(Spirituality, Vol. 18, September-October 2012, No. 104, pp.294-299)
Forgiveness is difficult
Some years ago, a young man told me of his anger towards his father. He said the father had grievously wronged his mother, and that he hated him for it. I felt that he was becoming cold and hard in himself, and I looked for a way of moving him forward a little, so I put a question to him, ‘If your father were dying, and in need of a blood transfusion, and you were the only person in the world who could give it to him, would you?’ He answered, instantly and emphatically, ‘No!’
Some time later, a man in his nineties told me of the anger he felt towards a nephew of his, who, he said, had treated his father, the old man’s brother, very badly. His bitterness was clear. I put the same question to him that I had put to the young man. Unlike the young man, he reflected before answering. Then he said, ‘No; he wouldn’t deserve it.’ Forgiveness is more difficult when the hurt comes from someone close.
The option of vengeance
Blessed Columba Marmion spoke of the time, while a curate in Arran Quay parish in Dublin, he went to the bedside of a dying man. The man would not forgive an enemy, saying, ‘If the gates of hell were opening in front of me, I would not forgive him.’ And he died that way. There’s something in us that sees that as a principled, even noble, commitment to what is right. Remember public reaction to the release of Jon Venables and Robert Thomson, the killers of the toddler Jamie Bolger, or the outpouring of hatred against Lord Longford at the time of the death of Myra Hindley, the “Moors murderer”, when he asked for compassion to be shown to her? Remember the reaction in the USA to Timothy McVeigh’s execution for the Oklahoma City bombing, relatives of those killed saying they hoped that seeing him die would bring them closure?
When we are hurt by another, the desire for revenge is never far below the surface. It usually presents itself as a desire for justice, but easily re-presents itself in terms of vengeance and settling scores. It has the weary logic of the treadmill, going round and round in the same hopeless routine. ‘Justice redeems evil; vengeance merely doubles it.’ (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks) And Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’ The desire for revenge is a claim to the moral high ground, the right to be judge, jury and, perhaps even executioner. It gives a sense of superiority, and a sense of control over the offender, with the power to humiliate, shame, or belittle him/her. It is a failure to understand that love and grace, of their nature, are unmerited (see Matthew 5.43-48); we literally don’t deserve them. If we withhold forgiveness, let’s hope we are never in need of it, one reason – among several – being that hatred of the other subtly becomes hatred of the self. The faults we condemn most strongly in others are usually those we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.
Forgiveness often involves letting go of logic: the husband who forgives his unfaithful wife knows she may interpret this as permission to go on having affairs. But that’s a risk he is prepared to take. If he experiences the humiliation of being taken for a fool, he grows in the capacity to forgive the enemy within himself and this leads him to a fuller humanity. Living with paradox, risk and uncertainty is part of the great adventure into the unknown within. Richard Rohr puts it like this, ‘If we don’t get forgiveness, we’re missing the whole mystery. We are still living in a world of meritocracy, of quid-pro-quo thinking, a world of performance and behaviour that earns and loses rewards…. Without radical and rule-breaking forgiveness received and given there will be no reconstruction of anything. It alone breaks down our damnable world of trying to buy and sell grace. Grace and forgiveness are gifts that must always be given freely – or they are not grace and not forgiveness!’ (See Ephesians 2.7-9) If we glimpse the love of God, hatred becomes impossible. It is not vengeance which is cathartic, but forgiveness.
What forgiveness isn’t
Forgiveness does not involve the suppression, denial, or abandonment of truth. It’s not about glossing things over, sweeping issues under the carpet, or smothering an issue with plámás or platitudes. Nor is it a matter of pretending that everything is fine, when it isn’t. It’s not based on pretending that wrong was right, or that so-and-so ‘really didn’t mean it’, if we are pretty sure he/she did, or that we weren’t hurt or angered, if in fact we were. Forgiveness is not excusing – ‘Don’t take any notice of him; he had a few jars taken when he did it.’ Nor is it condoning – ‘Ah, sure we all did the same thing at one time or another.’
