We all know that forgiveness can be very hard. We have all experienced the struggle at one point or another in our lives. The pain we bear from being hurt might be too great to let go of the deep resentment we feel. Or we might fear that if we forgive, the person who hurt us will not get their comeuppance. Or we might think that our honor or status requires that we take vengeance. Indeed, our culture has many famous revenge stories, both classics, like the play Hamlet, or in pop culture, like the Kill Bill movies. When we read or watch such stories, we might feel a sense of satisfaction as the protagonist destroys the villain, rather than offering forgiveness. But the problem is that the lack of forgiveness is self-destructive.
Refusing to forgive has been described as taking poison and hoping that the other person will die. Or as locking ourselves into a cage and throwing away the key. For example, if someone hurt me badly ten years ago and I am still unwilling to forgive, what is happening in me? The person who hurt me still has power over me. He still has control over my thoughts, my feelings, my sense of energy, and to some extent even my actions. As long as I refuse to forgive, I am not my own person. I am still subject to the one who hurt me. He may not even remember my existence, but I am still bound by him in various ways.
Lack of forgiveness can also lead us to deeply self-sabotaging actions. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey discusses various resolutions to problems, involving winning or losing, presenting a win-win resolution as the ideal. Among the various possible outcomes, he reflects on the possibility of a lose-lose situation, when we not only cause the other party to lose, but we lose ourselves as well. That is the type of action that revenge can drive us to. If we are consumed with anger and resentment, we can easily make choices that destroy our own lives, one way or another, as we seek to cause vengeful harm to the one who hurt us.
By contrast, if I forgive, if I let go of the anger, the resentment, the drive for vengeance, then I free myself from the control of the one who hurt me. My thoughts and feelings are no longer bound by him. I can do what I want to do with my life, without thinking about him. Forgiveness is the ultimate liberation.
The freeing effect of forgiveness can be illustrated by two stories, one fictional and one all too real. The first one is the live action remake of Cinderella by Disney, released in 2015. In the movie, we see Cinderella being abused by her stepmom and stepsisters, as the story goes. At the end, when Cinderella has met her prince and is driving away in a carriage to her new life, she turns back to her abusive step family and says: "I forgive you." By doing so, she frees herself from their control. Without forgiving, she could live the rest of her life angry and bitter, her mind bent on terrible revenge. But by forgiving, she wipes the slate clean and can now truly enjoy the new courtly life that she is blessed with.
A much more tragic story, that was all two real, involved a horrific school shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. A deranged man attacked a one-room Amish school and killed five girls, before turning his weapon on himself. Such an unspeakable tragedy could have ripped the community apart for generations to come. But the Amish decided to respond with forgiveness. They forgave the murderer and even comforted his family. They even raised money to help the widow of the gunman. Through their attitude and actions of forgiveness, they transcended the tragedy and brought Christ's healing love into the horrific situation.
However, one objection to the idea of forgiveness can be the question of dealing with abusive behavior. If, the objection goes, I forgive someone who has been abusive toward me, do I not open myself up to further abuse in the future? The answer is that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Forgiveness is about how I think of the other person. Reconciliation is about how I interact with him. I can forgive an abusive person in my heart and still put conditions on full reconciliation, such as the discontinuation of the abuse or restitution for prior harm.
But, we might ask, what if we are simply unable to forgive? What if we are so hurt that we cannot even begin to entertain thoughts of forgiveness? To begin, we are not expected to forgive through our own strength. We need God's grace to forgive. Thus, forgiveness needs to be grounded in prayer. If we cannot even begin to forgive, we can pray for the grace of being able to forgive and the grace of wanting to forgive.
We also see in the Gospel Reading for this Sunday that if we refuse to forgive others, we close ourselves off from God's forgiveness as well. If we are holding onto anger, bitterness, and resentment, if we are consumed with vengeful thoughts, we have no room in our hearts to accept God's love. Our ability to experience God's forgiveness is contingent on our willingness to forgive others.
Our ability to experience God's forgiveness is also dependent on our willingness to forgive ourselves. On the one hand, we need to admit that we are sinners and that we are fallen. On the other hand, we need to believe that God truly does forgive us. If we have confessed our sins through the Sacrament of Penance and have received absolution, we need to believe that God has truly forgiven us. We should learn from our sins and make the necessary reparations. But we should not be beating ourselves up for sins that God has already forgiven.
As we have seen, forgiving others sets us free in so many ways. Forgiveness also has a powerful societal dimension. Most of history has been characterized by a cycle of violence. One group does something evil to another, and that group responds with evil, and so forth and so forth. But when we forgive, we stop the cycle of violence. We refuse to let it continue. Thus, forgiveness stops generational evil and helps to usher in the peace of Christ.
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The readings for Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
Sirach 27:30—28:7
Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12
Romans 14:7-9
Matthew 18:21-35
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Image Credit: Amish horse and buggy warning signs in Cecilton, Cecil County, Maryland, by Bohemian Baltimore, from Wikimedia Commons.
