What Fran Lebowitz taught me about my need for vengeance

"I don't forgive people and I'm an incredible grudge holder," says Lebowitz.

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Julia Louis-Dreyfus has started a podcast called Wiser Than Me to get “schooled in how to live a full and meaningful life” by older, wiser women. I highly recommend the episode with the incomparable Fran Lebowitz, who once said her two greatest needs are smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge. She says:

What is forgiveness is actually Christianity. I mean, everyone was Jewish then. Christ said, “I'll forgive you.” Ninety-nine percent of people said, “Oh, you're our guy.” Think of the people who didn't. Those are my antecedents, okay? They're the ones who said, “Oh, no, we don't want to be forgiven and we're not going to forgive anyone.” So, you know, the Jewish God is a judge, and the Christian God is a forgiving martyr. So that is not me. And I don't forgive people. And I am like an incredible grudge holder, I have to say. I know it's not a delightful trait, but it is truthfully my trait.

And yet, I find her honesty and self-awareness totally delightful. Her comments remind me of conversations with Jewish friends who are often puzzled by my forgiveness fetish.

As anyone who has read my book Saving Grace knows, even though I’m not particularly religious anymore, my view of forgiveness was shaped by Christianity. But long before I developed any kind of coherent set of spiritual beliefs, I was weirdly forgiving. I have never held a grudge. I have always felt that this was because on some level I recognized how much forgiveness I needed, and regularly received because I was (and am) a pretty flawed human being. I also don’t like being controlled by things outside of me, and so holding a grudge makes me feel like I have handed my emotional state over to another person just because they wronged me or someone I care about.

But after listening to the Lebowitz interview in conjunction with doing an Enneagram Certification training this week, all of that has been called into question. (If you don’t know about the Enneagram, it’s a personality typing system sort of like Myers-Briggs, but also very different.)

I’m wondering if other people — especially spiritual or religious people, particularly Christians— have been deluded into thinking they don’t seek vengeance because they have (consciously or unconsciously) outsourced that vengeance to a higher authority, as I now realize I have.

I listened to the Lebowitz interview the same day we learned about the “fixations” of each Enneagram type. I am an Enneagram Eight (the Challenger), and the fixation is “vengeance.” This has never resonated because of my aforementioned reflexive forgiveness and lack of grudge-holding. Part of this is because I’m what’s called a “Social Eight” which is less overtly aggressive than the average Eight, but most of the reason is because I didn’t really understand vengeance.

As it was explained in my Enneagram class yesterday, everything clicked into place. The teacher, Uranio Paes, explained (this is not verbatim but from my notes):

Vengeance starts in the head. It’s a fixed idea that, “I cannot let anything I don’t like happen without a consequence.” I’m the referee of the world. The judge of the world. I judge what is right and wrong and protect whoever is being wronged. It’s believing everything needs to have a consequence, preferably now. If it can’t, I’ll wait. People need to get back what they did at least as strong as they did. Fixation is not connected to behavior. So it could just be a thought like, “This person will have or must have a teaching later in life. They must have a consequence.”

Even before Paes noted that this need for vengeance could be outsourced to a higher power, I knew that this was what I had done.

I don’t just wish for or expect this consequence, I feel deep satisfaction when it comes. It’s not that I enjoy other people’s suffering — I don’t at all — it’s that I have an innate need for order and when people get away with harming others it feels like the Universe is out of balance. When there are consequences, it feels like spiritual order to me. Interestingly, Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” is believed to have been a highly evolved Enneagram Eight.

The strange thing is that over a long period, I have observed that in my life this is what usually happens. I didn’t have to lift a finger to address the harassment I received from many of the men who went down in #MeToo, and they ended up receiving sentences that were far worse than anything I had ever imagined. There are so many examples in my life where this kind of cosmic justice has occurred. (And I have myself experienced a kind of eerie cosmic justice of my own at times, where my previous bad behavior came back to haunt me.)

But the fact that I’m not actually enacting revenge does not make me not a vengeful person. I’ve just outsourced it. Indeed if I’m totally honest, one of my most often cited Bible verses is, “Vengeance is the Lord’s.” I say it as a way to let go of any responsibility or need to hold a grudge. I thought that meant I wasn’t vengeful until I came face to face with the fact that I do live with the expectation that consequences will come — an expectation of vengeance.

I don’t think desiring or seeking vengeance is wrong or right, especially when it’s understood as a need to set things right. But we have to be honest that it does set a person up as the judge and jury. It requires a kind of separation that puts us above other people. It’s fundamentally an ego-reinforcing desire, which as I’ve discussed is what I am trying to move away from.

We need to remember also that whenever we ask for cosmic consequences for bad behavior, those consequences will be coming for us as much as they come for other people. So be careful what you wish for. (Update: To be clear, I’m not talking about systemic injustice or murdering someone. I’m talking about when we individually feel wronged or that something didn’t go the way we believed it should have. In the #MeToo case, that’s probably more like justice, whereas most of the other cases for me are things I just believe should go differently.)

I think Fran Lebowitz would say, “So what if I am the judge?” I respect that and based on her interview, she seems to respect people who feel differently. The most important relationship in her life seems to have been her friendship with Toni Morrison, who she notes in the interview, did not share her worldview about forgiveness. Where Liebowitz seems to see forgiveness as a weakness, Morrison viewed it as an “extreme strength.”

What is your experience with vengeance? Do you see it as a strength or weakness or something else?

I personally have a lot to ponder on this topic.

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