Venom & Virtue

Nearly five years ago to the day I was strewn across the leather couch in my quiet, empty house with my head facing Mount Timpanogos out the window. Daydreaming turned into looking back and I was soon sifting through my past for any unresolved nuggets of bad behavior. Was there something I had done that I could have/should have fixed and hadn’t? At that moment I had what C.S. Lewis calls “a red hot jab of memory” and three long-forgotten and specific errors came to mind. Instantly, like acid, the shameful memories began to burn me to my core. I knew I had to repent of what I had done, even if the deeds were over a decade old.

I wrote a letter to my mother to apologize for screaming at her at the top of my lungs in the Geo on the way to my final bridal fitting (where, once there, she acted like I had done nothing wrong and lovingly placed necklace after necklace around my neck with her pretty fingers to determine what looked best with my dress), I wrote a letter to someone from high school who I felt I had treated rather poorly, and I eventually flew to Missouri to apologize to my sister and her husband in person for how I acted at their wedding. All three were tough apologies to cough up despite my meaning them. All four victims instantly forgave me, one with a letter, one with a call, and two with hugs while I finished bawling. The acid went away and I resumed sailing through regret-free seas.

The smooth sailing ended this past year as I've had to produce a fresh crop of heartfelt apologies to the friend I offended by accident, the neighbor I offended on purpose, and the woman who unluckily worked the Sandy Post Office counter the third time I went to get RE’s passport with the right-sized birth certificate and husband in tow. Once again I've had to clean up the slew of slop I slung everywhere. Slop-cleaning involved goodie deliveries and home visits, letting things slowly return to normal after many months, and a return trip to the Sandy PO to deliver a box of homemade cards and a verbal apology for my choice words about the PO's lame website and the general ineffectiveness of government agencies. I am exhausted from apologizing. My mouth is definitely my double-edged sword; my blessing and my curse. It’s either dripping with honey or ready to sting. This is why I need to close it more often.

One other thing I have learned this year: it is just as bad to sling slop as it is to anxiously catch it. Being easily offended is a terrible quality. It is a fact of life that people will wrong us from time to time. Some will do it by accident, some will do it on purpose. The world will back us up when we seek R&R (Revenge & Retaliation) but that simply isn’t what the Lord has asked us to do. We have been commanded to F&F (Forgive and Forget).

Sometimes I squat on my spider web just daring someone to cross me in hopes that I might mummify them with my verbal venom, and other times I allow trespassers to traipse across my silky domain without notice or consequence. Sadly, I am usually the meanest to those I love the most. Bad spider, bad spider.

Gordon B. Hinckley, the beloved Mormon prophet that passed away in 2008, said

There is no virtue more needed in our day than forgiving and forgetting. There are those who would look upon this as a sign of weakness. Is it? I submit that it takes neither strength nor intelligence to brood in anger over wrongs suffered, to go through life with a spirit of vindictiveness, to dissipate one’s abilities in planning retribution. There is no peace in the nursing of a grudge.

I earned an A+ in Apology when the assignment was to not need to give one. I earned an F in Forgetting because I could only remember who did me wrong. Looks like I might be enrolling in summer school.

*One summer when my Durko-sisters were all in Denver we watched SYTYCD in Rat’s basement to avoid the stifling heat. One of the dances portrayed two statues that briefly came to life before turning back to stone. They danced to Ingrid Michaelson’s “Turn to Stone” (which was added to my iTunes library the day I arrived home). I think of the lyric often, even when photographing stone head alleys in Fairhope, Alabama. This short life is the only time we have to right our wrongs.