“Aw get over it.” “Hey, let’s just forget this whole thing, okay?” “I’ve moved on.”  “Forgive and forget.” “Won’t you please forgive me?” “I just want you to know that I have forgiven you.”

The key to any of the above is that sometimes we crave forgiveness, and sometimes we have to be the one to forgive. The latter can be very hard to do.

As a child, I experienced the need to say, “I’m sorry.” And being raised in the Catholic church, I had to experience Confession, now called Reconciliation. At the time, the focus was:  what did you do wrong? …I can still remember my first sin. I lied, telling my mother that our neighbor needed kitchen matches. But really, the truth was that Greg and I wanted to sit on the tree stump at the back of his yard and LIGHT THEM. Which we did. Luckily, we did not set the world on fire.

During my young adulthood, either my thin skin got thinner or more likely, the issues on either side of the forgiveness question got bigger, more complicated. They could cause actual pain. And issues where forgiveness is necessary can weigh anyone down; they can create depression, rip dangerous holes in relationships.

It is hard to forgive someone, when you have no idea what you did wrong, or you don’t believe the thing you did wrong is truly worthy of the punishment you are receiving.

OPRAH, LEWIS B. SMEDES, and SIMON WISENTHAL.  

I was an adult, and I had packed on some years, when I heard these words: Forgiving is not for the one who needs to be forgiven—it’s for the one doing the forgiving. Oprah Winfrey

I believe those words now, more than ever. It is definitely an idea that has taken root, growing strong in our culture. Oprah encouraged viewers to journal, which looking back was truly golden advice. When you sit with sadness…when you don’t understand why you are being punished…it can help to write things down. To ponder the situation from many angles. I am doing that right now.

But despite these ideas and aids, we all know the issue of forgiving is very complicated. And though I will always believe that forgiveness is for the one doing the forgiving—those of you who have been living in pain because of something someone did to you, or to someone you love, or because you believe you have not been forgiven for something you did—you realize that the entire process is not an easy one. Especially when the people involved are not talking to one another. Or refuse to talk to you!

I was reminded of this when reading Lewis B. Smedes book: The Art of Forgiving, When you need to forgive and don’t know how. 

A core debate in the text centers on the story of Karl, a German soldier during WW II, who killed many innocent Jewish men, women and children in a Russian village…and then, before he was to be executed, desired the forgiveness of one Jew. He grabbed the wrist of Simon Wisenthal, who was then a young architect, asking him to represent all Jews and forgive Karl. Wisenthal writes of the incident in his book The Sunflower and states: The crux of the matter is the question of forgiveness. Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision. 

Thus Wisenthal refused to forgive Karl, though over the years he wrote about and struggled with his decision.

Smedes writes that after the publication of The Sunflower, distinguished men and women from many walks of life were asked to comment on Wisenthal’s ultimate decision.

“Most of them believed that it was right and good for Wisenthal to not forgive Karl. Here are some of their answers:

You would never have been able to live with yourself had you forgiven him.

To forgive everything, means that one is lacking in discrimination, in true feeling, in reasonableness, in memory…

One cannot and should not go around happily killing and torturing and then, when the moment has come, simply ask and receive forgiveness.

I believe that the easy forgiving of such crimes perpetuates the evil it wants to alleviate.

THE ULTIMATE MORAL QUESTION

When examining Wisenthal’s dilemma in her essay, “The Ultimate Moral Question, Wendy Cooley ends with the following statement: They (the Jews in that village) were the ones who were murdered and brutalized and only they have the power to forgive those who have done them wrong. 

Smedes presents the same idea: no one has a right to forgive someone unless he himself had been injured by that person. Something to ponder.

But the true purpose of Smedes book is to stress the following aspects of being able to forgive. As you read them, please try to apply them to events in your own life. There may be readers who have even had to deal with the arrest and incarceration of the person who hurt you or your loved one. Others will only see in the list, those aspects of personal relationships that were hurt by abandonment or betrayal or other inter-personal issues. But each of the following are basic aspects of forgiving.

This is heavy heavy stuff, but it can lighten the load and it definitely leads to healing.

But then there are times when you hear: “Move on, move on,” and you just can’t ! You’re stuck. Do the words get even come to mind? Of course they do.

Smedes writes: “Vengeance is the only alternative to forgiving. It is, simply put, a passion to get even. We have been unfairly hurt. … The scales are unbalanced. The only way to balance them and get life back to normal is to inflict as much pain on our abuser as he inflicted on us…”

But we can’t ! We absolutely cannot. 

As Smedes writes, “…we are doomed to exchange wound for wound…pain for pain forever.” But when we stay away from vengeance and forgive, we are expressing our true and best nature.

Smedes: “..forgiving works on both sides of the street. It is a reciprocity. We do ourselves good only when we wish good for the other. And we do the other person good only after we have healed ourselves. Forgiving has to be both ego-centered and other-centered. Otherwise it cannot work.”  

(At this point, I suggest you read the above sentences again! POWERFUL. 

Finally, Smedes and others would conclude that forgiving is a journey. (and right now I am feeling it can be a rather long journey.)

Like all things in life, there are stages: the initial pain, the anger that pain brings, the utter change in a relationship because of the pain, the relapses—one day the pain is light, the next it again hits like a brick—and the need for help from a friend or counselor.

One comforting concept is Smedes approval of anger. He breaks it down this way:      

“The enemy of forgiving is hate, not anger. Anger is aimed at what persons do. Hate is aimed at persons. Anger keeps bad things from happening to you again. Hate wants bad things to happen to him or her. Anger is the positive power that pushes us toward justice. Hate is the negative force that pushes us toward vengeance. Anger is one of love’s good servants. Hate serves nobody well.

So if you get angry when you remember what he or she did to you, it does not mean that you have not forgiven him or her. It only means that you get mad when people do bad things to you.”

RICHARD ROHR: PRIEST, AUTHOR and THINKER 

Rohr’s words are words to remember: “Forgiveness is a decision, but making that decision doesn’t override the emotional residue that often takes much longer to release. That feeling of wanting revenge or wanting to assert your rightness or your victimhood—depending on the depth of your wounding—can take days, weeks, months and even years to dissipate. On certain days, when you’re in a down mood, your psyche will want to grab onto that hurt. You have to go through that necessary period of feeling half dead, half angry, half in denial—this is the liminal space in which we grow…”

Many of us live in liminal space–the space of unknowing. It’s the desert and we desire the green land with flowing water. But moving through that space can heal us and as Rohr says–we grow!!  

That might be the very reason we are challenged by our neighbors, by our very living, so that we can experience the pain of hurt and eventually know the peace of forgiving.