My name is Chutney, and I am a recovering fundamentalist. And I cannot forgive.

The preacher folks at church have been talking about forgiveness these last two weeks, on account of it being the High Holy Days. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve been in charge of leading sermon discussions for our 20/30s group those two Sundays, which means I’ve had to talk about it all civilized to boot.

Now, ordinarily, I’m all for forgiveness. (Especially the receiving end of it.) But there’s one kind of forgiveness that irks me something fierce.

I have a hard time describing it—which makes me wonder if I know what it even is—but I’ll do my best to generalize from the specific circumstances.

Many sorts of power structures set up certain folks to take care of people. Some power structures even go so far as to set up whole new power structures to make sure people are cared for. And this is all to the good.

It is imperative that these helper folks—let’s call them “shepherds”—take great care to not abuse their power because abuse of power by shepherds is fundamentally more aggregious than abuse of powers by others. My words are failing me already, so I’ll let the prophet Ezekiel take up some of the slack:

¹The word of the LORD came to me: ²“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? ³You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. ⁴The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. ⁵So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. ⁶My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.

Perhaps we’ll just leave the description to that? And, to say only a little more, it is this I cannot forgive. Especially when a shepherd does it not out of malice, or greed, but out of a blasé disregard for the sheep. Perhaps he’s thinking about the upcoming shepherding convention, wondering who will be Head Shepherd this year. Or perhaps he is Head Shepherd, and would rather boss the other shepherds than keep the sheep. It makes no difference why: this I cannot forgive.

Should I tell you that when the mother of one of these shepherds died, a woman I knew personally, I gloated, imagining the suffering he must have been going through? In truth, it was because he had hurt, repeatedly, my own mother when he was charged with her keep. But make no mistake, gentle reader: Chutney is neither nice nor sweet. And this is but a small thing in my history.

I know well the common exhortation: those who withhold forgiveness only hurt themselves. But those of us who desire vengeance, who worship at the altar of the goddess Nemesis, don’t care if we are wounded in the pursuit of our goal: punishing the bastards who did this to us and ours. If, say, I had attended that shepherd’s mother’s funeral and done some unspeakable thing that shocked him into public, shameful recognition of what he had done to my mother, and if I had looked into his eyes and gloated at his public shame, then I could start to think about forgiving him. That I would have publicly shamed myself in the process would not have mattered.

But then this past Sunday someone in the 20/30s group said this: she’s learned that when she cannot forgive, she’s often angry at herself for letting herself get into that situation in the first place. Who does she need to forgive? Herself.

Well, damn hell.