Reflecting on Forgiveness

As I prepare to preach on forgiveness this Sunday I am struck by my inability to discuss it in secular terms.  For me, forgiveness unavoidably involves the intervening presence of God as the essence of all mercy and loving-kindness.  I experience forgiveness as a gift of grace, an encounter with the living God,  something coming into my life from beyond, or, in the language of the Gospel for Sunday, 'from above.'  Secular language of self-help and therapy tends to reduce everything to technique and lists of what one should do to achieve a desired result; i.e. instrumental reasoning.  Across my thinking I increasingly struggle to explain myself in the terms of the dominant ethical and practical discourse which is so infected with instrumental and economic reasoning.  In a later post, I hope to explore the wholesale abdication of moral reasoning to an economic model which I feel is a terrible and costly mistake.  Why do we take the market as our model for morality?  Do we really believe that cost/benefit analysis is an adequate moral guide to life?  As a follower of a God who is radically centered on mutuality with the other - both internally in the nature of the Trinity's dance and externally in God's outpouring into creation - it is hard for me to connect my fundamental ethical concerns with a world that favors the absolute sovereignty of the individual.  It seems to me that the comical state of American morality is best expressed as, ":I want everything that works for me and I don't want to make any sacrifices whatsoever."   The notion of sacrifice is almost inaccessible to the dominant modes of consumer driven discourse.  Even volunteering - under the mandatory community service paradigm - has become instrumental, i.e. volunteering to polish my resume or have an 'experience' of the poor.  I call it poverty voyeurism but that is a topic for another post.  It seems to me that a worthy spiritual test of an activity like volunteering - or to return to the initial topic forgiveness- is, "Do I risk and am I open to transformation in this encounter?"