Your thoughts/experiences regarding forgiveness?

[CBHagman]

Dear Catholic/Orthodox Christian Group (and anyone who cares to weigh in), I'd be interested in hearing your views, understanding, and practice of forgiveness. It's an issue I'm struggling with lately, and it's also one of the areas that's easy to treat in a superficial fashion.

For instance, I suspect a great many of us carry around a good deal of unfinished business in the form of unresolved conflicts, relationships that went awry, and the like. I can't be the only one with a ringside seat to epic grudges, shunnings, and stony, uncomfortable silence.

And it always amazes me that sometimes the tiniest things set off a feud or grudge, while it's possible to live with cruelty for years without even acknowledging it.

I suspect that forgiveness is something we must always strive for. What are your thoughts?

CBH

[hedgehog]

1. It's very hard.

We are told on the one hand to turn the other cheek and forgive, but how does that square with walking away from your tormentors?

[CBHagman]

2. That's the hardest thing.

It's very humbling to read, for example, how peaceful activists -- civil rights workers, etc. --are trained to handle themselves when confronted with jeering or even with force.

And here I have trouble letting go of something as minor as a hurtful comment.

Yet forgiveness really is the answer, even when the offenses are large. Note that I'm not saying that it doesn't require work, or that I'm merely saying, "That's okay." It's just the business of not being chained to my original reaction (let alone built-up rage and resentment) towards an offense.

[hedgehog]

3. I was thinking of people who've been abused by family members

or in social situations. How do you deal with the person who has slighted you in public? Slighted is the wrong word; sometimes social snubs can cut to the heart.

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. It is not a virtue to be bereft of a sense of outrage at behaviour of great

malice, hedgehog.

Christ was continually enraged by the suffering of the innocent at the hands of the malevolent, so the import of that precept of his would seem to be that, while he does not counsel us to love people who have acted with immense cruelty towards us (someone clearly beyond our more or less normal propensity for badness), it is harmful to us, to ourselves, to dwell on their badness and wish them damned (though they may well deserve it and are likely to get it); but if we must think of them at all, to mourn the person they might have been, they were created to be.

The words of scripture, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay," are often forgotten, instead of being seen as a counter-balance to loving our enemies (or in relation to the worst, what they might have been, i.e. that happened to their true nature. Only God knows the full story of all our lives).

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. I have found it helpful to bear in mind that the true nature of all the children of light

is in Christ, in his Mystical Body, so while we can easily resent great mischief, even evil, done to us by this or that individual it is worthwhile reflecting that, insofar as a person chooses finally and definitively to identify with his lower, evil nature, then surely his/hers is the most unfortunate lot of any human being.

Fortunately, even the best of us are just an unpromising mixture of good and evil (and God came to call sinners, as he wryly observed to the Pharisees) but the worst... well, I believe that while Jesus mourned with tears the wickedness of the respectable folk of the Jerusalem of his day, in his famous lament, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem...", he referred to the fate of Judas with what seemed a certain bitterness and an evidently infinitely righteous anger. That creature must have witnessed Christ's goodness from close quarters for some time.

I think in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitzin commented that when a human being's wickedness plumbs a certain level of cruelty and depravity, in reality, they have made themselves beyond redemption. I believe he had in mind people such as torturers, though individuals, such as that Lindy England of the Abu Ghraib scandal, may have been so abused and misled by society and the army, only God can know for sure - at least on the basis of what little we know about her. Others are such manifest psychopaths, I wonder if, like Judas, their sin is the eternal sin, for which there is no forgiveness: believed by the Fathers to be wilful ignorance in the matters of the spirit. Evidently, in the Pharisees who were Christ's sworn enemies, for the most part, it would have manifested itself in a cruelty at several removes, the support of unjust structures, to the detriment of the poor, the Lord's anointed.

I think some of the questions you should ask yourself are, "In my shoes, since he was so fully human, as well as fully divine - and we know that Jesus learnt experientially as he grew up - would he not have struggled at times to sublimate his resentment at those who slighted, mocked, insulted him?" Reading the psalms can be pretty liberating on one level at least. In his psalms, David was not shy to tell God just what a bunch of bad beggars they had to deal with and to ask how long how it would be before he liberated his people and punished the wicked. They were of course psalms Jesus would have been more than familiar with.

Bear in mind that nobody likes to think of himself as being poor and low-status, and since Christ chose his own great self-abasement as a homeless preacher, many of the latter, because they would have been of a very low status in the eyes of the world, would have availed themselves of what they would have seen as the opportunity to look down on someone else - someone else with high and mighty ideas too... This, although Jesus pointed out that by and large it was the poor who were rich in faith, the privileged of our society, and almost all his furious diatribes seemed to be aimed at the respectable monied folk, whose self-righteous worldly ambition and materialism was prosecuted at their expense.

It is also helpful to remember that if someone has spoken ill of us, even if it is untrue in the specifics, there will have been times when we have expressed malice towards others, and maybe not just in our hearts. Offer your pain up to God, as Catholics are wont to say and do. God's Providence is never EVER derailed. I don't say it glibly, because some of my trials are so off the scale, imo, that I literally have no choice but to continue to bow my neck to the yoke in faith. I have no choice, because, as St Peter, said, "To who else should we go?" I've long known the truths of the faith as a total certainty. What is left to God to do or to ask, other than to see how much I am prepared to suffer for his sake? It doesn't mean I'm miserable all the time; the truth is, I'm probably much less prone to be glum than most people, not just externally, but internally.

[DemBones DemBones]

6. Good points, all. I especially thought this was important:

"It is also helpful to remember that if someone has spoken ill of us, even if it is untrue in the specifics, there will have been times when we have expressed malice towards others, and maybe not just in our hearts. Offer your pain up to God, as Catholics are wont to say and do."

[rug]

5. "Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them quite so much."

-- Oscar Wilde, deathbed Catholic