Some see forgiveness as trivializing both the evil done and the suffering of the victim. They feel that it lets the wrongdoer off the hook, leaving justice undone. But forgiveness does not involve suppressing the claims of justice. (It is vengeance, not justice that is incompatible with forgiveness.) ‘Forgiving the offender is something you do for yourself; holding the offender to account is something you do for the victim.’ (Lou-Anne Dillard) What is at the heart of justice and forgiveness is the creation of a new relationship in which evil does not have the last word.
Facing denial
One way we fudge the challenge to forgive is by denying that we have anyone to forgive in the first place. But is there really no one, the mention of whose name does not cause us to tighten up inside and bring us close to an angry blast? Do we never feel that our mother or father favoured a brother or sister above us? Do we never feel angry about something a teacher said or did at school? Etc.
Sometimes we enjoy the role of victim. We may be like Job who ‘sat in the ashes scraping his sores.’ (Job 2:8) Sometimes we want to re-live old hurts, like someone scraping and scratching at a sore in case it might heal, and then we’d be left without an excuse for self-pity, even if it strangles us.
C. S. Lewis, perceptive as always, points to another form of denial. He puts it in the mouth of the senior devil in The Screwtape Letters, ‘Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of [others], and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s, enemies. In other words, let him consider himself sufficiently identified with [others] to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.’ (Letter 29) Vicarious vengeance on behalf of the victim is a subtle seduction.
Forgiveness begins by looking facts in the face, calling them by name, and recognizing them for what they are. It begins there, but does not stop there. It goes on to say, ‘Yes, X offended me. I was hurt (or angered, betrayed, humiliated, etc.), but, despite that, I want his good, I wish him well, I ask God to bless him, to help him, to give him what he needs for his health, happiness and holiness. If I could help him, I would. Whatever about my feelings – and it is possible they may never heal – I will pray for him and ask God to forgive him for me until I can forgive him for myself. I will ask God to release him, and me, from the bonds of the past.’
Forgiveness and freedom
Humans have free will. We can give or withhold forgiveness; the choice is ours. Nothing, and nobody, can ever take from us the freedom to determine our own attitudes. To forgive comes from freedom, and leads to freedom. It comes from freedom because it is a choice, a decision, not an emotion; if I want to forgive, then, in God’s eyes, I have forgiven, even if I continue to be ambushed by my emotions for a long time after. Forgiveness also leads to freedom because it frees us from the anger of the past, enabling us to live in the present, and to be open to the future. It cannot change the past, but it can change the future. It’s an opening to life, to love, and to hope: ‘[The person]… who forgives does not allow himself to be controlled by the evil his enemy has done to him…’ (Hugo Echegaray, The Project of Jesus, p.106, trans. of El Pratico de Jesús).
The converse is also true: if we refuse to forgive, we retain in ourselves anger, bitterness, resentment, and a victim mentality. That traps and locks us into the past, and festers in us like a boil we refuse to lance; it guarantees that our past becomes our future because we refuse to leave it behind, carrying it with us. ‘Those whose sins you retain, they are retained’ (John 20.23) – in ourselves. ‘Love keeps no score of wrong.’ (1 Corinthians 13.6) Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and survivor of the World War II death camps, said at a commemoration in Auschwitz, ‘Please, God, do not have mercy on those who created this place. God of forgiveness, do not forgive these murderers.’ (From Ranulph Fiennes, The Secret Hunters, Little, Brown and Company, London, 2001, p.370) During one of the Palestinian intifadas, an Israeli soldier shot a woman and child crossing a street. A journalist shouted at him, ‘You’re as bad as the Nazis,’ and the soldier shouted back, ‘So what?’ One of the paradoxes of human nature is that while we become like those we love, we also become like those we hate.
Forgiveness is a gift
We cannot talk, argue or cajole ourselves into forgiving – though we can block it or dispose ourselves for it. It may help to ask some questions: recognizing that forgiveness is a grace, do I pray for my offender? Do I ask God to forgive that person in my name? Do I ask God to forgive my un-forgiveness? Would I pray for that person when I make Communion, the sacrament which is both a sign and a source of unity between us and God, between us and others, the sacrament which brings into play God’s power, which is greater than ours? I believe that if we were to do that, even for a short time, it would change our attitude. It is not possible to pray for a person for any length of time and continue hating them. A sure sign that I have forgiven a person is if I am willing to help them, and, even more, if I am willing to ask them for help.
