By: Reham Essam
One of God’s better jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality. And it comforts us little to know that not even God can undo what has been done.
The remedy has existed since the first wrong done one human being by another. Yet, people still punish themselves with pains of a past long gone. Or punish others in a futile passion to get revenge. Tribes slaughter tribes, ethnic groups assault other ethnic groups, and gangs shoot up other gangs. Couples break their marriages and divide their families into weeping pieces. Why do people surrender their tomorrows to the unfair pain of their yesterdays? The total answer lies buried somewhere in our primitive need to protect our pride, in our trembling fear of feeling weak, and in our moral instincts for justice, all mingled together as a raw passion to see he who wounded us wounded in equal measure. But the answer is also tangled in a web of misunderstandings about forgiveness itself.
What We Do When We Forgive
The Three Stages
Jennifer Klein was the kind of woman you could count on to reach out to a person in trouble. For instance, when Archie, her husband of twelve childless years, came home with a story about this poor kid named Lennie he know at the shop and how her parents had tossed her out in the street, he sparked Jennifer’s inner urge to seek and to save the lost. Without so much as looking up, she said “We’ve got an extra room; maybe we can do her some good. Why don’t you bring her here?” So he did.
Lennie was only seventeen, care and nurture were what the child needed—unconditional love if you will―and Jennifer felt that she had a calling to give them. Meanwhile, she never worried for a minute about leaving a mere child like Lennie hanging around the house alone with Archie. Two months after Lennie had moved in, Jennifer strained her thigh while she worked out at her fitness center and came home a half hour earlier than she said she would. When she got there, she found Archie and the castaway in the family room in a compromising prone position. Jennifer felt she had been mugged inside her soul by a two-ton thug. Is this what a person gets for showing some-body a little tender mercy?
Jennifer wasted no time. She found herself an apartment and left Archie the very next day. Now, two years later, her spirit is still aching and wracked in pain. She still has a hankering to kill the two of them. Somebody had told Jennifer that if she forgave Archie she would put the episode behind her, forget the whole thing, go back to him, accept who he is, and get on with their life together. As if nothing ever happened. But this sounded phony to Jennifer, and she knew she could not do it anyway. “Are you supposed to swallow hard, let him off the hook, and pretend the whole thing never happened? If that is what forgiving is about, “Jennifer said, “I would rather buy a gun and shoot them both.” When we forgive someone, we all perform the same basic transformation inside our inner selves. Each person’s healing follows the same basic script. This is why, for all of us, no matter how badly we have been wronged. Each of us naturally puts their special spin on the inner process of forgiving the wrong, and each of us makes his own decision about how to relate to someone after forgiving.
Rediscover the Humanity of the person who hurt us
80%of what we see lies behind our eyes. If this is true, 80% of what we see when we look at a person who recently wronged and deeply wounded us must lie behind our eyes in the memory of our pain. We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible. We say stuff like, “He is nothing but a cheat.” He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong. Forgiving our enemy doesn’t turn him into a close friend or a promising husband or a trustworthy partner. We do not diminish the wrongness of what he did to us. We do not blind ourselves to the reality that he is perfectly capable of doing it again. But we take him back into our private world as a person who shares our faulty humanity, bruised like us, faulty like us, still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us. We begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate without shadows of his soul.
Surrendering Our Right to Get Even
We want our enemy to suffer, but we also want him to know that he is suffering only because of what he did to us. We don’t want him to admit he made a mistake, flip an apology in our direction like a fifty-cent gratuity, and go on as if he had done nothing worse than burping before dessert. But take care when you give up vengeance; make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine. As Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secured when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction.
Revising Our Feelings
Once we have rediscovered our offender’s humanity and given up our right to enjoy getting even, we begin to feel new feelings toward him personally. We feel him differently after we see him differently.
What we felt before was simple hate. Whether passive or aggressive hate, our hurt left us calling heaven to make bad things to them. But if we feel any stirrings of benevolence inside us, any hint that it will be all right with us if some modest bit of good fortune comes our enemy’s way, we can be sure that we are teamed with God in a modest miracle of healing.
The three stages of the art of forgiving―restoring humanity to the person who wronged us, surrendering our right to get even, and beginning to bless the person we forgive―are the fundamentals of the healing process.
There are general rules to know what to forgive and what not to forgive
We forgive persons
We can only forgive persons. But the link between persons and their organizations can be very close. Forgiving is for persons so when corporations use their impersonal powers to our hurt and sometimes our ruin, and we don’t have someone to blame, we should let it just go.
We forgive persons for what they do, not for what they are
They do not wrong us by being untrustworthy; they wrong us by betraying our trust. It’s too hard to forgive people for what they are, but let us not make it harder than it is. It’s always better to narrow things down to something specific.
We forgive people who wound us seriously
We may couldn’t get back to the things we lost by forgiving someone, forgiveness won’t pay the bills, the pain that forgiving can heal is the pain of a wounded memory. If these pains of spirit ever get healed, you will be in better condition to control your impulses to trust people too soon.
