Matthew Ichihashi Potts > Quotes

“What if forgiveness allowed for anger and rage and grief? What if it preserved mistrust and could keep a safe distance for its victims? What if forgiveness acknowledged hurt rather than promising healing; what if it uniquely reckoned with the permanence of a wound, rather than hastily dressing that wound with a thin reconciliation?”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Just as the realism of mourning involves an acceptance of a future bereft of one's beloved, forgiveness's refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be. It does not vainly try by violence to restore a life that has been permanently destroyed. It refrains from a retaliatory attempt to rectify an irrevocable wrong. It looks with grief toward what life really must become going forward, and then it faces that future with a grim will and survives. It is precisely because forgiveness refuses the retributive fallacy of fixing the past that it is freed to move slowly, painfully, even perhaps like Christ with permanently open wounds into the future.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“What matters with respect to forgiveness is not how I feel about the person who has wronged me, but how I measure and temper my interpersonal response to that wrong.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Forgiveness reckons unflinchingly with a past that cannot be undone. The futility of retribution's urge to turn time backwards is precisely what forgiveness understands and works against.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Literary fiction, and these fictions in particular, allows forgiveness to be a problem, it is unsurprised by how forgiveness confounds and confuses, it doesn't aim to clean up the mess forgiveness leaves. Literary fiction doesn't expect to speak conclusively of forgiveness, it only wishes to speak at all.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Forgiveness rejects retaliation precisely because of the futility of vengeance with respect to the irrevocability of time. Much of the popular and scholarly discourse around forgiveness implies that it can either undo, restore, or erase the past. But the common delusion that an act in the present can somehow rectify a wronged past is in fact the hallmark of retribution's magical thinking, not of forgiveness's realist grief.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Forgiveness is the habit of non-retaliation; or better, it is the judgment non-retaliation renders. We cannot forgive virtues. We forgive only sins. But as it issues its condemnation of sin, as it resolutely names a violation that cannot be undone, forgiveness also accepts that past as unalterable and so imagines what possibilities for the future its battered history might bear.
If forgiveness is more mourning than miracle, a manner of living with rather than magically fixing a broken past, then its posture is paradoxically forward facing. Since forgiveness addresses the past so unflinchingly, it also necessarily and paradoxically sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past. In attempting to find the past's wrongs livable even if irrevocable, forgiveness requires and inspires imagination.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account