When I realize that my one-year anniversary with my boyfriend is on Easter Sunday, I text Merray. “That’s … a lot,” she jokes. Both of us had grown up Christian: me Chinese Baptist, her Coptic Orthodox. She texts me about her girlhood Easter dress: an empire waist baby-doll top with cap sleeves. It made her disdain her breasts because she saw herself as one of “the Boys”. We’re both queer. We have since left the church, but still talk about God. Now in our 30s, we have slid back into some version of our childhood spirituality, but would sooner meet the Holy Spirit on a dance floor than at a church. Consider us lapsed atheists.
When I was teenager, gay and closeted, I remember church leaders marched against gay marriage up and down the California suburbs. I found the Book of Romans cheerless: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and “For the wages of sin is death”. Even Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, that the desire to commit adultery was as sinful as actually committing adultery. So there was no getting around sin. Yet I believed I was young and innocent, and I did not deserve death. There had to be another way. One day, I would move to New York and become an atheist. I thought it was that simple.
Merray asks if I have any Easter rituals. I say I don’t. But if I did, I might tally up the wrongs, big and small, that anyone has ever committed in the last year, and say a prayer of forgiveness, one by one. In Matthew, when Peter asked Jesus, “How many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “Not seven times, but 77 times.”
There’s a musical rhythm to forgiving someone 77 times. If it sounds like overkill, it’s because Jesus had a sense of humor. You appreciate it when you’re old enough to have severely wronged some of the people you love. Once, at a party in Berlin – I was in my mid-20s – my best friend was raped a few yards away from me, but I was too high on ketamine to notice. He called my name while it was happening, probably assumed I didn’t hear him, but I did. The question I kept asking myself since: why did I pretend I didn’t? We hardly spoke about it after it happened, but for years, I couldn’t forgive myself. I could forgive others for hurting me because I thought I deserved it, which isn’t really forgiveness in the end.
In the Christian formulation, to give forgiveness simultaneously means to accept it. The Lord’s prayer hinges on this notion: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” I’ve been lucky enough to be shown how, as I have been forgiven, first by God, then by people. Once after an emergency, I had abandoned an apartment in Berlin I rented from two close friends, accidentally leaving a lethal amount of the drug GBL stored in an unmarked Pfeffi liquor bottle stored in the fridge. When my friend and her fiance moved back in, they discovered the bottle in the back of their fridge, thinking it was liquor. To celebrate after buying a new piece of furniture, they each took a shot, an amount that could have killed them. They went straight to the emergency room. This, too, is one of my life regrets.
The fiance cut me off from all social accounts and instructed me never to contact him. I haven’t heard from him in six years. It’s what I deserved. The second friend forgave me, which I didn’t deserve. “You have to be careful,” she wrote to me gently. “For others, for yourself.”
She did not forgive me because she knew I could make amends. She forgave me precisely because I couldn’t. Unconditional forgiveness doesn’t require change. It doesn’t require anything. But by not requiring change, it can make change happen.
So I pray I may turn from my ways. Rather than keeping the record of my transgressions close, fogging my ability to see myself as a victim of injustice, I have turned to the beauty of the world. I used to think grown men don’t cry, but the older I get, I find I am crying all the time: when biting into a clementine, or walking down Bowery at night and watching the taillights run along the Manhattan Bridge, or when my boyfriend hears the bedroom door, and wordlessly raises his elbow for me to slide my arm around him. Because I have been forgiven, I can be free to love and accept love. I should deserve none of this, but in Christ, all are forgiven, and freed from bondage to love the world. And I do love the world. I pray to forgive my debtors. I pray so I can love my enemies.
Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys (Bloomsbury)