We forgive people for wronging us
Forgiving is not meant for every pain people cause us. When we forgive people for things that don’t need forgiving we dilute the power, spoil the beauty, and interrupt the healing of forgiveness. When we forgive the things forgiving is for, we copy God’s own art.
Forgiving doesn’t mean Reunion
There are three reasons why the popular notion that forgiving and reunion always go together is a major misconception:
• Forgiving happens inside the person who does it
• Forgiving is not about reunion
• Forgiving does not obligate us to go back
Forgiving is completed in the mind of the person who forgives. When we forgive we see the person who wounded us as a fellow human being worthy of our love, and in that sense we reconcile ourselves to him. If we have forgiven, we have removed one obstacle to reunion―the wall of our own bitterness. Whether we heal the relationship depends pretty much on the forgiven person.
Forgiving Doesn’t mean Restoring
All of our human idols fall, sooner or later. Some of them repent. Some of those who repent get forgiven. But should we give them their old jobs back? It is all depends.
Easy forgivers sometimes get confused about the difference between forgiving someone and restoring that person to the place he held before he did whatever it was that he needed to be forgiven for. Their confusion grows out of the love and loyalty they had for him before his lapse. They felt such a special attachment to him, felt that his fall somehow diminished them, that they need―for their own sakes as much as for his―to see him back in his trusted slot again. If we keep all these things―forgiving and judgment and good sense― in their right places, we can let the miracle of forgiving do its own proper work of healing and leave the restoration of the offender to other practical considerations.
Who Can Do It?
In order to qualify for forgiving we need only to meet three requirements, it is not an easy job but this is just the license to practice
• We need to bear the wounds ourselves
• We need to know we have been wronged
• We need to have an inner push to forgive
Why We Forgive?
The Case Against Forgiving
Sometimes forgiving seems like exactly the wrong thing, even a bad thing, to do. In fact there are profound thinkers who say that― as a regular way to deal with monsters that do very bad things to people―forgiving can be precisely the wrong thing to do. Their objection is fiercely moral. It is not that forgiving is a foolish thing to do. It is that forgiving bad people can be morally wrong. One can’t and should not go around happily killing and torturing and then, when the moment has come, simply ask and receive forgiving.
Some critics indicate some cases that work against forgiving
• No one has a right to forgive someone unless he himself had been injured by the person.
• The crime was too horrible to be forgiven by anyone.
• It is dishonest. In the name of a cruel kindness, it denies reality. The reality is that someone wronged another human being. We will sweep it all under the magic carpet called forgiving and pretend it never happened.
• It contradicts human nature. Our nature is to get even. Forgiving may be divine, but what is natural to human beings is to pin the abusers of the world to the floor and make them pay.
In Defense Of Forgiving
We know the charges critics have leveled against forgiving― that forgiving makes things unfair, that it is dishonest, and that it goes against human nature. But forgiving offers the best hope of creating a new fairness out of past unfairness. The challenge that it is dishonest by saying that forgiving cannot happen without severe truthfulness. And to the charge that forgiving goes against the human nature, we can say forgiving follows the impulses of our true and better natures.
There are some stubborn distortions of the meaning of forgiving, we should clear up before answering those critics:
• Forgiving someone who did us wrong does not mean that we tolerate the wrong he did.
• Forgiving does not mean that we want to forget what happened.
• Forgiving does not mean that we excuse the person who did it.
• Forgiving does not mean that we take the edge off the evil of what was done to us.
• Forgiving does not mean that we invite someone who hurt us once to hurt us again.
Moving on from assumptions, we need to defend forgiving against the explicit criticisms that have been mentioned.
• Forgiving Is Fair: It is the only way for any fairness to rise from the ashes of unfairness.
• The Only Alternative To Forgiving Perpetuates Unfairness: Vengeance is the only alternative to forgiving.
• Forgiving Gives Future Fairness A Chance: It always opens the future to better possibilities.
• Forgiving is a severe honesty: Anyone can lie about forgiving, but you needn’t to prove it to anybody but yourself.
• Forgiving doesn’t falsify reality: You don’t act like nothing happened; you are healing the wounds of a world hacked apart by memories of wounds and wrongs we know we did not deserve.
Forgiving tolerates no disguising, no denying, no diminishing, and no ignoring of what happened.
• Forgiving is honest about the responsibility of the person who committed the wrong
• Forgiving is honest about the accountability of the person who did it
• Forgiving is honest about the price of any reunion
• Forgiving is honest about the person who wounded us
• Forgiving requires honesty with ourselves
• Forgiving is honest about future possibilities
In view of all these facts about forgiving, there is never any real forgiving at all unless it first be honest. Beyond that, we get ourselves free from the trap of persistent and unfair pain. It’s the only way for a victim to be fair to themselves.
