There are two kinds of people who have problems with the process of reconciliation. The first includes those who feel such outrage at the actions of others that forgiveness seems out of the question. Some may even say it: “I can never forgive her/him for that!” They can, of course. What they should say is, “I will never forgive her/him for that!” They feel they have been treated too badly for the other person to warrant forgiveness.
The other kind of people are those who cannot or will not forgive themsleves. It is they who have done the hurting, and the damage they’ve done seems irreparable. Often compounding the problem is the fact that those whom they believe they have hurt—usually family members—are no longer alive. They have died before the one who hurt them had a chance to say he or she was sorry and needed to be forgiven.
Because a person cannot forgive someone or forgive themselves, they cannot forget. Instead, they are preoccupied with traumatic memories. What is in the way of their forgiving and forgetting? Certainly not God. Nothing is more emphatically stated in the Bible than the availability of His forgiveness. ”As far as the east is from the west, so far had He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).
How far is the east from the west? A similar question might be: how long, wide, high, and deep is outer space? Can you imagine infinity—something without a beginning or an end? That’s how total and unending God’s forgiveness is.
God not only forgives, He forgets. “I, even I, an He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and remembers your sins no more” (Isaiah 43:25). How more clearly could it have been said? First, God blots out our sins so they can no longer be seen, and then He chooses not to remember even that which has been blotted out. Why? Because He does not want to remember.
While God can and does forgive us, we cannot forgive. While God chooses not to remember our wrongs, we can’t seem to forget. The obstacle to our forgiving, then, must lie in ourselves.
When someone does an unforgiveable thing to us. We decide to not forgive because we are outraged. This is the obstacle. For such an awful offense, the person has to be punished. We are more interested in retaliation. We would like to even the score—secure justice—and make them suffer as we have suffered. The obstacle in this situation is outrage.
Another obstacle is rejection of self. If we argue with someone, and they die. We sometimes assume, it was our fault for arguing. We are bad people. How could we have done such a thing. We feel beyond redemption. Our self-image, it seems, is hopelessly damaged. If there is justice in the world, we must be punished. Our rejection of ourselves is the way in which we administer punishment. Another is that we will not let ourselves receive anything good—like forgiveness.
WHEN GOOD NEWS IS NOT GOOD NEWS
Normally, the realization that God forgives is good news. This is why it’s called Gospel, a word which means “Good News”. But for those who choose to keep the obstacles in their lives, the fact that God forgives all wrongs is not Good News. In fact, it’s not news at all because they aren’t interested. It remains for them an abstraction, something in the religious realm with no connection to the world of reality.
When we hurt others or are hurt by them, our ego or pride is wounded, and a wounded pride, like a wounded animal, is dangerous. It refuses to die, and instead tries by compensation or fantasy to redo what cannot be done. Failing that, it tries to redeem the situation by paying whatever price one’s guilt or resentment seems to demand.
When we are in this state of mind, we are not interested in forgiveness because we are still too traumatized by events. The damage is so severe, our thoughts are focused only on what has already happened, rather than on what lies ahead. Since there is no future, there is no hope. We feel doomed by the turn of events which dominates the present.
We re also not interested in forgiveness because the hurt we feel demands it’s “pound of flesh.” We’re not inclined to leave such revenge to God, even though He has claimed a right to it. “’It is Mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). We are reluctant to leave revenge in God’s hands because He is likely to be slow in getting around to it. We want justice—retaliation—now! Besides, God may temper His justice with mercy, and at the moment we are not in a merciful mood.
The desire to take justice into our own hands demonstrates the retaliation principle, the principle which perpetuates wars between nations, between races, and even the abomination of a “holy War” between religious groups. Its application never ends anything except people’s lives in acts of ever-increasing brutality. Among nations and larger groups, the principle of “an eye for an eye” becomes 2, 20, 2,000 or 200,000 eyes for one eye. When the circle of people affected is smaller, such as is the case within families, the destruction is no less devastating.
In contrast, the principle of forgiveness brings to a halt the destructive process which retaliation can only perpetuate. Forgiveness is capable of reconciling nations, cultures, races, economic groups, and warring religious denominations, just as it can heal the division between individuals and bring peace to the conflict raging within a single troubles mind. Forgiveness also can heal the division between you and whoever has hurt you or has been hurt by you.
