VIRTUE ETHICS
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Youth
WORKSHOP 11: FORGIVENESS
BY JESSICA YORK JUDITH A. FREDIANI, DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR
© Copyright 2012 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 8:43:31 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. — Mahatma Gandhi
This workshop focuses on forgiveness, of both others and oneself. A story demonstrates how forgiveness helps the individual who does the forgiving, at least as much as it helps the forgiven.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Opening | 15 |
Activity 1: Story – A Path to Forgiveness | 10 |
Activity 2: Up Side, Down Side | 10 |
Activity 3: Forgiveness Maze | 25 |
Activity 4: Dilemma | 10 |
Activity 5: Practice | 15 |
Faith in Action: Creating a Ritual | |
Closing | 5 |
Alternate Activity 1: Real Life Challenges | |
Alternate Activity 2: Story – How Coyote Lost His Song, Music and Dance | 25 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Novelist Faith Baldwin wrote, "I think one should forgive and remember... to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you've forgiven is achievement." If there are times when we might celebrate living up to our highest standards, times when we have sought or granted forgiveness may be among these.
Can you think of a time when to forgive was extremely difficult, yet you managed it? Ethicist and theologian Lewis B. Smedes wrote, "You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well." Perhaps you have not perfected your forgiving. Moments may still arise when you feel anger or shame at a memory of being wronged. Yet, if you can move to a place where you are able to "wish them well," you can feel good about not settling for the easy way. Remember, we need not be perfect, but only to strive to be the best person we can be. Youth, adults, all of us are all still "becoming."
WORKSHOP PLAN
OPENING (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite a volunteer to light the chalice while you lead the group to recite the chalice lighting words:
The thought manifests as the word
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings...
As the shadow follows the body,
As we think, so we become.
– from the Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha
Invite the youth to check in by sharing any moral challenges they have experienced since the last meeting. If appropriate, use Alternate Activity 1 to further explore the group's challenges. If youth appear interested in discussing a particular challenge but you feel there is not enough time in this meeting, ask the person who shared it to write a short description of the challenge on the Bicycle Rack.
Tell participants that today you will talk about forgiveness.
ACTIVITY 1: STORY — A PATH TO FORGIVENESS (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
The group hears and discusses a true story about forgiveness.
Introduce the story by saying:
We can say important things about forgiveness by being clear what it is not. Forgiving another person does not necessarily mean you will reconcile a relationship, nor that a person has apologized or even asked to be forgiven. Forgiving another certainly does not mean that what that person did was okay, or that they are "getting away with it" (whatever "it" may be). And for most of us, advice "to forgive and forget" is often unrealistic.
So what is "forgiveness" and how do we choose to embrace forgiveness as part of our spiritual journey? Here is a story of how one man found a path to forgiveness.
Tell or read the story.
Process with these questions:
Say, in these words or your own:
From Azim, we can learn that forgiveness is indeed an opportunity to deepen our lives, spiritually and emotionally. We can choose acceptance over anger, gratitude for what we have over regret for what we have lost. It may be too much to expect we will actually love those who hurt us, but we can still decide not to hate, and not to hurt as we have been hurt.
None of this is easy and we will not always succeed. However, by making these choices, we truly can live our Principles, accepting and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of others, justice, equity and compassion, acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. Forgiveness is a gift we can give—to ourselves and to the world.
ACTIVITY 2: UP SIDE, DOWN SIDE (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Participants identify positive and negative aspects of the virtue of forgiveness.
Invite youth to sit for a moment and think about "forgiveness" as a virtue. Indicate the possible definitions you have posted on newsprint. Lead a discussion; these prompts may be useful:
As participants discuss the questions, briefly write on newsprint the positive ("Up side") and negative ("Down side") aspects of forgiveness that emerge. Conclude by reviewing the comments you have captured.
ACTIVITY 3: FORGIVENESS MAZE (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Participants create mazes to illustrate paths to forgiveness.
Tell the group that you will guide them to reflect on a few questions about forgiveness. Invite them to get comfortable and close their eyes if they wish.
