With the closing of the Jewish High Holidays I find myself thinking, in the spirit of the season, about forgiveness. It’s a lovely sentiment to base even one holiday around, never mind the two most important of the year (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which function as a unit). But that’s how Judaism designed it, and those two holidays bookend a ten-day period which is meant to be entirely and intensely focused on seeking the forgiveness of others, as well as offering it freely back.
This year three songs in particular keep coming to mind, all of which are explicitly about forgiveness and approach the idea from very different perspectives.
So why sermonize on the subject when these great songs speak about it so beautifully?
Don Henly: Heart of the Matter
This may be one of the best-known songs to focus on forgiveness. Henly’s song is clearly about the painful forgiving of someone who has fallen out of love with you. There are other songs that express this idea well (I Can’t Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt stands out), but none of them says it quite as plainly, at the same time gently admitting how hard it is to get there:
I’m trying to get down to the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness, even if you don’t love me anymore
John Hiatt: Sometime Other Than Now
“Maybe your mama didn’t treat you right. Maybe her intentions weren’t even very good.”
This jarring statement opens John Hiatt’s moving anthem to forgiveness, which extends the sentiment to parents in an expression of genuine empathy, granting how we are “left to our own devices, like maybe they were too, out on the open road and wondering what to do”.
Hiatt is talking to someone very close in this song, but what he says could be about anybody trying to overcome the hurts and fears and griefs of the past, an effort which Hiatt suggests culminates in forgiveness:
A little bit of fear, you know it goes a long way
It’s followed us around since we were little kids
With just a little faith, maybe baby someday
We will have the strength, the strength to forgive
Yes: Foot Prints
It’s risky territory trying to interpret Yes lyricist Jon Anderson’s songs, and this is a conscious aspect of his work. Anderson himself has often stated that he writes for effect rather than meaning much of the time. That said, there are definitely clear themes that emerge from his work over the decades, and forgiveness is certainly a prominent one, especially in his later writing.
This song, Foot Prints, is from a relatively little-known recording (Keys To Ascension 2) that ironically involved a measure of forgiveness itself. It was made in 1996, when the ‘classic’ lineup of Yes – Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Alan White – an iteration of the band that had a very strained relationship and split in 1980 (of course followed by a variety of other lineups) – had set aside their differences to come together again for a special series of concerts. Urged on by producer Billy Sherwood, the group took to the studio after the shows and ended up writing and recording several of the greatest pieces they ever did together – before promptly going their own ways again.
Despite the often elusive intent of Jon Anderson’s lyrics, in Foot Prints the insistent, repeated chorus makes forgiving the main theme:
Forgiving is what you have
Forgiving is what you see
Forgiving is what you know
Forgiving is all you are
It’s interesting that the song ends with the admonition: “Don’t forget to leave good footprints behind…”. To me this puts forgiveness in yet another perspective – what do we want to be our legacy? What kind of relationships do we want, what kind of impact on others do we want to have?
Finally, looking at forgiveness as a way to leave “good footprints” behind makes even more sense if you consider that it is precisely those footprints that we hope our children will walk in too. We can leave behind a path of love and forgiveness that wins over fear and grief, for them and for the world.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief excursion into songs of forgiveness. It really is a sentiment I think we can use more of, and these songs express it eloquently and memorably, reminding us, as do the Jewish High Holidays, how hard, and how important forgiving truly is.
And if I’ve left out other great songs, well, please forgive me!
Cover Image: Photo by Bailey Burton on Unsplash
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