-up conversations, reflection papers, involvement in campus activities—anything to try to reinforce the learning from the hearing.
Once we decide that the hearing is not about reiterating the rules (or at least not exclusively about the rules), we can use that setting to not just address the situation at hand, but to engage students in fundamental questions about what is most important to them as they discern this in the depths of their own hearts—their conscience. At the outset of many hearings, the students will simply try to accept responsibility and get it over with. They will apologize without really understanding what’s at stake. In many ways, they do not see their behavior as consequential, and they do not see that it is connected to who they are. To be present to students who have come to terms with having disappointed their parents, who realize their capacity to hurt another person, who recognize how they may have failed to stand up for another person is a remarkably privileged opportunity. These settings are absolute crucible moments for the students involved, and for the administrators who are guiding them. And, in my experience, the more significant the case at hand, the more essential that the student be treated with care, so that even in cases that may result in the separation of the student from the campus, that care for the student defines the encounter.
To return to the question of forgiveness. My work with conduct is a constant reminder of how hard it is to forgive ourselves. We return and return to the places of our regret—continually trying to square particular actions with our understanding of ourselves. And this is precisely why these conduct meetings are ideal settings to help students begin to develop a sense of themselves as adults—as people who make mistakes, as people who understand that others make mistakes, and yet need not be determined by their mistakes. As their inner light of conscience can alert them to their mistakes, it can also bring them to a change of heart, to new places. They are places of reflection, growth, and change. And sometimes, they are places of great learning and forgiveness.
Stephanie Quade is the Dean of Students at Marquette University.
Originally published in the Spring 2012 edition of C21 Resources.
RETURNING TO FORGIVENESS
“Don’t let yourself forget that God’s grace rewards not only those who never slip, but also those who bend and fall. So sing! The song of rejoicing softens hard hearts.”
—St. Hildegard of Bingen
Summary
Stephanie Quade reflects on the role of forgiveness through the Marquette University student conduct system. Quade describes that students often try to get through misconduct situations quickly, whereas the the goal of the process is to facilitate learning and growth for each student. In this setting, forgiveness and growth go hand in hand with self-knowledge in the process of developing studentconscience beyond “just following the rules.”
Questions for Conversation
1. How does Quade’s understanding of the student conduct process inform your understanding of forgiveness?
2. How can experiences of failure and self-forgiveness help us to mature and grow? What do we learn from these experiences, and what can we offer to others because of them?
3. Quade centers a concern that each student be truly cared for, regardless of the outcome of a conduct situation. How can we facilitate processes of growth and healing in a context of care? What are examples of “care” would you recommend or have you experienced?
GOD’S FORGIVING LOVE
By John Baldovin, SJ
Many older Catholics can remember the Saturday afternoons of their youth being partially taken up by the practice of weekly confession. Although it was never put in writing, there was a kind of unwritten rule that if you wanted to go to holy Communion on Sunday, you needed to go to confession on Saturday. Of course the timing minimized the likelihood that you would sin seriously before the next morning.
Today the situation is much changed. There are no long lines at confessionals in the church on Saturdays. My usual experience as a priest helping in suburban parishes is that perhaps two or three people might come to confess in an hour and a half period. Many complain that the sacrament has fallen onto hard times and lament its imminent demise.
I think it’s fair to say that what’s happened in the last forty years or so is that people’s perception of serious sin has changed quite a bit. Now the stress on the positive aspects of our Christian faith is very good news indeed. People are much more accustomed nowadays to pay more attention to God’s love, mercy and compassion than to their sins. They recognize too (if they have been well-catechized) that in order to commit a serious sin three things are required: serious matter, knowledge by the person, a freedom. I suspect it is true that people who are honestly striving to lead good Christian lives do not commit serious sins very often.
What’s the problem then? Why do some lament the apparent disappearance of frequent confession?
Why go to confession at all, especially if one is not conscious of serious sin? I think there are at least three answers to those questions.
The first is that we human beings have a great propensity for self-deception. Some people of course have the opposite problem and scrutinize their motives endlessly, but I think that the vast majority of us are not terribly vigilant about our wrongdoing. And even when we do recognize our wrongdoing and admit it before God, we run the risk of under- or over-estimating it. There is something very honest and human about our admitting our sins before another human being, who stands as a very tangible representative of God and the Church. It is from this ordained priest that we can hear the declaration of God’s pardon in a way that no one else can. Moreover, because of the solemn seal of the confessional this is literally the safest place on earth. I am quite sure that God does forgive our sins when we confess them honestly to Him, but the genius of sacramentality is that things like forgiveness, healing, God’s self-gift all become very real for us in their being ritualized by human beings and (in the case of the other sacraments) the material goods of the earth.
The second reason for going to confession is the development of a good habit. I remember a conversation with an undergraduate a number of years ago. I think he was a sophomore in college. He was asking about confession because he was unfamiliar with it. A Catholic, he had gone to confession only once in his life—before his first holy Communion at the age of eight! Presumably the situation was not dire—that is if he had committed no serious sin—but at the same time he was missing out on a valuable opportunity to take stock of his life before the Lord. It is essential for our growth in holiness that we regularly take time for a completely honest examination of conscience. It seems to me that today people who are involved in 12-step programs have a much better sense of this than the broader Catholic population. Significant events do have a big impact on our lives, but so do ordinary repetitive patterns.
The last of the (many possible) reasons I want to articulate for going to confession is the fact that regular confession helps us to recognize the extent of God’s grace in our lives. I frequently say to penitents: “You may think this sacrament is about how bad you are, but in reality it’s about how good God is.” It’s difficult sometimes to realize that sin is only sin when we see it in the context of God’s mercy. Otherwise our misdeeds are merely wrongdoing. When we can see our wrongdoing as an offense against the God of love, we get a gut sense of what the 18th century clergyman and poet, John Newton, meant when he wrote: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” The tangible, sacramental act of penance and reconciliation actually saves us from the wretchedness of our misdeeds. The indispensable admission ticket to Christianity is gratitude to the God who forgives us our sins so that we can live the life He wants for us.
As we’ve seen here the sacrament of penance has taken a number of different forms over the centuries. How it will develop in the future is anyone’s guess, but I am convinced it still has great value today—for anyone who needs to hear with regularity the spoken word of God’s forgiving love and I think that means anyone who wants to be called a Christian.
John F. Baldovin, S.J. is professor of historical and liturgical theology at the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry.
Excerpted from C21 Resources, Spring 2012.
GOD’S FORGIVING LOVE
“Confession is the sacrament of the tenderness of God, his way of embracing us.”
—Pope Francis
Summary
John Baldovin, SJ, reflects on changing sacramental practices regarding reconciliation. He writes that the sacrament still remains valuable, in that it offers Catholics the opportunity to know themselves better and to intimately experience God’s mercy. As he says, “the indispensable admission ticket to Christianity is gratitude to the God who forgives us our sins so that we can live the life He wants for us.”
Questions for Conversation
1. Describe your experience with the sacrament of reconciliation. Do you experience God’s tenderness, as Pope Francis describes it? Do you find it valuable to hear out loud that God has forgiven you? Have you had challenging confessions?
2. Of the three reasons Baldovin gives go to confession—honest selfknowledge, developing good habits, and recognize God’s grace at work—which speaks to you most and why?
3. In the Our Father we pray to be able to forgive others as God forgives us. Do you find it easier to extend mercy and forgiveness to others knowing that God extends both to you?