Say:
Think of forgiveness as a path. It starts when someone has been hurt or wronged. Perhaps the hurt party is you. Or, perhaps you are the one who has hurt another. How will you maneuver through the path to a place where you can forgive, or can be forgiven?
Have you ever lost a friend because one of you could not forgive the other? What blocked forgiveness?
Have you ever forgiven a friend a big hurt? What helped you forgive?
Has a friend ever forgiven you a big hurt? Do you think any actions on your part helped your friend along the path to forgiveness?
If forgiveness is a path, can you identify doorways to forgiveness? Sometimes an apology can be a doorway. Sometimes a doorway is refusing to hang on to shame or hate.
Can you identify road blocks on the forgiveness path? If someone does not admit to wrongdoing, is it harder for you to forgive? If you are afraid to own up to a hurt you caused, afraid to face our own shame, is that a road block?
Invite youth to take these thoughts and create a maze of forgiveness. Distribute Handouts 1 and 2, Maze. Tell the youth they have 15 minutes to follow all the steps to construct the maze. Give them five-minute and two-minute warnings.
Call the larger group back together. Ask:
ACTIVITY 4: DILEMMA (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Youth discuss scenarios involving ethical dilemmas.
Seek a volunteer to read each of the two scenarios. For each dilemma, open the floor to reactions and answers. How could forgiveness play a part in this dilemma? Ask the youth if it reminds them of other dilemmas they have experienced or heard of, real or fictional.
If you have time, invite volunteers to role play the dilemmas.
ACTIVITY 5: PRACTICE (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Participants understand how the practice of forgiveness affects their lives.
Invite youth to take five minutes to journal, using the questions on newsprint as prompts, or to draw or meditate on the questions. While they work, you might offer these additional prompts:
Invite participants to share journal writing to their level of comfort. You may wish to remind youth that you are a mandated reporter and, if anyone discloses behavior that could be dangerous to themselves or others, you will need to report it. Listen to what is said.
When sharing is complete or after ten minutes, invite youth to take the next five minutes to decorate cork beads. Distribute participants' clipboards, new beads (one per youth), and decorating materials. Invite youth to decorate a bead while reflecting on their personal experiences with forgiveness. Remind them that the beads will act as a reminder to use their highest values.
As participants finish, have them add this bead to the anklet they started in Workshop 1.
If any participant missed Workshop 1, provide them with a clipboard, hemp, a bead for their name bead, and instruction to begin their anklet.
Collect journals, clipboards, and anklet-making materials, and store for the next workshop.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Let a volunteer read the quotation below from ethicist and theologican Lewis B. Smedes, while another extinguishes the chalice:
You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.
Distribute Taking It Home.
FAITH IN ACTION: CREATING A RITUAL
Description of Activity
Youth create a simple forgiveness ritual and share it with others.
If you have a group that is creative or has quite a bit of worship experience, they might enjoy the challenge of creating a ritual around forgiveness. The ritual could involve a meditation. Use Activity 3, Forgiveness Maze or Activity 5, Practice as a basis for a ritual on the topic "What should I focus on as I steer my mind toward a path of forgiveness?"
The ritual could be more concrete. It could involve an act to signify release, such as burning (keeping safety in mind, always) or burying. It might include tying knots in a string to symbolize acts for which one needs to forgive and cutting or knotting the knots while repeating a mantra of forgiveness.
The group can work on one ritual together, or you can break into smaller groups. Share the ritual(s) in the congregational newsletter or lead them during a worship service or chapel.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
Reflect on the workshop with your co-leader. After today, only the closing workshop remains. How do you feel about the way the program has progressed?
Read the next workshop for any advance preparation needed and decide who will be responsible for what. If you will hold a short celebration, decide whether you will serve snacks and who will be responsible for providing them.
TAKING IT HOME
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. — Mahatma Gandhi
IN TODAY'S WORKSHOP... we talked about forgiveness—of others and of ourselves. We envisioned forgiveness as a path instead of a finite act and identified doorways and road blocks along the way. We acknowledged that forgiving can be a gift we give ourselves to stop thoughts of hatred and anger, which can hurt us emotionally, spiritually, and physically. That forgiveness can also help the forgiven is a bonus.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: REAL LIFE CHALLENGES
Materials for Activity
Description of Activity
Youth discuss ethical challenges they have faced.
