When I observe or participate in discussions about forgiveness in culturally Western Christian circles, I often find myself doing my best impression of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
What forgiveness isn’t
I have heard people talk about forgiveness as though it means telling someone who harmed you that what they did didn’t matter, or wasn’t that bad. I have had people tell me that forgiving someone who isn’t sorry is the same as letting them off the hook. I once had a friend ask me if the fact that I’d forgiven someone who had hurt us both meant I didn’t believe he should face consequences.
All of these misunderstandings of forgiveness make sense given my experience of how forgiveness is often discussed in Christian settings: completely separately from any discussion of contrition or atonement on the part of the person who hurt us. However, I do believe that the attitudes described above are indeed misunderstandings.
What forgiveness is
I was in college when I decided I needed to have stronger practices surrounding forgiveness. Like many people raised Christian, I had been raised with the idea that forgiving our neighbors (and everyone is our neighbor) is crucial. After all, the first prayer many young Christians memorize is the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” As a young child, I mostly understood that this meant not holding a grudge after someone apologized to me, but of course such matters grow more complicated as one grows older.
By the time I was halfway through college, I had had several experiences with people who hurt me, or who hurt people I loved, and who were extremely unlikely to ever apologize or seek reconciliation. I often ran into these few people around campus, despite the fact that I went to a university with 30,000 students, because that is just the way the universe works sometimes. Every time I passed one of these people on the sidewalk or in the campus diner, my heart would start racing and would feel a powerful anger that made me want to punch a wall. How dare these people laugh with their friends and occupy the same space as I did! They had manipulated me or taken advantage of people I loved! The rest of my day would feel somewhat ruined.
After several months of this, I decided I was really tired of feeling like I wanted to punch a wall.
When I looked for basic primers on forgiveness in practice from a Christian perspective, I quickly found The Book of Forgiving by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. They describe forgiveness as something that happens in stages, the goal of which is to help us release a desire for vengeance. I also listened to a mini-series on forgiveness that I found on the podcast of pastor Rob Bell, who repeatedly emphasized that forgiveness is about setting someone free, but that someone is yourself. Importantly, forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. You can forgive someone without ever wanting to have a relationship with them again. Forgiveness can mean saying, “Go far away from me, but go in peace.”
I also spoke with a trusted member of the clergy as I was working through all this, and she helped me see that anger and forgiveness can coexist. Indeed, anger tells us that something is wrong, that something has happened to us that shouldn’t have happened. This coexists quite well with Archbishop Tutu’s insistence that in order for us to forgive, we must first name how we have been hurt.
Spiritual practices for forgiveness
The naming of this hurt can take many forms: some may wish to tell the story aloud to a friend, or even speak to the person who hurt them if they ultimately hope that the relationship can be repaired. I chose to do something slightly different, and this is a spiritual practice that I use to foster forgiveness to this day.
I wanted to be able to name my hurts completely honestly, and without any judgment whatsoever from the person I was speaking to. In deciding who I wanted to tell my story to, I fell back on that old hymn: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
When I am ready to begin a journey of forgiveness, I sit by myself in a private space and close my eyes to imagine myself in a comfortable place. Usually this takes shape in my mind’s eye as the nave of my parish, which is a beautiful space and one that I feel quite at home in. I imagine Jesus sitting across from me, or next to me, a tallit covering his head like in the illustrations from the Bible stories I read as a child. I speak to him the way I might speak to an older brother who loves me and knows so much more than I do.
Once I have finished speaking this story to the Lord in prayer, it’s my turn to listen. I look through the gospels at the parables Jesus tells about forgiveness and the commandments he gives us regarding our own forgiveness. The more I have meditated on the parable of the Prodigal Son, the more convinced I become that forgiveness is primarily about the health of our own souls. The father in the parable is able to genuinely celebrate the return of a beloved son who had hurt him deeply, while the older brother’s jealousy prevents him from being able to enjoy the party. The problem isn’t that the older brother doesn’t have legitimate grievances against his younger brother—the younger son has behaved badly, and the father never denies this—but without forgiveness, the older brother remains mired in a stew of resentment.
Forgiveness as process
I cannot emphasize enough that none of my journeys of forgiveness have happened overnight. Every time I have been hurt badly enough to sit down and say, “I need to work on intentionally forgiving this person so that I no longer feel like I may spontaneously combust in fury,” I am usually looking at the work of several months. More than anything, I have found that prayer is central: even if I am not in a place where I feel ready to start a journey of forgiveness, I can say to the Lord that I want to want to forgive someone. That is a genuine first step on a path that we do not walk alone. Generations of Christians before us have struggled with the same problems of forgiveness, and Jesus is with us always.
So let us remember what forgiveness is and is not. It is not a deficit of consequences; it is not the denial of harm perpetrated; it is not the trampling of boundaries. It is a gift we give ourselves, with the help of God, at the command of Jesus, for the ultimate good of our souls.
Questions for reflection:
- What impact do you recognize in your body when you have festering resentment against someone?
- What messages about forgiveness did you grow up with? What do you think of those messages now?
- How does the idea of letting go of a past harm make you feel? How could these feelings guide a journey of forgiveness?
Further reading:
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. The Book of Forgiving.
- Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. On Repentance and Repair.
- Rob Bell. The Robcast, episodes 38-42.
