The Art of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is the first shape salvation takes in our lives. Through confession we experience forgiveness from God and are initiated into the ministry of reconciliation. We are then sent out to practice this ministry, first in the Church and then in the world. I say ‘practice’ here to cut against the notion that forgiveness is something at which we are immediately skilled. Forgiveness is a journey, the steps of which sometimes take months or years each. But forgiveness is real and it can bring us freedom from the power of our wounds. For this to happen, though, we have to get real about those hurts we would most like to avoid. Forgiveness begins where we really need to forgive, or it does not begin at all.
This is reflected in our liturgical year. Holy Week brings us to the foot of the Cross, the site of the greatest act of forgiveness ever worked. As forgiveness is the first shape salvation takes, it is also the first step of initiation into the Paschal mystery–the proclamation of Christ-crucified. This mystery is the character of our lives as Christians, who always carry within us the dying of the Lord Jesus, and thus always the forgiveness wrought by that dying. It is at the place of humanity’s greatest collective sin (in which we are all vicariously present and participant), and so it is the place where we must begin to receive Christ’s words of forgiveness from the Cross.
After my last two posts, I hope I have shown the importance of forgiveness as it pertains to the integrity of our interior life. I hope we have become more aware of what it means for us to receive forgiveness from God as the anchor of our practice. Having studied the pattern of confession and absolution to our relationships with others, then, we can begin to see some very tangible steps to take as we begin the work of forgiveness where it is necessary in our actual lives. A helpful book on this topic is The Process of Forgiveness by William Meninger, a Trappist monk who has thought very deeply about the complex practice of forgiveness and the obstacles we face in it. Many of the comments I will offer here are drawn from his written work.
The first step in forgiving others is to quit denying that we have been hurt, that something has gone wrong. To do this we have to stop rationalizing, compartmentalizing, and spiritualizing. When it comes to pain, we rationalize when we make excuses and justifications for the wrong done. We compartmentalize when we pretend like the wound we’ve received is somehow separable from the rest of us as though we are not an integrated, whole person. And we spiritualize when we try to jump into a theological or affective religious understanding that strips the pain by making us impervious to harm–using God as an emotional macguffin that immunizes us from hurt. Meninger puts it this way: “There is that within us which obscures the reality and the clear remembrance of past hurts. Our pride is reluctant to admit how deeply we have been affected and how much of our life has been changed for the worse as a result. Hurts are painful to face so we try almost naturally to look away from them.” In order to combat this, we have to get very precise about the wound. As we did in confession, we have to identify in our ruptured relationship with someone else, as much as we can, the exact parameters and name of the thing that happened. Until we do, we will not be able to progress to real healing.
The second step is to recognize and reject the self-blame we use as an escape from the hard truth that we have experienced damage by the actions of another. As strange as it is to say, we will sometimes pretend to be exercising a well-meaning but falsely balanced perspective. When we do this, we try to dull the pain of a hurt by assigning ourselves a false responsibility for it. We say things like: “well I could have been better, smarter, more careful, etc.” Then, we think, it would not have happened. Sometimes, there is truth to this voice and that makes it particularly difficult. But even what is truly ours to own is a matter for later in the process when we see more clearly. Early in the process of forgiving, it is usually a way to grasp for a sense of control and avoid admitting and embodying our vulnerability again. It is an attempt to remain invincible by attempting to define, and thus control our fallibility–if it’s mostly on our shoulders, we think, then we’re still in charge–we can then manage fixing ourselves. But healing cannot proceed until we begin to let go of the control we seek through false self-blame.
The third step is a rebound from the second. By realizing that ultimately, we cannot accept all the blame, and thus the control of the wrong, our next move will be to collapse into the sense that we are doomed to be the victims of the wrong done, probably forever. It is helpful, scary as it is, to listen to the emotional content of this stage because, as Meninger points out: “the victim stage allows us to express the sorrow, regret, and opposition we would like to have expressed when the wounds were inflicted.” We uncover the unspoken messages of the heart that need to get out.
This is a move toward reality: acknowledging that we are more fragile than we want to believe. We need to have sympathy for ourselves in this stage, especially if we were the kind of people for whom it was a struggle to escape the black hole of self blame in step two. But the danger here, of course, is that we collapse into a sense of despair–if we did not have control over the circumstances that went wrong, then that means we will never have any volition in anything. Here is the opportunity to remember what strengths, relationships, and assets we do have. Doing so with gratitude will restore balance to our perspective and remind us that our words and actions are indeed meaningful. In the end, our move forward means accepting that the past happened, and that the actions of both ourselves and others were real, and that what we choose to do next is very significant.