Because It Suits Us
Some people believe that we do only the things we really want to do. They believe we do what we do because it will reward us more than if we do something else. Increase our pleasure and avoid our pain―this is the motivation for all human action.
We end up doing what we think will give us more pleasure and less pain, but this is not true. We sometimes do the right thing even if we know that it will cost us a lot of pain. We do what is right simply because we believe it is right. You can even say that the quality of our lives is measured by our willingness to do the right thing― even when we know it will make us pay dearly.
On the other hand, somethings are just not meant to be done simply because it is our duty to do them. Some things are meant to be done only because we want to do them. Some can be done for no other reason. If we are not led to do them by our own inner impulses, they won’t get done at all. Or at least they will not get done well. Forgiving is one of these things. We forgive when we discover that we really want to forgive, and we want to forgive when we want to heal ourselves from the hangover of a wounded past.
For Our Own Sakes
When we forgive we become our own good physician and the remedy we use percolates from warm, beating heart of the universe. We are working with the healing energy of the creator himself. This is why forgiveness does its first good work inside us, and wishing the other person well is precisely what we do when we forgive.
We Only Forgive The Ones We Blames
If we dare not judge, we dare not forgive. We can blame somebody and refuse to forgive him. But we cannot forgive him if we dare not blame him. Blame not, forgive not, and there’s the end of it. The anti-blame people are victims of certain fallacies that are no less fallacious for being attractive to the relativists of our age. We want to run through few of them and explain why they are balderdash.
The “Who Am I to Judge?” Fallacy
If this fallacy were true, nobody should ever blame anybody. But it is not true, and for obvious reasons. When we blame wrongdoers for doing wrong, we are only holding them accountable on earth for one piece of bad action. We size up peoples actions the best we can and to assign responsibility for them. So, the imperfect people have not only the right but an obligation to blame people.
The Blame-Share Fallacy
Anyone who shares responsibility for what went wrong forfeits their right to blame the person who did it. The truth is that we must blame people who do wrong even if we helped make the wrong possible. But humble blaming is still blaming. And humble blaming leads to humble forgiving.
The “To Understand All Is to Forgive All” Fallacy
We forgive someone when we cannot understand why he did. If we understand we will keep creating excuses, and we don’t need to forgive him because we only forgive the ones we blame.
The Fatalist Fallacy
Blaming people for doing whatever bad things they do, does not mean we think everyone is totally responsible for everything they do. Nor does it mean that we think all people are equally responsible. Whatever evil influences were buzzing around them or inside them when they did the bad things, they still had the power not to do them. Therefore we blame them. And only then, if we are so inclined, do we forgive them. All we need to do is hold on to a belief that, in spite of all the influences on us, we do have power to act on our own initiative, we do not have to do what we do, and to that extent we are accountable for what we do. We should remember that blaming a person who wronged us is one of the better compliments we can ever pay her.
If what they did wounded and wronged you personally, you blame them. Only then do you consider forgiving them. You must remember that they might be wrong, and it always possible that they might be wholly innocent. So let no one rush to blame. Therefore, the point is only that forgiving always comes with blame attached. If we dare not blame, we dare not forgive. Forgiving is for people who know their own faults but who recognize a wrong and dare to name it when they feel it done to them and have the wisdom and grace to forgive it.
Forgiving People Who Don’t Say They Are Sorry
There are strong arguments against forgiving an unrepentant enemy, and we respect them even though we are not persuaded by them. We can count five plausible reasons not to forgive people who do not say they are sorry.
• If a person who wrongs us does not repent, he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven: Forgiving flows from grace―unearned, undeserved favor.
• Forgiving someone who does not repent is just too hard to do: It is a no-lose opportunity, difficult to do but with a harvest of healing.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is not fair to ourselves: Yes, but we are fair to ourselves when we prolong a bitterness that is shriveling our spirits.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is dangerous; If he feels no sorrow for what he did, he is likely to do it again: When we forgive, we don’t forget, and we do not intend to let it happen again.
• The Bible says that we have to repent before we can get forgiven:
A person who wrongs God should not expect God to forgive him unless he is really sorry.
When people want to be forgiven by God, they want to be reunited with him at the same time, but God want reunion with integrity.
Repentance is nothing but simple honesty about what we did to break our connection with God. This is why a person cannot expect to be forgiven by God unless he first repents. On the other side, the person who hurt us should not be the person who decides whether or when we should recover from the pain he brought us. A wounded person should no put their future happiness in the hands of the person who made them miserable.
Forgiving Ourselves
Forgiving takes two―someone who forgives and someone who gets forgiven, and there is a moral problem to hurt someone and forgive myself, I suggest we take on these four problems, one at a time.
• Does it make sense to forgive ourselves?
We are ripped apart inside, and forgiving ourselves is the only way we heal the split.
• Who gives us the right to forgive ourselves?
Only victims have a right to forgive. Self-forgiveness license comes from two authorities the victim and God.
• What do we forgive ourselves for?