If someone shared an experience in check-in or during any workshop activities that the group would like to explore further, do so now. This could be particularly useful if an experience resonated with many participants. If several challenges are already listed on the Bicycle Rack, invite the youth to choose one to discuss. It need not be related to this workshop's topic.
You might use these questions to structure a discussion:
Affirm that is always easier to see good solutions in hindsight and that living a life according to virtues we want to nurture or values we hold dear is not always easy. We do not need to always "get it right," but we do need to keep trying.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 2: STORY – HOW COYOTE LOST HIS SONG, MUSIC AND DANCE (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Youth act out a story and interpret its meaning in terms of the virtue of forgiveness.
Have the youth enact the story "How Coyote Lost His Song, Music, and Dance," (at www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith/wonderfulwelcome/session6/sessionplan/stories/118305.shtml) either with actors making up lines or with a narrator reading text for others to act out.
Afterward, ask:
VIRTUE ETHICS: WORKSHOP 11:
STORY: A PATH OF FORGIVENESS
By Shelley Jackson Denham.
This is the story of Azim Khamisa. His decision to forgive deeds many would consider unforgiveable has inspired and transformed people all over the world.
Azim, an international investment banker, lived in San Diego, with his two children, a son, Tariq, and a daughter, Tasreen.
One night in 1995, Azim's world collided with that of a 14-year-old boy named Tony. The impact changed their lives, and many other lives, forever.
Tony, too, lived in San Diego. He had lived with his grandfather, Ples Felix, since 1990 when Tony's mother sent him from their home in Los Angeles. She had come to this decision after Tony witnessed the murder of his cousin and best friend. She wanted Tony to be away from the gangs and violence that were rampant in their neighborhood. With her father, Ples, she decided that Tony would be safer in San Diego. Through the years, Ples tried to assure Tony's future by demanding that he study hard and stay away from the much older boys to whom Tony was drawn. Tony became more and more angry, resenting his strict grandfather and all the rules he imposed.
Finally one evening after he and his grandfather argued, Tony ran away, taking Ples' rifle. He went to find his older friends who belonged to a gang, the Black Mob.
That was the night the lives of Tony and his grandfather tragically crashed into the lives of Azim Khamisa and his son Tariq.
Tariq was a bright, popular student, 20 years old. He had a job delivering pizzas to help pay for his education. That evening, Tariq was delivering pizzas when he encountered the Black Mob. The gang demanded that he give them pizza without paying for it, but he refused. So they told Tony to "bust him." Tony pointed the rifle and pulled the trigger, instantly killing Tariq.
When Azim learned of the death of his beloved son, he was overwhelmed with grief.
As a devout Sufi Muslim, he turned to his faith for prayer, solace, and inspiration. Day by day, he came to know he must walk the path of forgiveness and compassion. He realized that Tony—the youngest person to be tried as an adult in California, and now sentenced to 25 years in prison—was as much a victim of society's violence as Tariq. Azim began to believe "You do forgiveness for yourself, because it moves you on; the fact that it can also heal the perpetrator is icing on the cake."
Azim felt that in order for him to move on, he needed to take some kind of action that would honor Tariq's spirit and give him a sense of purpose. He started the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, engaging people of all ages in education, mentorship, and community service programs with one mission: to stop children from killing children. Through its projects, the foundation works to transform violence prone, at-risk youth into nonviolent, achieving individuals and create safe, productive schools.
A month after establishing the foundation, Azim invited Tony's grandfather Ples to join him. Since November 1995—only 10 months after Tariq's death—Azim and Ples have considered themselves to be brothers, bringing their story and message of forgiveness and nonviolence to people all over the world.
Five years after the murder, Azim met Tony in prison. He told a remorseful Tony that he forgave him, and offered him a job with the Tariq Khamisa Foundation when he was released from prison. Later, Azim wrote to the governor of California, asking that Tony's sentence be commuted.