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive…’
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…’ (Matthew 6.12) God is not playing a game of tit for tat: ‘If you don’t forgive him/her, I won’t forgive you either’ and flouncing off in a huff. But there is a sense in which we cannot receive what we are not prepared to give. ‘It is in giving that we receive…’ Forgiving is for giving.
As a young man, Saint Francis of Assisi was afraid of lepers, afraid of catching the disease, and repelled by their appearance. One day, while out riding a horse on the plain near his home, he met a leper. His first instinct was to run, but he threw his fear aside, dismounted and embraced him. Later in life he wrote about this, ‘It seemed to me too bitter a thing to see lepers, but the Lord himself led me among them, and I showed compassion to them, and what before seemed bitter was changed for me into sweetness of soul and body.’ (Testament of Saint Francis) If we embrace the leper, embrace what we loath, despise, fear, or hate in the other, we can embrace the same in ourselves, and thereby become whole. We see others as we see ourselves – forgiven or unforgiven, and much else besides – and vice versa. Accepting and forgiving the other enables accepting and forgiving ourselves.
Francis and Berthe Climbié, parents of Victoria Climbié, a young child abused to death in London by her aunt and the aunt’s boyfriend, said, ‘If you want to live happily and at ease in this life you have to learn to forgive. It shouldn’t matter if the person is unable to ask for forgiveness, or even acknowledge that they’ve done wrong, because you cannot forgive based on conditions…. [Our] life is in some way inextricably linked to that of the perpetrator…. We are not separate from those who harm us.’ (Quoted by Marina Cantacuzino, “The freedom to forgive”, The Tablet, 10 January 2004, pp.10-11)
What if we actually dared to do it?
If we actually dared to forgive, we would dispel much physical illness, such as stress-related conditions like ulcers or chronic fatigue. We would dispel much emotional illness, such as tension, depression, moodiness and isolation. We would dissipate some mental illness, such as the inability to trust or to relate to people, by freeing ourselves from a past that imprisons us. We would put many psychologists and therapists out of work, and close some mental hospitals.
The first person to benefit from my act of forgiveness is myself. Unforgiveness is a self-made prison, and the key is in our pocket; we are free to walk out at any time – at the price of leaving our anger behind. If we forgave, we would heal many soured relationships in society. Doesn’t Ireland, and the world, stand greatly in need of forgiveness today? Is the readiness to forgive not at the basis of a societal searching for reconciliation and solidarity?
Showing the way
Jesus is the supreme exemplar of a God who forgives: Jesus on the cross, not blaming others, though it rightly belonged with them, not playing the role of victim, but taking on himself the evil, cruelty and malice of others, and, in some way, wiping it out through self-surrender. ‘For our sakes, God made the sinless one to be sin, so that, in him, we might become the sinlessness of God.’ (2 Corinthians 5.21) Is there anything closer to the heart of Christ than a willingness to forgive, to let go, to refuse to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil by good? (See Romans 12.21)
Not long after the Iranian revolution of 1979, Bahram Dehqani-Tafti, a son of the Anglican Bishop of Iran, was murdered. His father wrote this prayer:
‘Lord God, we remember not only our son but also his murderers:
not because they killed him in the prime of his youth and made our hearts bleed and our tears flow,
not because with this savage act they have brought further disgrace on the name of our country among the civilized nations of the world;
but because through their crime we now follow your footsteps more closely in the way of sacrifice.
The terrible fire of this calamity burns up all selfishness and possessiveness in us;
its flame reveals the depth of depravity and meanness and suspicion, the dimension of hatred and the measure of sinfulness in human nature;
it makes obvious as never before our need to trust in God’s love as shown in the cross of Jesus and his resurrection:
love which makes us free from hatred towards our persecutors;
love which brings patience, forbearance, courage, loyalty, humility, generosity and greatness of heart;
love which, more than ever, deepens our trust in God’s final victory and his eternal designs for the church and for the world;
love which teaches us how to prepare ourselves to face our own day of death.
God, our son’s blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls;
so, when his murderers stand before you on the day of judgment,
remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives. And forgive.’