Failure and forgiveness: a graduation speech - graduation address to seminary students - Editorial

Christian Century, June 1, 1994 by James M. Wall

He was only partially right, however. In the sandbox we learned what to do to get along with one another. We did not learn how to do it. That is where you come in.

I began with a sports story. Let me close with another. In case you have been so consumed with final exams and plans to move to your next assignment that you haven't kept up with the sports news, let me tell you about Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, who labored for years in the shadow of Michael Jordan but who emerged this year as the team's leader. At a crucial point in the final two seconds of a play-off game against the New York Knicks, Scottie refused to go back on the court. The play that coach Phil Jackson had designed for the final seconds put the ball in the hands of rookie Tony Kukoc, not Pippen.

Why did Scottie refuse to join his teammates on the court? Certainly Pippen was frustrated; his team had lost two previous games by giving up big leads, and in this, the third game of the series, a 22-point lead had dwindled to a tie. Pippen had just missed a shot, in part because Kukoc had failed to set a screen. The season appeared to be over for the Bulls. Scottie wanted to take that last shot. Maybe he was remembering Michael Jordan's statement, "I am not afraid to fail."

Refusing to play was, as he admitted later, a stupid act on his part. The sportswriters were almost unanimous is condemning him. Trade him today, was one bit of advice from a particularly acerbic Chicago writer. A National Public Radio commentator compared Pippen's mistake to two notorious sporting blunders: Bill Buckner's error that allowed the Mets to beat the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, and Roy Riegel's wrong way run against Georgia Tech in the 1929 Rose Bowl. This was a rather silly mixing of apples and oranges that I trust that commentator now regrets.

Throughout all this, Pippen's coach stood by him. Jackson, whose father was a conservative Protestant minister and who recently described himself as a "Zen Christian," said, "It was not a time for anger. It was a time for understanding and forgiveness."

Therein lies the basic difference between the secular law of success and failure and another worldview which has a reason to believe in understanding and forgiveness. That reason comes from the one who asked, "Who among you is without sin?" and then turned to the woman the crowd had wanted to stone and said, "Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more."

We might easily overlook the importance of forgiveness. We need to look to locations where religion is less socially acceptable to grasp something of its power. Consider the scene in Russia after the unsuccessful coup against President Boris Yeltsin in August 1991. Three young men were killed during the attack on Yeltsin's White House. At a burial service the president spoke to the parents of the three young men: "Forgive me, your president, that I was not able to protect and defend your sons."

Describing this scene, James H. Billington, writing in the New Republic (May 30), observed, "|Forgive me' is what Russians say to each other before taking communion. They are the last words uttered by in earlier Boris in Russia's greatest national opera, Boris Godunov. |Forgive us' were the words on many of the bouquets sent to Andrei Sakharov's funeral in December, 1989. Almost with those words alone Yeltsin seemed to reinvest power with higher authority. Someone blameless was assuming responsibility in a society where people in power never used to accept responsibility for anything. And he did it in the language of faith."