It is difficult to imagine how Azim could transcend the heartbreak of his son's murder, for there are some events in life that are too major to get "over." We just get through them. Azim got through the loss of Tariq by becoming a powerful activist, teaching forgiveness and peace in order to literally change lives and society as a whole. Azim discovered that forgiveness is a path we walk, not an act that we do once and we are finished. Forgiveness doesn't erase pain. It provides a path to transform that pain into something life affirming.
VIRTUE ETHICS: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 1: MAZE
1. Create a list of doorways: Actions or thoughts that help you to forgive others and yourself.
2. Create a list of road blocks: Actions or thoughts that hinder you in forgiving others or yourself.
3. Create your maze.
4. How many doorways are on your list? That is how many openings you should include in your maze—that many, plus two more. The two extra are the doorways you have yet to discover, but hope to find. Locate a path through your maze that uses exactly this many doorways. Create more, if needed. If you have more than these in your maze already, you will need to fill in the lines to close these doorways. Label your doorways.
5. The lines you need to fill in represent road blocks. As you fill them in, label them from the list you created in Step 2. If you need more road blocks, label other solid lines as road blocks.
VIRTUE ETHICS: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 2: MAZE
VIRTUE ETHICS: WORKSHOP 11:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: FORGIVENESS DILEMMAS
Dilemma 1
Alex is spreading rumors about you. You would LOVE to start rumors about Alex, but you know that is wrong. Besides, it would not really fix anything. C.J., the popular youth at school that just stopped dating popular Alex, starts spreading rumors about Alex. Alex approaches you after school and says "Now I know what it feels like to have people tell lies on you, and I'm sorry I started rumors about you. I promise never to lie about you again." You forgive Alex. But two months later, after C.J. and Alex make up, they both spread a new lie about you. What should you do?
Dilemma 2
Sometimes governments commit wrongdoing. Prongel is a fictional country. Prongel imprisoned the native population of Miwis for over a hundred years. Now Prongel is working on intentional reconciliation with the Miwi people. They debate two options. Option 1: Pay every Miwi a certain dollar amount, as restitution for the labor extracted from their ancestors. The check would arrive with a letter explaining that the government does not see this financial restitution as an apology because they do not admit that any wrong was ever done. Option 2: No financial remuneration, but the ruling body of Prongel will issue an official apology that clearly states the wrongs historically committed. Which option should Prongel take? [Does this dilemma seem contrived, because the obvious answer is to combine the options? In fact, history shows that governments are most likely to choose either Option 1 or Option 2, not both.]
FIND OUT MORE
The Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur is also known as the Day of Atonement. Read more about the meaning and practice of Yom Kippur in the Tapestry of Faith program Building Bridges, Workshop 5, or on the Judaism101 (at www.jewfaq.org/holiday4.htm) website. The Unitarian Universalist Association's resources on forgiveness include this UU-flavored Yom Kippur ritual (at www.uua.org/worship/words/ceremonies/submissions/143238.shtml).
Read more about the organization started by Azim Khamsa on the website of the Tariq Khamsa Foundation (at tkf.org/).
The Tao of Forgiveness, by William Martin (New York: Penguin, 2010), uses true stories, wisdom tales, and spiritual exercises to help you along a path of forgiveness.
Living into Hope: A Call to Spiritual Action for Such a Time As This, (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1331) by Joan Brown Campbell (Woodstock, VT: Skylights Path, 2010), invites people of faith to bring hope to the work of forgiveness, renewal, creating justice, and building loving communities.
A Little Book of Forgiveness (Pasadena: Fuller Press, 2008), by Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell, explores forgiveness as a catalyst for spiritual growth.
The video clip Forgiveness: How Do Children Forgive? (at www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzKAerj8xKE&feature=related) is part of a series the Spiritual Literacy Project (at www.spiritualityandpractice.com/spiritualliteracy/) has posted on YouTube featuring excerpts from a DVD series, based on the book Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat (New York: Scribner, 1998). Watch more of the videos, visit the website, or read the book.