We forgive ourselves for what we did, not for what we are
We forgive ourselves for specific things we did
We forgive ourselves for wrongful things that we deserve blame for doing
We forgive ourselves for what we blame ourselves for
We forgive ourselves for what we feel forgiven for
• How can we go about forgiving ourselves?
We tell it to ourselves
We repeat it
We keep it to ourselves
We act like it even if we don’t talk about it
We do something extravagant
Forgiving God
We sometimes have question of how God carries on when people are wronged and what we should do about him when things go badly wrong with us whether it might ever make sense to forgive God of unfair wounds. But when we stop, we will see that pain is God’s way of getting us to listen to him, when we forget to keep tuned in to God. We get to be better persons for having felt the bad pain. God always has a good purpose for allowing unfair pain to happen to us.
How God Forgives
God invented forgiving as a remedy for a past that not even he could change and not even he could forget. His way of forgiving is the model for our forgiving. Forgive each other the way God forgives us, because we forgive for our own sake. We forgive as we rediscover the person behind the offense, as we surrender our right to revenge, and as we wish good things for the person who did bad things to us, just as father deal with his son mercifully, we can heal our own spirits, alone, and get the first benefit of forgiving, we can open ourselves to the possibilities of reunion. But when it comes to the happy endings, we can never be sure. There is something unfinished about forgiving someone who does not come back to you.
Owning Our Pain
Forgiving is a remedy for pain, but not for anybody else’s pain, just our own. But no pain is really our pain until we own it; we own something when we take personal responsibility and give a name to our feelings.
We begin to take responsibility for our pain when we listen to its question. We begin to heal our pain when we give the right answer. We won’t take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain; we need to admit we feel it.
Taking our Time
We worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse. Shock may be a temporary pain-blocker, but forgiveness within shock or using forgiveness as shield against the pain that is sure will come later. People who forgives to avoid conformation, because they think it is vulgar, so unpleasant, to escape the ugly scene. However, we should worry most about those who resort to fast forgiving as a trick to gain advantage. Quickly done to gain advantage, but here forgiveness is the smelliest if dirty tricks. People who have badly wounded should give themselves space and time to start forgiving through the following:
• Think of what actually happened
• Evaluate what is behind the scenes
• Talk to a friend or counselor
• Feel and take time to be alone without any distractions and put a name on what they feel
• Pray, be honest , and admit that they need help
Postponements have made it severely hard. There is a right moment to forgive, we can’t predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives. Consequently, the unscientific advice here is not to do it too quickly, but don’t wait too long; only the wounded person who can pinpoint that right moment to forgive.
We Don’t Have To Say So
It’s a happy ending too, but we shouldn’t suppose that we must tell. Silent forgiving can be just as real and just as effective as spoken forgiving. Sometimes good intentions badly botched, so it is better to keep quiet. There are some tips if you want to share the good news, but it all depends on the situation and the person, if you are not totally ready, forget about them.
• Take your time
• Size up the risk
• Wait for a signal
• Do it sideways
• Begin at the end
• Don’t claim holy motives
• Improvise
• Make it short
• Keep it light
• Give the other person time
These strategies for those who want to initiate the conversation on their own. If the other person comes to you with sorrow, you don’t need any strategy just follow your heart and you will take the perfect decision if you are honest, but remember it is always good to forgive and never bad to say so. But if the response is not what you hoped for, you can go home and enjoy our healing in private.
How Often?
As Often As We Need To
There are three fundamental facts of forgiving:
• Forgiving is not obligation.
• Forgiving is not about letting people get away with something.
• Forgiving is not about reunion with people who are hurting us.
Don’t make forgiving a matter of number, we should focus on healing our memories of a wound that someone’s wrong etched in our past. The right question is how many times we need to forgive. Forgiving is a gift not a duty, use the gift to set yourself free from the miserable past.
When We Are Not Sure We Have Done It
When you discover that you don’t like the person you thought you had forgiven anymore, and you start to wonder whether you have failed at forgiving just take it easy, and expect some relapses. Forgiving does not clear everything up. We need sometimes to wash the mirror of everything up, we need to wash the mirror of our memories, and we may need someone to lend us a sponge. It’s only slip on the way to success not a failure.
Forgive And Remember
Healed memory is not a deleted memory. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future, also the other dilemma created by combination of power and weakness, power of imagining the future and weakness of not controlling it. And the way to hope for a better future after a bad past is the way of forgiving.
• We remember the good parts of the bad past
• We remember the past with truth
• We remember with a new respect for ourselves
• We remember with sadness
• We remember without illusions
One way to regain hope is to choose the new way of remembering that comes with forgiving the wrongs of the pasts and don’t lose hope when the vision of tomorrow is clouded by the wrong of yesterday. It is a new path to change a bitter memory into a grateful memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory. We reflect light to our darkness, we open door for unseen future, and remind us how good it is to be healed.
