Forgiveness

What is your understanding of forgiveness? Why do you think forgiveness is seen as so important to the teaching of most religions and many healing practices?


Forgiveness is a real sticky wicket for most of us. What helped me understand forgiveness was to first take a serious look at what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is NOT: condoning bad behavior, poor choices/decisions, unkindness, or abuse; forgetting what happened; making excuses for the offender; minimizing, discounting or denying the physical, emotional, mental, and/or spiritual results; ignoring the feelings around the issue(s); giving up anger; and most certainly does not require reconciliation with the offender.

What does that leave? It means that forgiveness IS: for the one forgiving and not the offender; taking responsibility for the feelings around the issue(s); working towards healing within and not for those who caused the harm; finding serenity and letting go of resentments; recognizing that the past cannot be changed, yet neither do we have to remain stuck there; and is definitely a skill one can learn and a choice that one can make.

There is forgiveness from others, forgiveness of others, and sometimes the most difficult, forgiveness of self.  As well, there are different kinds of forgiveness called for given the situation, and various levels of egregious offenses.

Forgiving others can be the beginning of serenity, a gift we give ourselves. In many cases we forgive others not for their sake, but for ours. We make the decision, the choice, to not have the past event destroy our lives any further. We make the decision to begin disarming the build up of resentment along with guilt/shame and worry to keep us in emotional turmoil. Another key point to forgiving others is that the wrongdoer need never know we have forgiven them. Forgiving is not making their amends for them; every individual needs to make their own amends.

Forgiveness is a journey of healing, sometimes slow, but steady; occasionally a lifelong quest, as in the case of severe child abuse and such. For survivors of abuse, forgiveness is in learning to re-focus one’s attention on the here and now, and the positive that can be embraced today. While there may be residual effects from past events, and while what happened may not at all have been fair, all anyone can do is to make the best of today. This is not a denial of the reality, or making light of physical disabilities and limitations which might remain from abuse in the past. It is, instead, a turning towards G!d and seeking how to continue to be one’s Best Self with G!d’s help given the reality of the here and now today. It’s not simple, easy, or black and white one size fits all. Forgiveness is, above all else, a process, a journey, an unfolding.

Many people have often wondered how Elie Wiesel could survive the Holocaust and go on to do good in the world. He wrote of his experience in his memoir, Night. In that book, he wrote of a day when he watches a young boy die slowly by hanging and repeats the question posed by someone in the crowd: “Where is G!d now?” Wiesel wrote, “I heard a voice within me answer him. Where is He? He is hanging here on this gallows…” He goes on to relate that he lost his faith at Auschwitz, but, in his words, he “went on praying.”

Elie explains, “What is prayer? You take words, everyday words, and all of a sudden they become holy. Why? Because there is something that separates one word from another and then you try to fill the vacuum. With what? With whom? With what memory? With what aspiration? So when words bring you closer to the prisoner in his cell, to the patient who is dying on his bed alone, to the starving child, then it’s a prayer.”

Later, in an interview with Krista Tippette on her program, On Being, they had this conversation about his Holocaust experience and forgiveness:

Krista: “Is “forgiveness” a big enough word or a good enough word for this?”

Elie: “No, I cannot. No, I cannot forgive.”

Krista: “You said you can’t forgive. So if you can’t forgive, what can you do? What is the endeavor, the holy endeavor?”

Elie: “This is the aim — first of all, to tell the truth, and to sensitize other people not to do the same thing. We aren’t here to forgive. We are, in the Jewish faith, on the eve of Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day of the year, and we plead with G!d for forgiveness, and G!d forgives, I hope. But one thing He does not forgive: the evil I have done to other fellow human beings. Only they can forgive. If I do something bad to you, I cannot ask G!d to forgive me. You must forgive me.”

At the end of the day, Elie reminds us that he and many others who survived the Holocaust learned a lesson: Every day is a gift. He had to do something with his life, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of those who died. Rebbe Gelberman said the same of the loss of his wife and daughter at the hands of the Nazis.

That is the why of forgiveness. Humans can be terrible to one another. Even when perpetrators of horrible things cause so much pain and suffering and even death, we who have suffered must do something with our lives, and continue to work to elevate the world and gather the shattered fragments. Forgiveness is absolutely essential for spiritual growth.