FORGIVEN AND FORGIVING
Forgiveness works when those involved in a conflict are ready to receive it and to give it. This mutuality between being forgiven and forgiving is shown in the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are asking God to forgive wrongs we have done in the same way we forgive wrongs done against us. Implicit in the prayer is the fact that being sinned against is part and parcel of living in an imperfect world. Things—and people—go wrong, but, more importantly, no one is entirely innocent.
The mutuality of forgiveness is illustrated in a story Jesus told. When a servant could not possibly repay the huge debt he had accumulated with his master, his master wiped the debt from his books. The same servant, however, refused to be patient with a fellow servant who owed him a much smaller amount. When the master heard about his servant’s lack of compassion, he summoned him and revoked the forgiveness he had earlier given. Jesus applied the story to real life when He said, “this is how My heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35).
The forgiver is also the forgiven! It is not only a fact of life that we shall be sinned against, but also that we shall sin against others. Forgiveness, then, is not simply an innocent person forgiving someone who is guilty. It is one wrongdoer forgiving another wrongdoer. We tend to forget that when we feel we are the victim of someone else’s sin. As St. Peter explains (read 2 Peter 1:3-10) we become nearsighted and blind, and forget that we have been cleansed from our past sins.
Withholding forgiveness often reflects a sense of moral superiority over the wrongdoer. We are reluctant to admit that we are no better than the one who has hurt us. Even when we do extend forgiveness, however, we may attempt to do so without stepping down from our lofty position as moral superiors. When that happens, the person forgiven senses the putdown and resents it, perhaps even to the point of pulling back from the process of reconciliation thus begun. In fact, the arrogance with which the forgiving gesture is made can become the trigger for a new round of wrongs—or at least the justification of the initial one.
Even if we manage to forgive without adopting an attitude or moral superiority, our forgiveness may be insincere for another reason—guilt. We may be convinced of our own wrongs and recognize the truth in Jesus’ warning that god will treat us the way we treat each other. Between teeth clenched in resistance, we say, “All right. I’ll forgive him.” But we never forget!
In fact, we may rub the forgiveness in at every opportunity because we resent the coercion to forgive. The need to retaliate lurks behind the mask of forgiveness we have reluctantly put on.
Whether the forgiveness is handed down from a position of (false) moral superiority or dragged from us grudgingly by a sense of guilt, the healing is all on the surface. Deep down, the wound we have suffered still festers. This is not “forgiving from the heart.” We are only pretending to forgive. Our egos still stand in the way.
What are we to do, then? Since we know what the obstacle is—ourselves—we need to confront it along with the hurt, the embarrassment, humiliation, resentment, and guilt.
THE ROLE OF ANGER
Our first and most deep-seated reaction to being hurt is anger. Even if I bump my shins on an inanimate object, I feel anger. If some person hurts me betrays my trust, attacks my confidence, makes me feel bad, or cheats me out of something that’s rightfully mine, my anger can escalate quickly into rage, and beyond to hatred.
Anger is primarily a reaction to an injustice. If in my mind I have been treated unjustly, I naturally—and rightly—feel anger. That anger, however, stands in the way of my forgiving and forgetting, since it perpetuates the hurt I feel at being treated unfairly.
Anger is a secondary emotion: that is, it’s usually produced by the original feelings of pain and hurt. It also may be a reaction to feelings of guilt which in themselves produce pain. Whoever, therefore, simply causes me to feel guilty may become the object of my anger. Being hurt also can cause me to be afreaid, and many of us become angry when we are frightened. In such situations, anger is almost a reflexive action, a way to strike back when we feel we have been attacked. Since most of us are reluctant to confront someone who has hurt us (if we are afraid of the person or the confrontation itself), we make a safer response. We talk to others about the person who hurt us or let out our hostility in other indirect ways that are ultimately just as destructive.
Whatever the source of our anger might be—a sense of having been treated unjustly, guilt feelings, or fear—we will be unable to forgive an forget until we can find out what we can do with our anger.
GOD’S ROLE IN THE PROCESS
We have referred to God as the One who forgives. But He is also the Anger Bearer in that He takes our hurt and anger on Himself. We have fragile egos. God does not. We are impatient while God is long-suffering. We seek revenge. God does not respond in kind to the hurts we have caused Him. We can use God as a kind of lightning rod for our anger, pouring it out to Him in prayer just as the writers of Psalms 7, 10, 17, 28, and other parts of the Bible shared their angry feelings with God.
