Let Fall.

What forgiveness really costs. (A whole lot.)

Laisse tomber. Literally, “let fall” in French. There is however a broad range of meanings for this phrase. Everything from a snippy just drop it OK when you’re being teased to something like the New Yorker’s fuggetaboutit, dream on, buddy. It can also be an encouragement to let something go or stop worrying about it. Like the friend you pick up at 5 am from the airport and they keep apologizing and you tell them ça va! laisse tomber…because you secretly loved this little adventure in the dark and it got you out of the house and you like this friend anyway.

Ultimately it’s an appeal to release expectations of one kind or another. Let them fall. Expectations are the thief of joy says a well-worn phrase that was originally stated by an unnamed neanderthal or Seneca or Theodore Roosevelt but the idea is intuitive enough for all of us. We say that hopes are dashed. However hackneyed the phrase, what a strong word! Dashed. The word disappointment does not seem quite so violent until you dissect it and come up with dis-appoint which ends up sounding like a coup of some sort where the seat of one’s affections is the throne and a hope has been unceremoniously deposed. I’m curious. What is actually going on here? When my Aldi order doesn’t end up including the salmon fillets I was planning on and twenty minutes later I snap at a tiny person I love with all my heart and soul for leaving his toy in the middle of the kitchen, what the heck is going on? Are these two events related?

Yes. I do think so.

I carry a world in my mind, something like a vast museum full of carefully sculpted and curated images in my mind called expectations. There’s a vastly different and separate universe that exists outside. Let’s say that the mismatch of those inner and outer worlds is what we commonly refer to as Suffering. I imagine an Event (so-and-so will text me back soon, I will have another baby, my husband will pick up his clothes from the floor) but the people or things around us do not correspond. In other words, a rock flies through the museum window and knocks the nose off one of my favorite ideas. So naturally I feel the need for compensation of some sort. Simone Weil puts it this way:

Human mechanics.

Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within and poisons him. This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance?

The tendency to spread the suffering beyond ourselves.

If through excessive weakness we can neither call forth pity nor do harm to others, we do violence to the representation of the universe inside of us.

Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult.

So I have a few options when I encounter a disparity between my reality and another. 1) I can take it out on someone, especially an inferior who is powerless to respond and seek compensation for themselves. 2) I can unload my suffering through seeking another’s pity. 3) Neither of these options are open to me and I stay silent while the pain eats me from the inside out. Finally, 4) I’m too chicken to go with the first couple of options and I take it out on the world in my mind. I no longer try to choose images that have some kind of resemblance to the reality outside; I really go for the metaphysical jugular and flip everything around, calling bad good and good bad, the beautiful ugly and the ugly beautiful. This is of course the nuclear option but humans can get to the point of desperation and emptiness that it looks like the only way out.

I find my sudden anger when I’ve been “wronged” quite disturbing as well as the lengths to which I’m willing to go to cause others pain. And if I can’t do it “in real life” I do it in my imagination. (When you have time here’s a whole other essay about that sticky problem.) Simone laments:

The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not yet sacred enough to me….Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment?

To be able to hurt others with impunity—for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.

I would never dare step into an actual art gallery and slash and smash those works of art. How then am I capable of spitting out vicious words at a child who I assert to be made in the image of God himself? Answer: Neither the child nor the God who made him are yet sacred enough to me. “What will bring me to the point where I could no more imagine splashing caustic irritation and anger on my fellow humans than I could red paint across a Vermeer or van Gogh?” Where can I find the clarity of vision and the humility to accept the things I find as they are?

It takes a different kind of gravity. Not the one that pulls us down into our cyclical desire for others to suffer as we do, but a weighty humility which learns from careful observation of the things around us. This is unaccountably difficult and first involves facing that emptiness or the Void as Weil calls it. Someone I love suffers from daily migraines. The war in Ukraine grinds on while another begins in Gaza. I watch as friends are betrayed by the community they trust. What are we to do? At some point all of us are pushed to the edge, the Moment.

The Moment is my private shorthand for the point at which we look into the Void. If you have seen Life is Beautiful, the Roberto Benigni film about a young Jewish family taken to a concentration camp, you may remember the father’s attempt to shield his son Giosuè from the ugliness by using humor and games. Guido (the father) is employing a survival technique to make it through the horror. One night however he turns a corner while sneaking around with his son and comes face-to-face with the ashes from the ovens. I will never forget the look on his face, nor the fact that his son is sleeping in his arms (facing the other way), nor the slump of Guido’s shoulders as he walks away. Even he is brought to a Moment from which he cannot fully recover. You see the light go out. The irrepressible skip in his step is gone though his love for his son gives him the energy to make one last attempt to save him.

