Category: Forgiveness

The topic of forgiveness, is one I have previously visited, and no doubt will visit many times again, in experience if not in writing. The issue of forgiveness is ever fresh in human experience, flowing inevitably from the wanton harms and evil which surrounds us and so often affects us directly. It is a subject among Christians which engenders a great deal of misunderstanding and sometimes foolishness. In what is certainly the most uttered prayer in Christianity — the Lord’s Prayer — we are called to both ask forgiveness for ourselves and extend it to others: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” So what exactly is forgiveness? Forgiveness requires, first of all, that there is some genuine harm done — real or perceived — to an individual, by another. The harm may be physical, emotional, or spiritual, affecting any one of a host of important areas: our pride, our emotional or physical well-being, our finances, our security, our relationships, and many other areas. The harm must be substantial — the injury must cost us something dear, thereby engendering the inevitable responses to such harm: fear, pain, sorrow, loss, anger, resentment, disruption of relationships. The need for forgiveness arises out of these natural defensive responses to the offense — defenses which have an unnerving tendency to be self-perpetuating and self-destructive. Some of the silliness surrounding the act of forgiveness arises from the lack of such substantial harm. Choosing, for example, to forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust, or the terrorists for 9/11, for example, when we ourselves have never been affected by it directly in any way (or at best trivially so), becomes little more than pretentious posturing. It costs us nothing to say, accomplishing nothing but the appearance of self-righteous sanctimony. This form seems especially common in some Christian circles, where it serves little more than a veneer of righteousness, allowing us to sound “Christian” while sacrificing nothing. False forgiveness commonly takes another form, driven by obligation to moral or religious dictates, and facilitated by denial. Having sustained some harm, we know the moral command to forgive, and therefore simply will ourselves to do so. When the inevitable anger arises again — as it always will, if there has been substantial harm — we simply force it under the surface, recommitting ourselves to the act while trying desperately not to relive the incident. Yet the anger and resentment never get resolved, and arise repeatedly — often in areas of life far removed from the direct injury, manifesting themselves in depression, irritability, and acting out in other relationships or domains of life. The forgiveness driven by moral compulsion or law far more enslaves the giver than frees him, and allows the poison to fester rather than lancing the boil. True forgiveness at its heart is about sacrifice. It is an extension of grace, a humble admission that we too have harmed others — perhaps even been instrumental in precipitating by our own behavior the offense we have sustained. It arises from a profound gratitude at having been forgiven ourselves, by God, of far greater failings than those which have wounded us. Yet there is more to forgiveness than just having the the proper spirit — there must be action. Forgiveness arising from the right spirit is still frail — the emotions, the hurt, the resentment remain all to close at hand, as the injury is relived time and time again. The feelings persist though the spirit forgives. The heart must be transformed — it must, in fact, be dragged to victory by the will manifesting itself in changed behavior toward the offender. Corrie ten Boom and her family secretly housed Jews in their home during WWII. Their “illegal” activity was discovered by the Nazis, and Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the German death camp at Ravensbruck. There Corrie would watch many, including her sister, die. After the war she returned to Germany to declare the grace of Christ: It was 1947, and I’d come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. It was the truth that they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. When we confess our sins, I said, God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a Scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, “NO FISHING ALLOWED”. The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a cap with skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush — the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were! That place was Ravensbruck, and the man who was making his way forward had been a guard — one of the most cruel guards. Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: “Fine message, Fraulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!” And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course! How could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women? But I remembered him. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze. “You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk”, he was saying. “I was a guard there.” No, he…

