Moral Teaching From Smock Signals #17

“How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream? Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left? (Thomas Builds-the Fire, Smoke Signals)”

Forgiveness is a hard thing to do. It takes an immense person to ask for forgiveness, but will take an even immense person to do the forgiving. We most of the time feel that we shouldn’t give people forgiveness. The reason why is because they’ve already messed up to bad to deserve our forgiveness. We think of forgiveness as a right, which only we can give. We only see how forgiving people affect ourselves. If we concede and forgive a person, that did something horrific to us, then we tend to see ourselves as the weak link. We blame the crack in the foundation on ourselves, because maybe we could have prevented it.

We need to realize that forgiving is not a weakness, nor a right. In the end the only thing at stake when forgiving is the relationships. The relationship with that person and whether or not when you forgive that person, if you still want them to be in your life or let them loose. To know that that chapter in your life ended in a resolution because if it didn’t then you will always know that there is unfinished business and the reader will never know what happened.

The next relationship we need to fix is with ourselves. When we don’t forgive, that hate and the other overwhelming feelings that come with holding a grudge will start to eat away at you. It will consume you from the inside out. Starting with your humanity and well-being. I don’t know about you, but I think once you lose those qualities then you can’t rebuild them. Even if you wanted to, the damage would already be done. Life’s short. Do you really want to be wasting it by holding onto the past and never moving on to a newer and better day?

Forgiveness played a major theme in the movie Smoke Signals. Each character seems to portray the difficulty with forgiving someone who has hurt them greatly or just generally forgiving themselves. The character who has a real struggle with it is Victor. He has struggled with his parents being alcoholics as a young child, his dad being abusive and not always getting the attention he needs and wants. The thing that he struggles with the most is that his father left him and his mother with nothing else left to say.

As Victor becomes older, he becomes a bitter and cold person, without a care in the world who he hurts or not. It doesn’t help that his “friend”, Thomas, is there right beside him, telling him a bunch of mumbo jumbo -that makes no absolute sense to him- reminding him of the faults in his life, what he’ll never be and almost the worst thing, what he has become. What makes it a million times worse is that Thomas reminds him of the person his dad isn’t.

This movie seemed to be relatable to real life. I actually picked this movie because it related to something I’ve gone through in life. I seem to understand where Victor is coming from when he can’t seem to forgive his father. Like Victor, my father walked out of my life. At first I too saw him as a coward, who couldn’t deal with something when it got too hard, and that he took the easy way out. The thing that makes Victor and me different is that I learned quickly after my dad left that I can’t blame him for the way things turn out in my life. I learned that he needs to be a chapter in my life, that while didn’t end well, but ended with my understanding that he probably is sorry for what he did. While I haven’t yet given him forgiveness, but something just as great. Understanding. Understanding that it’s not my fault and that maybe it was for the better.

Understanding is probably the next thing best to forgiveness. If we understand why that person did what they did, then we understand the fundamentals of being human. We learn that not everyone’s perfect, because if everyone was then life would be nothing but a haze. The reason why is because “sometimes it's a good day to die, and sometimes it's a good day to forgive”.