Forgiving a Community That Closed Its Doors
When the wrong was done not by a person but by a community — an institution, a congregation, a family of origin — the work has a different shape. The wrongdoer is plural and partly anonymous.
Some of the wounds that are hardest to address were done not by an individual but by a community. An institution that closed its doors. A congregation that turned its back. A family of origin that organized itself around denying what the wronged party had named. The wrongdoer in these cases is plural, partly anonymous, partly structural. The ordinary architecture of person-to-person forgiveness does not quite fit, and the work has its own shape.
The first complication is locating the wrongdoer. Was it one specific person who made the decision to exclude? Several? The whole body? The institution as such, beyond any individual? The wronged party often does not know, and the not-knowing itself is part of the harm. The first move is to allow the imprecision to stand. The wronged party does not have to assign the blame perfectly. They have to recognize that the harm was done, that it was done by a community acting in concert, and that the texture of communal harm is different from individual harm.
The second complication is that communal wrongdoers rarely apologize as such. An individual may, years later, find the courage to approach the wronged party and acknowledge what they did. A community, by its nature, does not approach. It carries on. The membership turns over. The decision that hurt the wronged party becomes institutional history, often misremembered. There is rarely an apology equivalent to what an individual might offer.
What is the work, in this situation? It starts with the truth-telling. The wronged party writes out what was done, by whom, when, with what effect. This is for themselves first. The naming of the harm is its own correction to the communal record that has been quietly editing the wronged party out. Even if the truth-telling never reaches the community, it has done work in the wronged party's own interior.
It continues with the location of witness. The wronged party finds, if they can, others who witnessed the same thing or who experienced the communal harm at the hands of the same body. Communal harm is rarely a single instance. Where one person was excluded, others usually were. Where one congregation refused to engage with what was named, the same congregation has likely refused to engage with what others have named. The community of those who carry the same wound is itself a form of repair, and finding it matters.
The Ubuntu tradition, drawing on the work of the South African TRC, has thought carefully about communal harm. The TRC structure required the full disclosure of what was done, in public, with witnesses, before any amnesty was offered. The wronged party was given a venue at which to name the harm. The naming was itself constitutive of the repair, regardless of what happened next. Many TRC participants reported that the act of public naming, in the presence of witnesses, did the deepest work for them.
For the wronged party of a communal harm with no TRC equivalent available, the work has to be improvised. The naming can be done in the company of one trusted listener, or three, or a group of fellow-wounded. It can be done in writing, sent to no one in particular, or kept for the wronged party themselves. The form matters less than the act of taking the communal harm out of the silence in which the community wanted it kept.
What does forgiveness then look like? It looks less like a transactional release than like a withdrawal of the wronged party's remaining identification with the community that harmed them. The wronged party no longer carries the community's verdict on them as a private weight. They have located themselves outside the community's authority to render such a verdict. The community continues, without them. The wronged party continues, without the community's voice in their interior life. This is its own form of release. It is not the same shape as forgiving an individual, but it does similar work.
What is not asked, in this kind of work, is the wronged party's return. The community that closed its doors has not earned the wronged party's reentry. If the community later opens its doors, the wronged party may or may not choose to walk back through them. That decision is separate from the work of forgiveness. The forgiveness is interior. The reentry, if there is one, is relational and requires the community's own work, which communities rarely do.