Benjamin and I sit together while he eats breakfast. Some mornings he belts out a song. O Precious Sign is one he sang this week, and for reasons I can't explain he knows all the verses. It's a hymn often played at weddings, but usually I leave him home from such events. The words are admittedly in the liturgy on the piano, but I have no proof that he can read music. Is it possible that on some level he understands that house guests are arriving because of a family wedding?
Today he looked anxious, hunched over his cornflakes. His face wrinkles up when emotions are bubbling.
"Do you want to sing, Ben?"
He looked up at me. That alone was good, in that it loosened the bonds that keep him in his head.
"No." He spoke firmly. "I'm annoyed at Dad because he broke the lid on my pill box." It's true that one of the twenty eight compartments is held shut by tape.
"Well, I'm annoyed at you for screaming at our guests yesterday."
His head dropped. Guilt hung like sandbags around his neck.
"I'll forgive you if you'll forgive Dad."
I thought, but did not say, that the discrepancy between tugging too energetically on a cheap piece of plastic and a full throttled blast at people who had traveled two thousand miles to our door was sharp.
"Can you forgive Dad?" I asked.
"yes," came the soft answer.
"Then I forgive you."
The thing about the caveat in the New Testament about debts, is that it is not about payment. Compassion for someone who has wronged you does not drop coins in your own forgiveness account. Rather it lessens the distance between two people who have messed up. When our self image is inflated by the belief that we are above reproach, it is harder, if not impossible to accept imperfection. Looking in the mirror at our own blemishes is the best way I know of to distract us from flaws in
others.
I think I'll take Ben to the thrift store to look for a new pill box. While we are there I can invite him to find a small wedding gift for his cousin. And if he is in the right mood, he can come to the ceremony. If I am very lucky, he will sing all three verses.