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| The Art Of Forgiving: By: Lewis B. Smedes |
One of God’s better jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality. And it comforts us little to know that not even God can undo what has been done.
The remedy has existed since the first wrong done one human being by another. Yet, people still punish themselves with pains of a past long gone. Or punish others in a futile passion to get revenge. Tribes slaughter tribes, ethnic groups assault other ethnic groups, and gangs shoot up other gangs. Couples break their marriages and divide their families into weeping pieces. Why do people surrender their tomorrows to the unfair pain of their yesterdays? The total answer lies buried somewhere in our primitive need to protect our pride, in our trembling fear of feeling weak, and in our moral instincts for justice, all mingled together as a raw passion to see he who wounded us wounded in equal measure. But the answer is also tangled in a web of misunderstandings about forgiveness itself.
What We Do When We Forgive
The Three Stages
Jennifer Klein was the kind of woman you could count on to reach out to a person in trouble. For instance, when Archie, her husband of twelve childless years, came home with a story about this poor kid named Lennie he know at the shop and how her parents had tossed her out in the street, he sparked Jennifer’s inner urge to seek and to save the lost. Without so much as looking up, she said “We’ve got an extra room; maybe we can do her some good. Why don’t you bring her here?” So he did.
Lennie was only seventeen, care and nurture were what the child needed—unconditional love if you will―and Jennifer felt that she had a calling to give them. Meanwhile, she never worried for a minute about leaving a mere child like Lennie hanging around the house alone with Archie. Two months after Lennie had moved in, Jennifer strained her thigh while she worked out at her fitness center and came home a half hour earlier than she said she would. When she got there, she found Archie and the castaway in the family room in a compromising prone position. Jennifer felt she had been mugged inside her soul by a two-ton thug. Is this what a person gets for showing some-body a little tender mercy?
Jennifer wasted no time. She found herself an apartment and left Archie the very next day. Now, two years later, her spirit is still aching and wracked in pain. She still has a hankering to kill the two of them. Somebody had told Jennifer that if she forgave Archie she would put the episode behind her, forget the whole thing, go back to him, accept who he is, and get on with their life together. As if nothing ever happened. But this sounded phony to Jennifer, and she knew she could not do it anyway. “Are you supposed to swallow hard, let him off the hook, and pretend the whole thing never happened? If that is what forgiving is about, “Jennifer said, “I would rather buy a gun and shoot them both.” When we forgive someone, we all perform the same basic transformation inside our inner selves. Each person’s healing follows the same basic script. This is why, for all of us, no matter how badly we have been wronged. Each of us naturally puts their special spin on the inner process of forgiving the wrong, and each of us makes his own decision about how to relate to someone after forgiving.
Rediscover the Humanity of the person who hurt us
80%of what we see lies behind our eyes. If this is true, 80% of what we see when we look at a person who recently wronged and deeply wounded us must lie behind our eyes in the memory of our pain. We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible. We say stuff like, “He is nothing but a cheat.” He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong. Forgiving our enemy doesn’t turn him into a close friend or a promising husband or a trustworthy partner. We do not diminish the wrongness of what he did to us. We do not blind ourselves to the reality that he is perfectly capable of doing it again. But we take him back into our private world as a person who shares our faulty humanity, bruised like us, faulty like us, still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us. We begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate without shadows of his soul.
Surrendering Our Right to Get Even
We want our enemy to suffer, but we also want him to know that he is suffering only because of what he did to us. We don’t want him to admit he made a mistake, flip an apology in our direction like a fifty-cent gratuity, and go on as if he had done nothing worse than burping before dessert. But take care when you give up vengeance; make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine. As Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secured when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction.
Revising Our Feelings
Once we have rediscovered our offender’s humanity and given up our right to enjoy getting even, we begin to feel new feelings toward him personally. We feel him differently after we see him differently.
What we felt before was simple hate. Whether passive or aggressive hate, our hurt left us calling heaven to make bad things to them. But if we feel any stirrings of benevolence inside us, any hint that it will be all right with us if some modest bit of good fortune comes our enemy’s way, we can be sure that we are teamed with God in a modest miracle of healing.
The three stages of the art of forgiving―restoring humanity to the person who wronged us, surrendering our right to get even, and beginning to bless the person we forgive―are the fundamentals of the healing process.
There are general rules to know what to forgive and what not to forgive
We forgive persons
We can only forgive persons. But the link between persons and their organizations can be very close. Forgiving is for persons so when corporations use their impersonal powers to our hurt and sometimes our ruin, and we don’t have someone to blame, we should let it just go.
We forgive persons for what they do, not for what they are
They do not wrong us by being untrustworthy; they wrong us by betraying our trust. It’s too hard to forgive people for what they are, but let us not make it harder than it is. It’s always better to narrow things down to something specific.
We forgive people who wound us seriously
We may couldn’t get back to the things we lost by forgiving someone, forgiveness won’t pay the bills, the pain that forgiving can heal is the pain of a wounded memory. If these pains of spirit ever get healed, you will be in better condition to control your impulses to trust people too soon.
