I am thinking this week of forgiveness, and of Brian Williams, our own Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, lost his wings and  crashed to  the earth. I think of him for many reasons, one is that I am a former media critic, another is that I am a former television producer. I am also a human being who has embellished more than one or two stories in his life, it saved my life as a child, and helped make me a best-selling author as an adult. I have never met a writer who did not smile and wink and admit to the same.

In our country, we have a new Puritan mob, they call it Twitter or Facebook or social media, it is cruel and unrelenting, it is often unthinking and furious, like water bursting from a dam. And it is unfailingly unforgiving. Online, we can all play God, we can all be Cotton Mathers, condemning hapless strangers from the safety of our living rooms to the gallows of the righteous and superior.

Brian Williams messed up, he exaggerated and fabricated and embellished a war story and bungled his apology, and in so doing,  he has been ridiculed and driven from the Temple, a death sentence for a public person, unacceptable to timid and greedy corporate masters, who are as incapable of loyalty as they are of truth. I wondered this morning, reading about his suspension and the almost certain end of his career, how many of the people condemning him every day on Facebook or Twitter have never embellished a story, fabricated one, or told a lie.

Freud said that every human being lies at least once every day. We lie to advance ourselves, embellish ourselves, protect ourselves, delude ourselves, heal and comfort ourselves. In America, politicians who tell the truth are instantly destroyed, they have to lie to survive. Cable news commentators lie to please their outraged followers, corporations lie every second, telling us how much they care. I will be the first to confess, I learned to lie as an abused child, I have lied many times since.

How selective is our outrage and judgment.

How curious to live in a world where forgiveness is a universal idea, preached by Jesus, Mohammed and the ancient Rabbis, preached by one politician after another, but forgotten in our every day lives.

I will leave the details of this sad story to the other media, but I wondered why it is that Williams could not simply have acknowledged his mistake in a forthright way and gone back to work, promising to learn from  his mistakes and do better. Don’t we have better things to do?  Don’t we know that humans fail and fall? Is any one of us so pure we can stand up and say we have never lied?   Williams never lied on the air, he never made up a story that was broadcast, he did a good and creditable job for many years. Is he not entitled to the very human trait of making mistakes? Does every anchor or political leader have be saintly and perfect, beyond what is possible for real people?

It was Jesus himself who said the greater sin is the inability to forgive. Why do so many people worship in his name, but ignore his messages?

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I feel badly for Jesus Christ, a man I have admired and studied for much of my life. If he is, in fact, in Heaven, looking down, he must sometimes writhe in agony at the way his views have been distorted, his ideas twisted by angry, power-mad and corrupt human beings. I am not a Christian, but I have always been drawn to the early and pure Christian theology, forgiveness was one of it’s most cherished tenets.  “…I say unto you,” said Jesus, “that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses, standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin.”

There is no revered theologian or spiritual leader who does not preach forgiveness, from Christ to the Dalai Lama: “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message,” says the Dalai Lama, “that is love, compassion and forgiveness, the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.” And most Americans claim to be religious but are not. To me, every religious person who refuses to forgive Williams is lying, denying the very reality of faith.

Thomas Merton wrote that “forgiveness is our salvation, love is our destiny.” He wrote that “nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the stand point of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” Gandhi wrote that “the weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” The Christian theologian C.S. Lewis wrote that “to be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”  Martin Luther King preached that forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

It seems so ironic to me, all these stirring words, so readily discarded and ignored, every day, often with the tap of a finger on a keyboard.  Words mean a great deal to me, they deserve better. I think King was correct in saying that forgiveness was an attitude, I remember that he, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi all embraced the attitude of forgiveness, they did so much good, saved so many lives, were so admired, but so rarely emulated.

In the great scheme of life and death, of the glory and mystery of life on the earth, how important is it that Williams took a war story and puffed himself up with it? Speaking only for myself, I don’t care much, this story is not worth an hour of my life. Credibility does not come from perfection.

I am happy to accept William’s apology – he will eventually get it right – and move on very quickly with my life and hope for him to move on to his. It is not easy to get to be a successful television news anchor, it means something, you have to work hard at it,  he has much to offer. If he blunders and stumbles along the way, he can lick his wounds, learn his lessons and move on. It should not all be thrown away so callously, especially at the hands of ignorant mobs and grossly hypocritical corporate moguls whose only ethic is caution and profit.

I recently wrote a book – “Saving Simon” – about the lessons of compassion a donkey taught me. Compassion, I learned, is an easy thing to preach, a hard thing to practice. We tend to be compassionate only to the people we like, not to the people who need it the most, the ones we don’t like.

Forgiveness is similar. Millions of people sit in church and temple pews and in mosques every week to hear and bow their heads to the messages of forgiveness, yet when we are confronted with forgiveness every day of our lives, those same people can’t wait to get on Facebook and Twitter and help other human beings die a death of a thousand cuts. It is not just Williams, of course, but so many other people who stumble and fall, chewed up in this righteous digital chopper.

Christianity teaches that we are all sinners, and if that sometimes seems harsh and unfeeling to me, I also know it is true. God knew it too. What does it mean to be a person of faith?

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I might put it differently. We are all human beings. We all make mistakes. We all live and stand in our own truth, and that is very often not the literal truth or everyone else’s truth. Gandhi lied sometimes in his cause, so did King, so, I am sure, did Jesus. He was very honest about his own failings. Lies are a constant presence in the human toolbox.  I have no idea why Brian Williams needed to embellish his story, I imagine that, like the rest of us, he wanted to look a little bit better than he sometimes felt he was. Fame is not a magic wand, it does not heal every wound.

The Williams story is a tragedy in many ways, it reminds me that forgiveness is not just the stuff of Sunday sermons and tattered Bibles. If it has any meaning at all, it has to live outside of churches and in the hearts and minds of people whose detachment from other human beings so often permits them to hide and shed their own humanity.

I forgive them.