If forgiveness is divine, as Alexander Pope once wrote it was, then it is an aspect of the religious that we are called on to imitate, as much for our own good as for that of others.
When we are wounded by someone's thoughtlessness, rejection or deliberate cruelty, we have two options before us: We can try to get even or pretend that we haven't been hurt. The other option is to forgive.
Newspaper Agony Aunt Abigail Van Buren of "Dear Abby" fame once asked women readers if any of them had forgiven an unfaithful husband and had since had a happy marriage. The response was overwhelming. One woman wrote: "What a grand and glorious thing it is to rise above the pain." Others admitted that it wasn't easy to forgive, but they consistently recommended "the rewards of forgiveness, the futility of harbouring a grudge" had made them do the unthinkable, that is, to forgive.
When we are wounded by someone's thoughtlessness, rejection or deliberate cruelty, we have two options before us: We can try to get even or pretend that we haven't been hurt. The other option is to forgive.
Newspaper Agony Aunt Abigail Van Buren of "Dear Abby" fame once asked women readers if any of them had forgiven an unfaithful husband and had since had a happy marriage. The response was overwhelming. One woman wrote: "What a grand and glorious thing it is to rise above the pain." Others admitted that it wasn't easy to forgive, but they consistently recommended "the rewards of forgiveness, the futility of harbouring a grudge" had made them do the unthinkable, that is, to forgive.
The most popular misconception about forgiveness is that when we forgive, we forget. Most of the time, we don't forget. The woman who forgives her husband's philandering is not asked to forget his weakness, but rather not to let the negative behaviour direct their lives and stand in the way of building emotional bridges.
Try forgiving a friend who betrays your confidence, or a co-worker who lies about you. When the real effort of forgiveness takes place, it's not easy at all; instinct urges us to pay back in kind. There is usually a pause between the anguish and the time when trust and love can take root again. Forgiveness is part of a process that begins with suffering and ends, as its final and long-range goal, with the event of reconciliation. It works only when we become aware of the depths and causes of the anger burning in us so that we can forgive wholeheartedly and ensure an enduring peace. A particularly helpful exercise in the process of forgiveness is to try to understand the one who is wounding us as a person, and not just as the cause of our pain.
Forgiveness should come from within, and not be a mere show of magnanimity; it should help the forgiver in all future dealings with the person who is forgiven.
A declaration of forgiveness may appear as naive, weak, utopian - sometimes even outrageous. Indeed, those were the sentiments of many members of theDexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama, USA. The parishioners had endured harassments, threats, beatings and even house bombings. They gathered in 1955 at Dexter for guidance from their pastor, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. His message was simple: When Jesus said, "Love your enemy, he meant every word of it. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity."
We cannot escape from this prison of birth and death until we have cleared our karmic account; Jesus said we should ask forgiveness of those we have wronged, while we are still living in this world.
Forgiveness depends on the situation and the people involved. In the end, all forgivers do the same thing: they restore self-worth to the offender, they cancel a debt; they experience such peace that they lose the urge to retaliate, and live as freer persons, unshackled by the weight of the suffering.