We forgive people for wronging us
Forgiving is not meant for every pain people cause us. When we forgive people for things that don’t need forgiving we dilute the power, spoil the beauty, and interrupt the healing of forgiveness. When we forgive the things forgiving is for, we copy God’s own art.
Forgiving doesn’t mean Reunion
There are three reasons why the popular notion that forgiving and reunion always go together is a major misconception:
• Forgiving happens inside the person who does it
• Forgiving is not about reunion
• Forgiving does not obligate us to go back
Forgiving is completed in the mind of the person who forgives. When we forgive we see the person who wounded us as a fellow human being worthy of our love, and in that sense we reconcile ourselves to him. If we have forgiven, we have removed one obstacle to reunion―the wall of our own bitterness. Whether we heal the relationship depends pretty much on the forgiven person.
Forgiving Doesn’t mean Restoring
All of our human idols fall, sooner or later. Some of them repent. Some of those who repent get forgiven. But should we give them their old jobs back? It is all depends.
Easy forgivers sometimes get confused about the difference between forgiving someone and restoring that person to the place he held before he did whatever it was that he needed to be forgiven for. Their confusion grows out of the love and loyalty they had for him before his lapse. They felt such a special attachment to him, felt that his fall somehow diminished them, that they need―for their own sakes as much as for his―to see him back in his trusted slot again. If we keep all these things―forgiving and judgment and good sense― in their right places, we can let the miracle of forgiving do its own proper work of healing and leave the restoration of the offender to other practical considerations.
Who Can Do It?
In order to qualify for forgiving we need only to meet three requirements, it is not an easy job but this is just the license to practice
• We need to bear the wounds ourselves
• We need to know we have been wronged
• We need to have an inner push to forgive
Why We Forgive?
The Case Against Forgiving
Sometimes forgiving seems like exactly the wrong thing, even a bad thing, to do. In fact there are profound thinkers who say that― as a regular way to deal with monsters that do very bad things to people―forgiving can be precisely the wrong thing to do. Their objection is fiercely moral. It is not that forgiving is a foolish thing to do. It is that forgiving bad people can be morally wrong. One can’t and should not go around happily killing and torturing and then, when the moment has come, simply ask and receive forgiving.
Some critics indicate some cases that work against forgiving
• No one has a right to forgive someone unless he himself had been injured by the person.
• The crime was too horrible to be forgiven by anyone.
• It is dishonest. In the name of a cruel kindness, it denies reality. The reality is that someone wronged another human being. We will sweep it all under the magic carpet called forgiving and pretend it never happened.
• It contradicts human nature. Our nature is to get even. Forgiving may be divine, but what is natural to human beings is to pin the abusers of the world to the floor and make them pay.
In Defense Of Forgiving
We know the charges critics have leveled against forgiving― that forgiving makes things unfair, that it is dishonest, and that it goes against human nature. But forgiving offers the best hope of creating a new fairness out of past unfairness. The challenge that it is dishonest by saying that forgiving cannot happen without severe truthfulness. And to the charge that forgiving goes against the human nature, we can say forgiving follows the impulses of our true and better natures.
There are some stubborn distortions of the meaning of forgiving, we should clear up before answering those critics:
• Forgiving someone who did us wrong does not mean that we tolerate the wrong he did.
• Forgiving does not mean that we want to forget what happened.
• Forgiving does not mean that we excuse the person who did it.
• Forgiving does not mean that we take the edge off the evil of what was done to us.
• Forgiving does not mean that we invite someone who hurt us once to hurt us again.
Moving on from assumptions, we need to defend forgiving against the explicit criticisms that have been mentioned.
• Forgiving Is Fair: It is the only way for any fairness to rise from the ashes of unfairness.
• The Only Alternative To Forgiving Perpetuates Unfairness: Vengeance is the only alternative to forgiving.
• Forgiving Gives Future Fairness A Chance: It always opens the future to better possibilities.
• Forgiving is a severe honesty: Anyone can lie about forgiving, but you needn’t to prove it to anybody but yourself.
• Forgiving doesn’t falsify reality: You don’t act like nothing happened; you are healing the wounds of a world hacked apart by memories of wounds and wrongs we know we did not deserve.
Forgiving tolerates no disguising, no denying, no diminishing, and no ignoring of what happened.
• Forgiving is honest about the responsibility of the person who committed the wrong
• Forgiving is honest about the accountability of the person who did it
• Forgiving is honest about the price of any reunion
• Forgiving is honest about the person who wounded us
• Forgiving requires honesty with ourselves
• Forgiving is honest about future possibilities
In view of all these facts about forgiving, there is never any real forgiving at all unless it first be honest. Beyond that, we get ourselves free from the trap of persistent and unfair pain. It’s the only way for a victim to be fair to themselves.
