Two great articles from John Guzlowski: Christmas and Forgiveness

A while ago, I gave a talk to a high school class about my parents and their experiences under the Nazis. I talked about my father’s four years in Buchenwald and my mothers two and half years in various slave labor camps in Germany.

During the Q & A after my talk, a young man asked me a question. I’m sure it was in part sparked by the Christmas season, the talk that you hear at this time of year about —Peace on Earth and Good Will to all Men.— He asked me whether or not I forgave the Germans for what they did to my parents.

The question stopped me. I haven’t thought about it before…

…and

Heaven

When our daughter Lillian was about five years old, she started thinking about the natural end of all the things she knew. She started thinking about dying and death.

I don’t know why she did, but she did, and it made her sad and worried. She didn’t want to lose her mother and me and her grandparents to death, and she was frightened that she would.

Because she was a bright kid and a problem solver, she tried to think of a solution, some way around death, and the solution she thought out was her own personal vision of heaven.

Heaven, she figured, would be a place where she and her parents and all the people she loved would live in some perfect place, interacting with all her favorite characters from all her favorite books.

It sounded great, and I used to love to hear her talk about it. She and Linda and I would be in the same perfect place as the characters in Laura Ingalls Wilder and C. S. Lewis. We would have lunch in a park with Laura and Lucy and Edmund and Susie and Peter and Aslan, the compassionate, kind, loving God of this Heaven…

Consider these two posts and their relationship, one to the other. Does God forgive, and to what extent? Beyond metaphysical and theological ramblings can we see a God Whose love is the ultimate victor? Who accepts all who present themselves? Who cannot help but run after those who purposefully turn away from Him in an everlasting series of overtures?

Our forgiveness is limited and human. Our concept of heaven too adult. We need more of the heaven of Laura and Lucy and Edmund and Susie and Peter and Aslan and less of our prosaic vision[less] concept. Perhaps Saint Exupéry was right:

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to have to explain things to them always and forever. — The Little Prince, Chapter 1.

Something to ponder as we approach our celebration of the Incarnation.