As we move to the fourth step, it’s time to get angry. Often, this is a strange experience if we’re not the kind of people who allow ourselves to feel anger when a wound arises. If we lingered or got stuck in the first three steps, we can get the feeling like we’re not allowed to feel anger anymore, like our moment has passed. But anger, we should remember, is not itself a sinful or inappropriate feeling. It is what we say and do with it–including in relationship to ourselves–that matters. The impulse of anger is neutral, but we are not permitted to trap it as a fire within ourselves forever. Anger, naturally understood, is forward moving. It motivates us to move through to the release of the final stage, but it will not allow us to do so without acknowledging the message of the heart that cries, and sometimes screams out: That should not have happened! We are not permitted to act destructively here, but we also cannot try to eradicate the feeling– that would just be a form of self-destruction. The feeling is, after all, telling us something true. It is better to express it in measured, safe ways. This can be through writing, or like me, going out by myself to the beach at night and yelling at the ocean. I’m reminded of a story I heard of a convent in which the Mother Superior allowed the sisters, once a year, to leave the grounds of the convent and yell for as long as they wanted out in the woods.
Meninger notes that when anger subsides, the message it is trying to get across concerns our sense of having lost, generally, one of three things: security, control, or approval. As we get past the flood of anger in (hopefully) healthy ways, we can start to interrogate the emotion: how am I feeling a loss of security, control, or approval. The critical shift we then need to make is to ask why do I so strongly desire security, control, or approval? Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves: am I willing to give up my desire to control, to have security, or to need approval? It helps to remember that, factually, there is much we cannot do to manage these things–we cannot curate every detail, we cannot protect against everything, and we cannot script others’ reactions to us. We can make choices, though, about our desire for these things and what we do with that desire. In other words, we can choose whether or not we allow ourselves to be controlled by those desires for control. I want to note here, though, that we should expect this shift to be a lengthy and imperfect process–even if we are surprised at the times it is not. As my fellow blogger, Rachael Crews, has said to me: “even if our anger comes out in an inappropriate way, it does not necessitate that we stop being angry. We ask forgiveness, correct the error, but continue the process of healthy anger to keep moving forward. I think a lot of people who make it to this step if they stumble, feel it was wrong of them to consider the step at all.”
Having attended to the anger, we are ready to move on to forgiveness, to the step of loosing another for the wrong they have done from us. It helps to remember here that forgiveness is not an assessment of the thing done–to decide its moral quality or proper recompense. As Meninger notes: “Realizing our hurt and our hurter, knowing what we did (or did not do) to facilitate the wounding, having mourned our suffering and determined to do something about it, we proceed to do it.” Forgiveness is the act of releasing to God the debt of wrong done to us. It is an oblation of our experience, as it is, to God who can heal and restore. Again, as Meninger notes: “Real forgiveness cannot be squeezed out of a sense of duty, it is given freely or not at all. It is neither a power play nor a manipulation, but an act of love.” And, I would add, it is an act of costly love.
Forgiveness is the choice to allow the hurt we have experienced to participate in the reconciliation that God is working in all things through Christ. It is centrally about our withholding or giving our oblation, and from this central posture and perspective forgiveness is then about how we go on to relate to others. We may continue to have an impaired relationship with others–either because they are factually dangerous to us or because, perhaps, they are deceased. But regardless of what is possible in how we interact, forgiveness means, as Meninger says: “you are no longer dependent on what someone else did to you.” We begin to live with hearts free to receive the love of God in our actual struggles, and we are more able to impart that love–with all of its comfort and demand–to others. And here, at last, it is time to move on. We begin to act as though the thing has been put in the past, no longer a present reality. Forgiveness restores possibility to the future by taking it, over time, out of the shadow of our past. We can do new things and grow. As we say at the end of a confession: “We can go our way in peace.”
Forgiveness is a process, not a moment. But even the smallest step in the process of forgiving makes us participate as ministers of reconciliation. To modify a phrase from our late Archbishop John Charles: “forgive as you can, not as you can’t.” There is much more to that ministry, but it is never less than this. The fruit of a good Lent is to grow in forgiveness. When we begin to experience a world in which we forgive and are forgiven, we begin to experience life as it is known in the Kingdom. And as Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov: “Let me be sinful before everyone, so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise.” We are able to pray with renewed integrity: “forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And as we pray, we experience, more and more, that the Father’s answer to this prayer of the forgiving heart is always the ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ of His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
As we enter Eastertide, may the Lord give us all new hearts to forgive.
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