Because It Suits Us
Some people believe that we do only the things we really want to do. They believe we do what we do because it will reward us more than if we do something else. Increase our pleasure and avoid our pain―this is the motivation for all human action.
We end up doing what we think will give us more pleasure and less pain, but this is not true. We sometimes do the right thing even if we know that it will cost us a lot of pain. We do what is right simply because we believe it is right. You can even say that the quality of our lives is measured by our willingness to do the right thing― even when we know it will make us pay dearly.
On the other hand, somethings are just not meant to be done simply because it is our duty to do them. Some things are meant to be done only because we want to do them. Some can be done for no other reason. If we are not led to do them by our own inner impulses, they won’t get done at all. Or at least they will not get done well. Forgiving is one of these things. We forgive when we discover that we really want to forgive, and we want to forgive when we want to heal ourselves from the hangover of a wounded past.
For Our Own Sakes
When we forgive we become our own good physician and the remedy we use percolates from warm, beating heart of the universe. We are working with the healing energy of the creator himself. This is why forgiveness does its first good work inside us, and wishing the other person well is precisely what we do when we forgive.
We Only Forgive The Ones We Blames
If we dare not judge, we dare not forgive. We can blame somebody and refuse to forgive him. But we cannot forgive him if we dare not blame him. Blame not, forgive not, and there’s the end of it. The anti-blame people are victims of certain fallacies that are no less fallacious for being attractive to the relativists of our age. We want to run through few of them and explain why they are balderdash.
The “Who Am I to Judge?” Fallacy
If this fallacy were true, nobody should ever blame anybody. But it is not true, and for obvious reasons. When we blame wrongdoers for doing wrong, we are only holding them accountable on earth for one piece of bad action. We size up peoples actions the best we can and to assign responsibility for them. So, the imperfect people have not only the right but an obligation to blame people.
The Blame-Share Fallacy
Anyone who shares responsibility for what went wrong forfeits their right to blame the person who did it. The truth is that we must blame people who do wrong even if we helped make the wrong possible. But humble blaming is still blaming. And humble blaming leads to humble forgiving.
The “To Understand All Is to Forgive All” Fallacy
We forgive someone when we cannot understand why he did. If we understand we will keep creating excuses, and we don’t need to forgive him because we only forgive the ones we blame.
The Fatalist Fallacy
Blaming people for doing whatever bad things they do, does not mean we think everyone is totally responsible for everything they do. Nor does it mean that we think all people are equally responsible. Whatever evil influences were buzzing around them or inside them when they did the bad things, they still had the power not to do them. Therefore we blame them. And only then, if we are so inclined, do we forgive them. All we need to do is hold on to a belief that, in spite of all the influences on us, we do have power to act on our own initiative, we do not have to do what we do, and to that extent we are accountable for what we do. We should remember that blaming a person who wronged us is one of the better compliments we can ever pay her.
If what they did wounded and wronged you personally, you blame them. Only then do you consider forgiving them. You must remember that they might be wrong, and it always possible that they might be wholly innocent. So let no one rush to blame. Therefore, the point is only that forgiving always comes with blame attached. If we dare not blame, we dare not forgive. Forgiving is for people who know their own faults but who recognize a wrong and dare to name it when they feel it done to them and have the wisdom and grace to forgive it.
Forgiving People Who Don’t Say They Are Sorry
There are strong arguments against forgiving an unrepentant enemy, and we respect them even though we are not persuaded by them. We can count five plausible reasons not to forgive people who do not say they are sorry.
• If a person who wrongs us does not repent, he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven: Forgiving flows from grace―unearned, undeserved favor.
• Forgiving someone who does not repent is just too hard to do: It is a no-lose opportunity, difficult to do but with a harvest of healing.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is not fair to ourselves: Yes, but we are fair to ourselves when we prolong a bitterness that is shriveling our spirits.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is dangerous; If he feels no sorrow for what he did, he is likely to do it again: When we forgive, we don’t forget, and we do not intend to let it happen again.
• The Bible says that we have to repent before we can get forgiven:
A person who wrongs God should not expect God to forgive him unless he is really sorry.
When people want to be forgiven by God, they want to be reunited with him at the same time, but God want reunion with integrity.
Repentance is nothing but simple honesty about what we did to break our connection with God. This is why a person cannot expect to be forgiven by God unless he first repents. On the other side, the person who hurt us should not be the person who decides whether or when we should recover from the pain he brought us. A wounded person should no put their future happiness in the hands of the person who made them miserable.
Forgiving Ourselves
Forgiving takes two―someone who forgives and someone who gets forgiven, and there is a moral problem to hurt someone and forgive myself, I suggest we take on these four problems, one at a time.
• Does it make sense to forgive ourselves?
We are ripped apart inside, and forgiving ourselves is the only way we heal the split.
• Who gives us the right to forgive ourselves?
Only victims have a right to forgive. Self-forgiveness license comes from two authorities the victim and God.
