Finding Our Winding Way Toward Forgiveness
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(OPINION) If you ever get a wild hair to try something really spiritual, try this. Think of the people who’ve done you dirty. We tend to keep a long list somewhere in our heads of people who’ve royally messed us over, bad guys we’d love to see get theirs.
So, dredge up that personal, smoking list of those guys, then make up your mind to forgive them. If that’s too tall an order, and it probably is, decide to forgive just one of them.
Maybe you’d pick the critical father who preferred your boneheaded brother to you. Or your first wife, who left you for a traveling gospel music singer. Or the sociopathic colleague who sabotaged your career for no reason other than meanness.
The problem is — as writer Philip Yancey pointed out long ago in an essay for Christianity Today — you won’t find forgiving easy. It’s not even logical or fair.
But referring to the brutal ethnic cleansing that was then taking place in Bosnia, Yancey observed that the only thing forgiveness does have going for it is that it beats the alternative:
“Where unforgiveness reigns,” he said, “a Newtonian law comes into play: For every atrocity, there must be an equal and opposite atrocity.”
One eye gouged out demands another eye, you might say. Forgiveness stops an otherwise endless cycle of hatred, reprisals and blindness.
I’ve long argued that the human race needs hardly anything as much as it needs for us to become more forgiving. The results might be miraculous: fewer wars, fewer broken families, less political polarization — indeed, far less stress all around, for everybody.
I believe a lot of people actually would like to forgive. They just don’t know how. They can’t seem to let the past go. The strain of carrying around a bucket of sizzling bile eventually becomes untenable; the bile eats holes in their own souls.
Here are some further thoughts on forgiving:
We need to understand what forgiveness is and isn’t. Forgiveness doesn’t mean denying or minimizing the harm someone did to us. It doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t always mean we must resume our relationship with the person who harmed us, especially if that person hasn’t apologized or changed or is physically dangerous.
What it does mean is that we decide to, as one definition puts it, “release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness.”
In doing that, we set ourselves free as much as we set the other person free.
Forgiveness develops over time as we face life for what it really is. Fred Luskin, a scholar who founded the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, has described forgiveness as “the ability to make peace with the word ‘no.’ I wanted my partner to be faithful; they weren’t faithful. I got ‘no.’ I wanted somebody to tell the truth; they told a lie. I got ‘no.’ I wanted to be loved as a child; I wasn‘t loved in a way that I felt good about. I got ‘no.’”
We must recognize these are universal misfortunes nearly everyone encounters.
“The essence of forgiveness is being resilient when things don’t go the way you want — to be at peace with ‘no,’ be at peace with what is, be at peace with the vulnerability inherent in human life,” Luskin said.
“Then you have to move forward and live your life. … You realize that nobody owes you, that you don’t have to take the hurt you suffered and pay it forward to someone else. Just because your last partner was unkind to you doesn’t mean you always have to give your new partner the third degree.”
Forgiveness occurs as we work through our grief.
“Whether we lose affection or a human being or a dream,” they’re all manifestations of loss, Luskin wrote. “And when we lose something, human beings have a natural reintegration process, which we call grief. Then forgiveness is the resolution of grief.’
Unfortunately, some folks never acknowledge their grief, while others never move beyond it.
Ideally, we should face our pain head on.
But a healthy person, Luskin said, “also lets go of their suffering — they don’t maintain it forever, don’t create their personality around it, and don’t use it as a weapon. You don’t cling to the negative part of the experience so that you can have something to hold accountable for your failures.”
As I’ve written before, forgiving isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. It’s an exertion of our will that eventually overrides our hurt. It doesn’t ignore the wrong done. It says, “I was treated shabbily. I don’t like what this person did. But I’ll pray for him and treat him as generously as I’m able.” That takes guts.
Whatever else it is, true forgiveness also is a work performed within us by God. Our willpower enables us to perform deeds consistent with forgiveness, such as feeding an enemy who’s hungry, but it can’t heal our scarred hearts. For that, we need the Lord.
Forgiving, then, becomes an act of faith. We admit God’s ways are above ours. We inch toward a better world, where the injustices we’ve experienced will eventually become dim memories of little consequence.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.