Forgiveness ain’t easy. St. Peter certainly thought so. He tried to put limits on forgiveness. “Seven times?” But Jesus kept stressing the importance of forgiving. Forgive seventy-seven times. Each of you forgives your brother or sister from your heart. Right in the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And, in case we missed it in St. Matthew’s account of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus adds “If you forgive the faults of others, your heavenly Father will forgive you yours.” Forgiveness is so difficult that Jesus’ contemporaries thought that only God was capable of doing it. When Jesus would forgive they would say in amazement, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” To be genuine followers of Jesus, therefore, we must be like him and forgive.
But it ain’t easy. Forgiveness is hard because, quite frankly, many people do not deserve to be forgiven. I was watching a TV show the other day and a woman who had cheated on her husband came to him to ask for forgiveness. But she immediately blamed him for her indiscretion. “You were busy all the time. You neglected me.” It is hard to forgive when the offender is not actually contrite. And, it’s hard to forgive when the wound cuts to the bone. Several years ago I met with a group of men – all in the 70s – who had been abused as teen-agers. They started off the meeting by saying, “Don’t expect us to forgive.” As we unpacked why, the men felt that to extend forgiveness would somehow diminish the pain and suffering that they had experienced which had impacted them throughout their lives. It is hard to forgive so great a wound. And, it is hard to forgive when you fear doing so will expose you to being hurt again. Some people are so self-absorbed that they don’t see the harm they are causing by their actions. Better to keep a wall up rather than risk another wound. I was in Jersey City on 9/11 and when the towers came down in New York, I must confess that my thoughts were not of forgiveness. I wanted the people who had done that terrible deed to pay for what they had done. How are we to forgive in such circumstances?
To go back to the group of the victims of abuse: I learned a lot from them. The more we talked the group came to realize that the inability to forgive gave to the perpetrator some ongoing power over them. Only by letting go would they be free of him. Did forgiving the abuser exonerate him from the suffering he had caused others? No. Did forgiving him lessen the responsibility that he bore for the way their pain lingered like a tooth ache that won’t go away? It did not. What forgiving him did was free the victims from letting those long ago events continue to stab into their heart. It enabled them to say, “That was then. This is now.”
So how to do it? How does one go about forgiving? One mistaken notion to clear up first that you often hear is “forgive and forget.” Forgetting is not part of forgiveness. Letting go of the grudges is part of forgiveness. Getting over the resentments is part of forgiveness. But not forgetting. In fact, remembering is one of the ways that forgiveness brings about healing — because the act of remembering enables us to say, “never again.” As a philosopher once put it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Elie Weisel served as the conscience of the world in recalling the memory of the holocaust. He once said, “God is God because he remembers.” In our country we must remember the horrors of slavery, the mistreatment of the native peoples, the lingering effects of Jim Crow as part of the road to forgiveness. Remembering provides the opportunity for us as a nation to learn and that makes the suffering endured produce some benefit. The same is true on the personal level. We remember not to cling to those old wounds but in order to grow. If you think about it, forgiveness in this sense is about love. We love the other enough that we want them to be better people, to call them to act in ways which reflect the fact that they are children of God.
So the question: how do we go about forgiving? A four step process. First: experience yourself as forgiven. Jesus nailed our sins to the cross. When we were still sinners, St. Paul says, Christ died for us. He didn’t wait for us to be worthy of forgiveness. He didn’t even wait for us to ask for forgiveness. His death brought us forgiveness unasked and unearned. So that experience of being loved and accepted by God in all of our unworthiness is the first step. The second is to forgive ourselves. We are really good at beating ourselves up. If we don’t forgive ourselves for mistakes from the past, how will be able to forgive others? Be gentle with yourself. Third, remember the reciprocal nature of forgiveness. Jesus stresses that in the prayer he left us. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.” That’s what the parable emphasized as well. Because we are forgiven, we also need to forgive. Since there is the giving and taking of wounds there needs to be the giving and taking of forgiveness. We need to be both give and receive forgiveness. Finally, forgiveness does not happen in a vacuum but in an entire context. Actions have consequences. Wounds inflicted are not healed just with a word “I’m sorry.” They need to be bandaged up. We must do those things which will help repair the breach. Old time Catholics will remember the concept of reparation – we have to do something real and concrete to counteract the harm inflicted on another. Forgiving is a lifestyle.
Gospel forgiveness runs clean counter to some of very human tendencies to want pay back. We have to continue to work on forgiveness. It ain’t easy, but in the end it provides the royal road to peace and happiness.
