Forgiveness

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude."

Indeed, we practice forgiveness with remarkable regularity -- probably many times over the course of each day. Your child spills his milk at the breakfast table, and you clean up the mess and say, "That's OK, honey. I'll get you some more milk." You get up in the morning and discover your spouse has left the refrigerator door open -- yet another time. You sigh, maybe shake your head, and -- in a silent act of forgiveness -- shut the refrigerator door. Your teenager calls you late in the evening with the news she has wrecked the family car. And so you nervously ask if she is OK and where she is, and go and pick her up, forgiving her along the way as you recall being forgiven in the same manner by your own parents.

Jesus' awareness of the very common, everyday occurrence of forgiving others is reflected in his answer to Peter's question, "How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus tells him. "Not seven times, ... but 77 times."

But what about those harder to forgive incidents -- those times when you have been wronged by someone in ways that have caused pain and suffering to you and maybe to those you love? It is much harder to forgive really serious transgressions.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells this story: "A woman in my congregation came to see me. She was a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She said to me, 'Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he's living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?' I answered her, 'I'm not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn't; it was mean and selfish. I'm asking you to forgive because he doesn't deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter, angry woman. By holding on to that resentment, you are not hurting him, but you are hurting yourself."

It has been said that unforgiveness is the poison we drink expecting someone else to die. When it comes down to it, the act of forgiveness is far more important for the well-being of the forgiver than it can ever be for the forgiven. Those to whom we are offering our forgiveness might or might not care about being forgiven. I would guess most of the people we need to forgive probably don't think they have done anything for which they need to be forgiven. I think Jesus was urging Peter to forgive the person who had sinned against him 77 times not because the transgressor wanted or needed Peter's forgiveness, but because Peter still needed to forgive.

We can be imprisoned by our own unwillingness to forgive others. Forgiveness can offer you a way out, liberation from a prison of your own making.

My first marriage ended in divorce. My wife and I separated when our son and daughter were very young, and the long separation and ultimate parting was filled with hurt and anger. Although I could intellectually recognize that both my wife and I played a role in the failure of the marriage, for me, true forgiveness remained elusive for many years.

Long after my anger subsided, long after my desire to blame anyone else lessened, long after my resentment faded, there remained an image of which I could not let go -- an image of what might have been. I had imagined our marriage would last forever; we would raise our children in a happy home, and eventually share the joy of grandkids. I couldn't let go of that vision.

Although I was more involved in the lives of my children than most fathers in unbroken homes, my dream of a family hadn't worked out like I had planned it. And so, I couldn't really forgive.

Forgiveness -- when it ultimately took shape -- didn't arrive as a single magical moment. It took place over time, as I began to live a new life and to let go of the old one. And it is only in retrospect that I began to understand the wisdom behind the idea that forgiveness is really a letting go of the hope that the past can be changed. It's a letting go of an old story of who you might have been if circumstances had been different. It's letting go of a mental picture of what life might have been like if things had worked out differently. Forgiveness allows you to live fully into the life you have been given, embracing who you are now, without clinging to an imagined ideal of how a different path might have looked.

Forgive 77 times, Jesus said. I think it me took more than that. I think forgiveness is more a spiritual practice rather than a moment of epiphany. We practice forgiving in the small, everyday ways, so when opportunities for larger acts of forgiveness arise, we have already strengthened the forgiveness muscle and we can bring it into play. But even then, we are seldom able to forgive in an instant. It takes time.

When the image of "what could have been" arises -- had we not been wronged by another -- the spiritual practice is to gently let go of that image and return to the present. Forgiveness happens as we learn to replace the memory of the imagined past, with gratitude for what we have now. Forgiveness allows us to fully occupy this space, this place we have been given, rather than dwelling on a past we thought we wanted.

And each time the memory -- the unrealized image of what we imagined our future would be like -- comes to mind, we get another opportunity to practice letting go and returning to where we are.