Apology

The ocean does not apologize for its depth and the mountains do not seek forgiveness for the space they take and so, neither shall I

 -Becca Lee

As I have meditated on this word over the last few weeks, I keep trying to make it an essay about forgiveness instead of apology. Fitting. This is exactly what we always want to do—to rush past the painful act of regret and get to the joyous gift of reconciliation. But it is good to sit with the awkward, undesirable, angst of saying, and (more importantly), of being, “sorry.”  

Sometimes.

 I had a student once who apologized profusely—when she spoke too high, or too quietly to be heard by her peers, when she mispronounced or misspoke, and also when she said exactly what she meant to say. She reminded me recently that at one point she accidentally jostled the desk where she was sitting and promptly begged its pardon. I teased her,

“D, did you just apologize to that table?”

“Yes,” she admitted sheepishly. And then with a shrug,

“Sorry.”

The class laughed, and I suggested that this tendency was well worth paying attention to as an aspiring advocate and ally. I was happy to hear when she recounted the story to me just a few weeks ago, that she considered this a positive turning point in her professional growth.

Apology, like so many virtue practices, has been doled out inequitably by the powers that be such that some of us find ourselves carrying more of the burden to make amends than others. But contrition is a responsibility that should be shared, which means (perhaps counterintuitively) that some of us will need to take it up more than we have been led to believe, and others of us will need to relinquish some of its weight—so familiar to us now that we believe it to be our own.

 People of color, women, queer and disabled people to name a few, have been asked to live our entire lives as an uninterrupted apology for existing, always seeking forgiveness for our hair, and our bodies, our desires, limits, and expanses. Some of us have been told that we are, in fact, so embarrassing, shameful, and discomfiting, that we should be grateful for any attempts at kindness no matter how small, sloppy, insincere, or incomplete.

 I disagree.

 And many of these same power dynamics happen in our most intimate settings. Holidays are harrowing times for so many of us who live with regret for things we have said and done and left unsaid and undone with the people and places that made us. But if we are under and over-practiced at making amends, we will have to try-on a new way of being if we are to ever get any better at it.

I watch with curiosity when adults make children give immediate, unreflective apologies. I understand the desire to build in a practice of humbling thyself and seeking relational restoration, but I have wondered if part of the reason, that so many of us still struggle with the concept of contrition into adulthood is that so few of us were given the proper space or tools to tune in, self-reflect, and decide whether we are in fact aggrieved at our own behavior.

 So then, depending on temperament, we learn to say “sorry” as a way to earn love, to ensure security, or to simply be done with something when it begins to interfere with our other pursuits or our own self-conception.  We learn—and practice— offering words detached, if not divorced, from our sentiments about them. This is dangerous, especially if we are calling it holy.

When you are in over your head an apology is one way to the other side.

It can be a baptism, for the accused or otherwise implicated,

but it can also be

a drowning. 

So, the question of when to humble ourselves, for the sake of right relationship and when instead, to champion ourselves for the sake of self-respect, is what I find most interesting about the notion of apology. As is often the case, a power analysis might be a good place to start. Counterintuitive solidarity tells me that I am unlikely to intuit what is painful for someone whose marginalization or experience I do not share. Many of us have been led to believe that we need to understand and even agree with someone’s ache in order to offer apology, but I think we deceive ourselves when we believe we have ever fully understood what it is like for another human being. I think apology is more about trust, empathy, and vulnerability than it is about exacting perception or agreement.

 On some level, every request for apology is about power and how one has or hasn’t used it

 He pushed me.

She yelled at me.

They ignored me.

You hurt me.

 The problem is, so few of us are willing to admit that we are powerful. Presidents, pastors, deans, directors, artists, accountants, mothers, fathers, siblings, we all feel the ever-pressing limits of our own humanity and forget that those around us are often even younger, littler, sicker, poorer, more endangered than we are or may have ever been.

 So as a person prone to taking up space, talking-over, judging, and controlling, as a person with titles and talents that gain me social capital (earned and unearned) I am learning to apologize whenever I have failed to recognize (even momentarily) the humanity in my quieter, smaller, more timid, tired, and more fluid siblings.

 And

 as a woman concurrently prone to apologize for sins that are not my own, that were maybe never even sins to begin with, I am learning to lengthen the time between my interior compulsion and my proclamations of remorse—to inspect, examine, and decide whether the sorrow pooling inside me is a conviction for how I have behaved, (which is of course quite possible, no matter my identities) or whether the sorrow is better accounted for by a world filled with people even people I love or have loved) that would deign to demand that I be any less or any more than who I am—a bearer of the image of God, a God, I should say, who is known for their ability to be all-powerful and also to give power away when that is what the people they love need the most.