Forgiveness

Someone recently accused me of being unable to forgive, despite having known me for many years and having seen me forgive several people.  The authorities of my childhood parish also accused me of an inability to forgive.  Both parties are correct in one sense: they demanded immediate forgiveness on command, which I can not do.

Forgiveness is not an easy thing to define, it is more than simply saying "it's ok" when someone has caused harm.  It involves releasing resentment, moving on both as an individual and as a relationship from an incident, letting go of hurt.  One can forgive another without ever speaking to the transgressor: forgiving someone who's hurt you doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to resume a relationship.  It's also possible to forgive someone who's died!

Functioning as an individual and as a member of a community is eased through forgiveness.  The act, which is an almost entirely introverted event with fuzzy boundaries, ameliorates harmony both internally and communally.  Forgiveness has been such a prominent religious concept because religious communities involve so much intangible vulnerability between participants.  Both forgiveness and spirituality exist on the line between logic and emotion.

Time between the hurtful occurrence and forgiveness (whether of the self or of the transgressor) is immeasurable.  The idea of needing to forgive in order to harmonize the self and the community is very old, and many ancient ritualistic religions involved going through some kind of ceremony in order to bring about forgiveness.  Some of these traditions also argued that to die without having forgiven would cause disaster: ritual fixed this dangerous chance.  Catholicism makes the same point, but with intimidation rather than facilitation*.  The line of the Our Father "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" meaning, at least as it was posed to me, that if you don't forgive everyone right away then God has no reason to forgive you so you've doomed yourself to Hell if Jesus could forgive while on the Cross what's stopping you?!?

No matter who demands forgiveness on command, the forgiveness itself is insincere when done through intimidation or fear.  The fault of the insincerity is on the pressuring party, not the forgiver.  I was already in the process of forgiving the person mentioned at the beginning of this post and the accusation of my inability only hindered the process.  Thinking and writing about the nature of forgiveness is a step in resuming that process, which has an unknowable duration.

* It may seem logically inconsistent to many that I would return to the very Church that hurt me so much.  Seeking out a parish of compassion and re-establishing myself as a practicing (keyword: PRACTICING.  Practice, not doctrine.) Catholic are steps in my forgiving of the Church.  By attending Sunday Mass and studying Catholicism, I'm harmonizing myself both as a spiritual individual and as a very tentative, doubting member of a community.

Forgiveness

Going to a strict Catholic school is precisely what prevented me from understanding what forgiveness means for many years. Forgiveness, to that parish, was to be given as stingily as possible and with many reminders for years, "I was able to forgive you, so you should do X for me." The concept of forgiveness was associated with Christianity, which I thought was that school, so I rejected the entire concept up until my senior year of high school. Then I has a Jesuit priest as a teacher and he showed me that it is possible to be religious and even a clergyman as well as compassionate, understanding, and open. He and a close friend of mine taught me about forgiveness:

You've probably gotten a wound on your hand or something at some point and had to change the way you did things while it healed. It scabs over eventually and your new patterns become habit. Then you realize, maybe even weeks later, that the wound is completely healed and you can go back to doing what you used to do (which seems foreign, now). There may or may not be a scar, which may or may not fade. That's what forgiveness is and it can take any amount of time or it might never come about at all. It can also be chosen and scheduled like a surgical procedure or physical therapy. And it doesn't come easily and may require an additional healing period.

The final piece these two wise people let me know was that you don't have to actually let the person know you've forgiven z, though it may show through in your behavior if you're still in contact. It's entirely possible to say to someone, "I've forgiven you for what you did, but I still want no contact with you."

There are some people I'll never be able to forgive and some people I won't be able to forgive until they die. There's the whole thing about this time of year being the forgiving season and other such garble...enough holidays have been ruined by these people and now that I'm away from them, I don't want another holiday brought down by thinking about them.