• What do we forgive ourselves for?
We forgive ourselves for what we did, not for what we are
We forgive ourselves for specific things we did
We forgive ourselves for wrongful things that we deserve blame for doing
We forgive ourselves for what we blame ourselves for
We forgive ourselves for what we feel forgiven for
• How can we go about forgiving ourselves?
We tell it to ourselves
We repeat it
We keep it to ourselves
We act like it even if we don’t talk about it
We do something extravagant
Forgiving God
We sometimes have question of how God carries on when people are wronged and what we should do about him when things go badly wrong with us whether it might ever make sense to forgive God of unfair wounds. But when we stop, we will see that pain is God’s way of getting us to listen to him, when we forget to keep tuned in to God. We get to be better persons for having felt the bad pain. God always has a good purpose for allowing unfair pain to happen to us.
How God Forgives
God invented forgiving as a remedy for a past that not even he could change and not even he could forget. His way of forgiving is the model for our forgiving. Forgive each other the way God forgives us, because we forgive for our own sake. We forgive as we rediscover the person behind the offense, as we surrender our right to revenge, and as we wish good things for the person who did bad things to us, just as father deal with his son mercifully, we can heal our own spirits, alone, and get the first benefit of forgiving, we can open ourselves to the possibilities of reunion. But when it comes to the happy endings, we can never be sure. There is something unfinished about forgiving someone who does not come back to you.
Owning Our Pain
Forgiving is a remedy for pain, but not for anybody else’s pain, just our own. But no pain is really our pain until we own it; we own something when we take personal responsibility and give a name to our feelings.
We begin to take responsibility for our pain when we listen to its question. We begin to heal our pain when we give the right answer. We won’t take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain; we need to admit we feel it.
Taking our Time
We worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse. Shock may be a temporary pain-blocker, but forgiveness within shock or using forgiveness as shield against the pain that is sure will come later. People who forgives to avoid conformation, because they think it is vulgar, so unpleasant, to escape the ugly scene. However, we should worry most about those who resort to fast forgiving as a trick to gain advantage. Quickly done to gain advantage, but here forgiveness is the smelliest if dirty tricks. People who have badly wounded should give themselves space and time to start forgiving through the following:
• Think of what actually happened
• Evaluate what is behind the scenes
• Talk to a friend or counselor
• Feel and take time to be alone without any distractions and put a name on what they feel
• Pray, be honest , and admit that they need help
Postponements have made it severely hard. There is a right moment to forgive, we can’t predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives. Consequently, the unscientific advice here is not to do it too quickly, but don’t wait too long; only the wounded person who can pinpoint that right moment to forgive.
We Don’t Have To Say So
It’s a happy ending too, but we shouldn’t suppose that we must tell. Silent forgiving can be just as real and just as effective as spoken forgiving. Sometimes good intentions badly botched, so it is better to keep quiet. There are some tips if you want to share the good news, but it all depends on the situation and the person, if you are not totally ready, forget about them.
• Take your time
• Size up the risk
• Wait for a signal
• Do it sideways
• Begin at the end
• Don’t claim holy motives
• Improvise
• Make it short
• Keep it light
• Give the other person time
These strategies for those who want to initiate the conversation on their own. If the other person comes to you with sorrow, you don’t need any strategy just follow your heart and you will take the perfect decision if you are honest, but remember it is always good to forgive and never bad to say so. But if the response is not what you hoped for, you can go home and enjoy our healing in private.
How Often?
As Often As We Need To
There are three fundamental facts of forgiving:
• Forgiving is not obligation.
• Forgiving is not about letting people get away with something.
• Forgiving is not about reunion with people who are hurting us.
Don’t make forgiving a matter of number, we should focus on healing our memories of a wound that someone’s wrong etched in our past. The right question is how many times we need to forgive. Forgiving is a gift not a duty, use the gift to set yourself free from the miserable past.
When We Are Not Sure We Have Done It
When you discover that you don’t like the person you thought you had forgiven anymore, and you start to wonder whether you have failed at forgiving just take it easy, and expect some relapses. Forgiving does not clear everything up. We need sometimes to wash the mirror of everything up, we need to wash the mirror of our memories, and we may need someone to lend us a sponge. It’s only slip on the way to success not a failure.
Forgive And Remember
Healed memory is not a deleted memory. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future, also the other dilemma created by combination of power and weakness, power of imagining the future and weakness of not controlling it. And the way to hope for a better future after a bad past is the way of forgiving.
• We remember the good parts of the bad past
• We remember the past with truth
• We remember with a new respect for ourselves
• We remember with sadness
• We remember without illusions
One way to regain hope is to choose the new way of remembering that comes with forgiving the wrongs of the pasts and don’t lose hope when the vision of tomorrow is clouded by the wrong of yesterday. It is a new path to change a bitter memory into a grateful memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory. We reflect light to our darkness, we open door for unseen future, and remind us how good it is to be healed.
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