The Moment can come at any time, multiple times. This is the mismatch of inner reality and outer reality times a million. It can destroy a person. It can lead someone to really reorganize that inner world to something almost unrecognizable, that situation I called the nuclear option earlier. How can one bear up? The answer is that a human being cannot. It is beyond our ken. Weil says that in order to have the strength to contemplate affliction when we are afflicted we need supernatural bread. (What on earth do you mean by that, dear Simone?)

I am not certain. But I will tell you what beauty has fed me, what the ravens have brought me in the desert of my exile. The gifts are actually myriad but I offer a handful today: a song, a poem, an action.

A Song.

While exploring my feelings after a desolating loss of a specific community and vocation this past year, I remembered this song one day. I had first heard it riding in the passenger seat through the starkly beautiful Mojave desert. It was just after the release of Over the Rhine’s album Love and Revelation a couple years ago and also just after my body released a ten-week old baby. Here came the strains of “Broken Angels,” the precise cocktail of beauty, suffering, melancholy and love for which I have loved this band since I met them in 1996. This is an anthem for those of us who have just come from the brink and are asking questions.

Read the verses with me while we have a listen.

I want to take a break from heartache, drive away from all the tears I’ve cried. I’m a wasteland down inside.

In the crawlspace under heaven,
in the landscape of a wounded heart, I don’t know where to start.

But the wild geese of Mary pierce the darkness with a song
and a light that I’ve been running from and running for so long.

As their feathers spin their stories I can still cling to my fears,
or I can run, but they come along and we both disappear
just like all…

All these broken angels, all these tattered wings, all these things
come alive in me.

An empty frame against the madness, like the fence line holds the fog at bay, it’s gonna roll in anyway.

Draw the curtain across heaven,
cut the sky, a cold coyote moon kills the season off too soon.

Are they sparks or are they embers, fireflies or falling stars?
Are they fireworks that backfired? Will they leave a scar?

Are they evening murmurations that make me wish that I could fly,
or are they just trespassing satellites intersecting my night sky
just like all…

All these broken angels, all these tattered wings, all these things
come alive in me. All these broken…
All these broken angels, all these scary things, all these dreams
are alive in me.

A Poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote a love poem to God whose lines give me some idea of what gravity might look like when it’s working aright. This is not the gravity Simone describes frequently in opposition to grace. Rather than a force which crushes self and others in a desire for compensation or a kind that is crushed by life’s agonies, this gravity teaches us how to fall well.

How surely gravity’s law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.


Each thing —

each stone, blossom, child — 

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we belong to 

for some empty freedom. 


If we surrendered 

to earth’s intelligence 

we could rise up rooted, like trees. 

Instead we entangle ourselves 

in knots of our own making 

and struggle, lonely and confused. 


So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God’s heart; 

they have never left him.


This is what the things can teach us: to fall, 

patiently to trust out heaviness

even a bird has to do that 

before he can fly. 

I don’t know how to think my way cerebrally out of the base tendency to ruin others’ happiness which vexes my days nor the basic problem of evil but this poem lights up my imagination in ways that give me hope. We must let fall. The things themselves, the expectations, ourselves. Patiently to trust our heaviness. Look at the trees. Look at the birds. Look at your kid. One must go down to go up. The earth has this intelligence implicit; it is we humans who must relearn this humble stance. (Incidentally I have a hunch that another Over the Rhine song called Let It Fall is in fact haunted by this poem.)

An Action.

One way I have to found to reconnect with the sacredness of life and others is to look them (and all of it!) straight in the eye. This is easy enough to remember to do when it comes to strangers I’m trying hard to treat in a properly neighborly fashion; it can be surprisingly difficult to remember with my nearest — husband, children, family, close friends. I glaze over in the dailiness of life and forgot to stop and really see them or hear them. (Sorry guys.) The iPhone does not help but it’s not the only culprit. My own idols…er…expectations are often more distracting.

And yet. My eyes resting in theirs, even for a split second, it slows the world. My breath catches up to my racing mind. We are collectively pulled closer to earth and to each other and (if Rilke is right) to God. We begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God’s heart; they have never left him.

Then the next time I have to reckon with the disparities between life within and life without, I have some impressions (however imperfect) of real people and things which surround me, their contours. This can get me through the iconoclastic moment when things don’t turn out or when the pain is truly annihilating. Simone is brutally honest about the kind of brutal honesty this requires.

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. What a sentence — one part poetry, one part loaded gun. God renounced being the only thing in the universe when he created the world. (And further joined himself to it in the incarnation, I guess!) The upshot is that the need for compensation is set aside. The debts, imagined or real, are settled. To know this is forgiveness; for myself and for others. To know this is to laisser tomber.