The Long Road to Forgiveness

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Humans will, no doubt, debate this issue until the end of time: when to hold other people accountable, even punishable, for their offenses, and when to move toward acceptance and tolerance. There is nothing about genuine forgiveness that precludes holding people accountable if we have that power. Nor does forgiveness necessarily include restoration of the perpetrator to a place in our daily life. I would be highly suspicious of a marital partner who rushed to forgive an infidelity without wanting to understand both partners' accountability for the breach. And it would be outrageous to push a traumatized client back into a relationship with an abusive parent. Forgiveness is not about being blind or stupid.

I spoke again the other day with my ex-husband. I had the feeling of listening in two directions: inward, toward my own reactivity, and outward, to what he was telling me about a move to the ocean. I made a place for hearing him, letting it all leap through me, as a diver might receive the cool electricity of the water, a strange gift, a blue baptism into aliveness.

To forgive means, literally, to give up—to give up hatred, revenge, punishment, hard payment of a hard debt. In struggling to forgive someone, our motive is to move our lives past bitter obsession.

Regrettably, forgiveness is not necessarily about justice. The murderer may be justly condemned, but the grieving family doesn't always forgive. Nor is forgiveness otherworldly acceptance of what must be. We all know injured people who push forward in their lives without struggling with forgiveness. Ex-partners remarry, even prosper, but can stay as bitter toward each other as if the split had happened yesterday. In contrast to justice and acceptance, forgiveness is not only the recovery of our spirit, but also the enlargement of that spirit—somehow, some way—to imagine the humanity of the injuring person. And why would we want that?

In a great injury, something is broken, psychologically or spiritually. The break not only erodes our sense of living in a fair world, corrupts our experience of our own worth, and fragments our control over our own lives and emotions; it also fundamentally damages our faith in the worthiness of others. It is that loss of the other that we absorb, and somehow transform, in forgiveness.

Last year I heard a radio interviewer ask a minister why there is evil in the world, why people do terrible things to one another. He said he didn't have a satisfactory answer, but he thought that the fact that we suffer at the hands of others keeps us aware that we are not solitary, that we cannot be indifferent to the conditions that make people mean or desperate enough to harm.

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