It is, after a fashion, a legend of the fall. Not mine, mind you — although one could say my fall was in some ways greater. My wife’s mother was, though elderly, quite strong and independent — alert, cantankerous, losing a little memory here and there, in nearly constant pain from vertebrae once tall and straight but now arched and foreshortened. It seemed simple enough: bend down to retrieve the dropped utensil, a task done mindlessly a million times before. But this time, different: muscles weakened by nearly nine decades, joints worn thin and crepitant by a century’s steps, she could not maintain balance and fell backwards to the floor. The call came shortly thereafter, and was not the first: a prior fall six months before had broken no bones but nearly broken her spirit — months of slow recovery, fighting pain and hopelessness, had by some small miracle been conquered, with much relief among us but a lingering fear of an even-worse encore. The curtain call came, to no applause and much apprehension. The hospital stay was long, and replete with the consequences of falls in the elderly: rapid loss of strength from recumbency; mental confusion from requisite opiates; quiescent health problems charging to the fore to complicate a recovery trivial for the young but disastrous and often deadly in the eighth decade of life. When she was finally discharged to the nursing home, she was hardly recognizable as the same individual who had fallen little more than one week before. She had sustained no fractures, but there were fractures aplenty developing. The enfeeblement of an elderly parent quickly finds the fault lines in a family, as the stresses of disrupted schedules, new financial strains, and disputes about responsibilities and recovery find old tapes playing and new resentments kindling. The lid blew off at mom’s birthday dinner, when a planned family meeting found my wife and her siblings squaring off, two on two, with one storming out and all looking for lightning rods to discharge their pent-up passions. The war raged hot for weeks, with angry phone calls and tears, misunderstandings and mischief. My wife, remorseful over her initiation of the dispute, desperately tried to patch it up and reconcile, egged on by siblings who simply wanted the conflict to cease — all the while taking sides and launching back door verbal raids of their own. But her every attempt at reconciliation seemed only to fuel the fire, as the offended party went on offense, quietly working the phones on a “fact-finding” mission to undermine her credibility and prove her malfeasance. I, meanwhile, studiously avoided involvement in this sibling insurrection, although the incessant vengeful assault on her character was taking its toll, and a simmering anger began brewing within. It burst forth when one such fact-finding call was made to an employee of mine, against my express wishes. Litigious insinuations and lavender imprecations poured forth like some foul excrescence — and now I was right in the thick of things. A carefully-written letter, apologizing for my actions while explaining the roots of our anger, proved not a balm but a bombshell. It became clear that a truce must ensue, and all communication was put on hold. The war became cold, and a frigid silence ensued. Incoming calls went unanswered, incoming e-mails ignored. My wife, far more noble than I, continued her efforts at reconciliation, though I encouraged her to freeze out the errant ingrates. She encouraged me to forgive, knowing well the consequences of a resentment slowly simmered to perfection, seasoned with self-righteous anger and a dash of wounded ego. I would tell her “I’m working on it” — but reality said otherwise, as mid-night mental rages wrecked sleep and drop-forged a heart silently steeled against grace and mercy. Silence was golden, and allowed me to believe the matter was finally behind us — until a call and e-mail from my wife’s brother arrived, requesting a conversation for reconciliation. I wanted no part of it, being convinced that nothing had changed, that in their eyes we remained the evil perpetrators and they the innocent victims. The old fury returned, as dark sleepless nights were spent crafting disparaging replies, honing the knife blade to surgical precision with words rational only in the quiet insanity of eyes wide open in a room dark with demons. The committee was in session; its judgments final, its justice, harsh. The crush of Christmas kept futility at bay, as guests and gift-gathering granted no reprieve to reply. A quiet Saturday seemed providential, as my wife and daughter set out to shop, and deliver Christmas cookies to friends — and to her brother, in yet another conciliatory exercise I deemed well-meaning but pointless. But a change in plans changed the plan: “Would you deliver the cookies to George?” I knew what she would ask before she opened her mouth: “No, I’m really not interested.” “You know, you really need to forgive him.” “I’m working on it.” “You can ‘work on it’ until the cows come home — forgiveness is a choice, a decision — not a project.” The moment when the hammer of conviction strikes the anvil of self-will is intense, pitting fear against faith, fury against forgiveness, in a struggle for their place in the soul. I sat, silently, for several minutes, not wanting to make the choice I knew must be made. There was, in the depths of my spirit, a soft lowing. The cows had come home. I arrived at his door, unannounced, and rung the bell. After a few anxious moments, he answered. His shock was palpable. Men have greeted the Grim Reaper with greater joy; his face was ashen. The bear hug I gave him was reciprocated as a man would embrace a corpse. He regained his composure as he scrambled to find his wife. I set the cookies on the coffee table, and set about listening far more than talking. It was civil, at times even humorous, as a…