We also can express to god the anger we feel toward Him. Because we know God is good, and because we know it might be disrespectful to direct our anger at God, we may not recognize the fact that He Himself is sometimes the One with whom we are most angry. If there is no specific focus or an easily identifiable cause for the emotion, we may say we’re angry at life or Lady Luck or that fate that seems to be shaping our destiny. Or we may choose other people as scapegoats for anger which actually is directed toward God.
The great sufferer in the Old Testament, Job, directed his anger at God when, in biting sarcasm, he asked, ”Does it please You to oppress me, to spurn the work of Your hands, while You smile on the schemes of the wicked?” (Job 10:3).
Our quarrels with God and others often are desperate attempts to “hang in there” in a frustrating world where injustices occur too frequently. Perhaps you share the same angry thoughts that came to Job and want to aim the arrow of your rage at a God who seems to be ignoring your situation or even seems to be taking a hand in creating it. Express the anger. God already knows of it.
Along with our anger and frustration comes the recognition that God is compassionate. We may not recognize that truth and the power for healing in that image of God until we have unloaded our anger on God and understood that He bears it.
HEALING LEADS TO FORGIVING
If you’re trying to forgive but are not forgetting, you’re probably still too hurt and, therefore, too angry. In fact, you may be inwardly raging over what has happened to you. Let me encourage you to “let it out” in a safe situation until the anger begins to subside. It will, you know.
Our memories can heal if we deal with them in a healthy way: that is, expose them, bring them out in the open and let God see them. We need to relive the memories—with all their emotional baggage—in the presence of a caring and trusting person who can listen and point us to the source of comfort: God. We may need to do the exposing more than once, depending on the severity of the hurt and the depth of our anger, but the pain in the memories will begin to diminish.
Our problem is that we tend to hold on to the memories. We’re creatures of habit, even when it comes to things that hurt us, so we want to keep things, even the pain we experience. We sometimes even rationalize our clinging to bad memories as necessary reminders of how others have mistreated us. Blaming others and keeping our eyes and memories fixed on someone else relieves us of the need to be accountable for the way we feel. Thus, we re protected from the confession of our own faults, a process more painful than confessing the sins of others.
It’s also possible that we may resist both the forgetting and the forgiving because the reconciliation that would follow would amount to an accusation of how resentful, even hateful, we have been. As long as we remain unreconciled, we can nurture our anger without guilt.
Now you can see why change and healing are so difficult for us. These are processes in which one change leads to another, processes in which we gradually adopt a different way of looking at things and people. It’s easier to leave things as they are and maintain the perspective we now have. It’s a mistake to do that, of course, because the poison of resentment and bitterness will ultimately destroy us. WE NEED TO FORGET!
Forgiveness does not imply amnesia. It means replacing unpleasant memories with pleasant ones. It means recalling the moments of forgiving and forgiveness, as well as the moments of resentment and guilt.
Sometimes forgetting becomes mixed up with repression of memory, covering up a painful event because even to recall it is painful. It is a kind of forgetting, but not a healthy forgetfulness. Rather than a result of forgiveness, repression is a further obstacle to the healing of bad memories.
Instead of leading to amnesia or repression, forgiveness takes the sting out of memories—neutralizes them so they slip into forgetfulness, because they no longer are needed to perpetuate resentment. The memories, however, may remain because of the good feelings that result from being reconciled. Forgiveness represents an end, a closure with the past, and provides us with a fresh start.
Jesus once said that He had come to set free those who are bound (Luke4:18). Nothing can bind us like a negative past. When this past comes to a healthy conclusion so that its pain can no longer color our present or cast a shadow over our future, we are free indeed. The weight is lifted from our backs. This is the liberation basic to all liberations. When it happens, not only are the forgiven ones blessed, but also the ones who do the forgiving. They feel better in all ways—spiritually, emotionally, and sometimes even physically.
Before we can forget the hurts we have felt, we need to forgive those who have done the damage. Forgiving may not lead immediately to forgetting, and although we may feel obligated oreven desire to forgive, our hurt feelings may not lus us do so. Feelings take healthy treatment over time to heal. Giving verbal expressions to them in the presence of a trusted and capable confidant is a necessar step in the process.
In addition to giving expressions to our pain, we need to give expression to our anger, our resentment, and our outrage. Then after we’ve shared those feelings, we will be able to start letting them go. That means letting go of our attitude of moral superiority as well, and attitude to which we are in no way entitled. God’s forgiveness makes the healing happen. His continued and caring presence will lead us through the process.
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