The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

the cheapening of grace.
A second fear: crimes against a people will be taken less seriously if individual persons
start forgiving in their name. The question is here raised, then, whether latter-day Germans
who do express repentance should be allowed to feel forgiven. Here I must raise the
question whether it is always valuable to prolong a people's sense of guilt. As a white, they
tell me that I must always feel guilty and grovel over what whites in the American past did
when they killed Indians and enslaved blacks. And, to a measure, I do. But I have sufficient
guilt for my own faults in relation to the heirs of the Indians and blacks, and to many other
people. Is there not a limit to the good that can be achieved by my groveling, my self-hate,
my loss of pride in the positive features of my heritages? Did not Nazism in part grow out of
such negative and resentful views? Must I not also be given a means for retrieving from a
people's history some moments, models, motifs that can give dignity and nobility to a
history?
The third reason for pause: if grace be cheap and splattered at random, will we not soon
forget to tell the story? Theodor Adorno and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have both reminded us
that to forget to tell the story is to deprive past sufferers of the meaning of their act. But there
are many ways to tell the story. Wiesenthal's ambivalence stays in our mind because he has
taken pains to tell us of it. So would other attitudes, if there be storytellers to broadcast
them.
We do not want cheap grace, a casual people, or a forgotten victim. What do we want? I
am on a search for grace in the world. While my colleagues write on the phenomenology of
evil or of the will, I want to see what grace feels like. As a Christian I am told that God is a
gracious Other, but I also need to be a gracious brother. Gracelessness helps produce