Someone Hurt You, maybe yesterday, maybe long ago, and you cannot forget it. You did not deserve the hurt, and it has lodged deeply in your memory, where it keeps on hurting.
You are not alone. We all muddle our way through a world where even well-meaning people hurt one another. A friend betrays us, a parent abuses us, a spouse leaves us.
Philosopher Hanna Arendt discovered that the only power that can stop the stream of painful memories is "the faculty of forgiving." In that spirit, one December day in 1983, Pope John Paul II walked into a dank cell of Rebibbia prison outside Rome to meet Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had fired a bullet at his heart. In a quiet moment alone with his would-be assassin, the pope forgave him.
For the ordinary person, however, it is not easy to forgive. The act seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving can bring a miraculous kind of healing, even reconciliation.
Hate - our natural response to deep and unfair hurts - comes more easily. A woman hopes her former husband will be miserable with his new wife. A man hopes that the friend who betrayed him will be fired from his job. Passive or aggressive, hate is a malignancy that festers and grows, stifling joy and threatening our health. It hurts the hater more than the hated. It must be cut out - for our own sake.
How can this be done? How can you let go of hurt, the way a child opens his hands and frees trapped butterfly? Here are guidelines to help you on the road to forgiveness:
Confront your malice. None of us wants to admit hating someone, so we hide it from ourselves. But the fury denied rages beneath the surface and infects all our relationships. Admitting our hate compels us to make a decision about the soul surgery we call forgiving. We must acknowledge what has happened, face up to the other person and say: "You did me wrong."
Liz was an assistant professor at a California university. She was a good teacher, and the chairman of her department promised to ask the dean to promote her. Instead, his report was so critical of her performance that the dean told her she should look for another job.
Liz hated the chairman for betraying her - but she needed a recommendation from him. When he told her how sorry he was that his support could not convince the dean, she pretended to believe him. But she could not keep up the duplicity. One day she confronted him with the truth. His embarassed denial enabled Liz to see him for the poor weak person he was. She began to feel the power she needed to forgive him and, in her decision to do so was set free of her hate.
Separate the wrongdoer from the wrong. Be angry at the deed, not at the doer. The Bible describes, in the ancient drama of atonement, how God took a bundle of human sins off man's back, tied it to a goat, and sent the "scapegoat" to a "solitary land." Forgiving is finding a new vision of the person who has wronged us, the person - stripped of his sins - who really lives beneath the cloak of his wrongdoing.
The first gift of sin-stripping is new insight. As we come to see the deeper truth about people - that they are needy, fallible human beings - our feelings change. Cathy, an adopted child, was at 16 a flaming hothead who bitterly resented her birth-mother for giving her away. She wondered why she herself had not been worth keeping. Then she found out that her biological parents had been very young and poor and not married.
Around this time, One of Cathy's friends became pregnant and, in fear and doubt, gave up her baby for adoption. Cathy shared her friend's conflict and was sure that the right thing had been done under the circumstances. Gradually she came to feel that her own mother had done the right thing too - she had given her child away because she loved her too much to keep her. Cathy's new empathy brought her resentment down to forgiving size. And she began to see her own worth as a strong, valuable human being.
Let go of the past. A beautiful actress of my acquaintance was left crippled after an automobile accident a few years ago. Her husband stayed with her until she had partially recovered. Then, coldly and quickly, he left her.
She could have chained herself to the past and mortgaged her future to hate. Instead, he saw her husband for what he was, forgave him, and wished him well.
I was skeptical. "Suppose," I asked, "that he married a sexy young starlet. Would you wish him to be happy with her?"
"Yes, I would," she responded.
This does not mean that my friend has completely forgotten her hurt. Premature forgetting, in fact, may be a dangerous way to escape forgiving's inner surgery. Once we have forgiven, however, forgetting is a sign of health: we can forget, eventually, because we are healed.
Don't give up on forgiveness - keep working at it. As a boy, C.S Lewis, the British scholar who wrote marvelous children's fantasies, was badly hurt by a bully of a schoolteacher. For most of his life, Lewis could not forgive this teacher, and being a failure at forgiving troubled him. But not long before he died, Lewis wrote to a friend: "Only a few weeks ago, I suddenly realized that I had at last forgiven the schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I'd been trying to do it for years and each time I thought I'd done it, I found it had to be attempted again. But this time, I feel sure it is the real thing."
The hate habit is hard to break. As we do with other bad habits, we usually break it many times before we get rid of it altogether. The deeper the hurt, the longer it can take. But slowly, it happens.
PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS have been made against forgiving. Some say that forgiveness is unjust because the wrongdoer should not be let off the hook. Others say that forgiveness is a sign of weakness, not strength. Bernard Shaw called it "a beggar's refuge."
I disagree. Vengeance never evens the score. It ties both the injured and injurer to an endless escalator of retaliation. Gandhi was right: if we all live by an "eye to eye" kind of justice, the whole world will be blind. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr also saw this after World War II when he said, "We must finally be reconciled with our foe, lest we both perish in the vicious circle of hatred." Forgiveness breaks pain's grip on our minds and opens the door to possibility.
To forgive is to be tough, not weak. It takes guts to deal with the wickedness done to us. It also takes love - the real power behind forgiveness - and especially those two strong ingredients of love: respect and commitment.
When you respect yourself, you will not load all the blame for your pain on yourself if your father deprives you of love, or your marriage partner has an affair, or your children throw away your values. Self-respect enables you to begin to forgive by also showing respect for the people who hurt you, and allowing them the freedom to be accountable for what they do.
Love dares us to commit ourselves to someone, to reach out into a future we cannot control, and to expect commitment from another. Commitments are risky, but the very love that dares us to be vulnerable has power to heal the pain when people let us down. Love also means remembering we are seldom sinned against. For example, you may contribute to your spouse's infidelity by ignoring your partner's needs and desires, or bring on your children's rebellion by your cold judgments and hot tempers. A man I'll call Mark thought of his wife, Karen as domineering, while he thought of himself as ineffective and timid. One night at a party, Karen laughingly called Mark a mama's boy who had never grown up. When they got home, Mark shouted, "I'll never forgive you for this!" His rage became a cover for the weakness he dared not face.
Through her own chagrin and contrition, Karen learned that she herself was weak and afraid. Her cocky toughness had been a way to keep her secret demons under control. When she found the courage to reveal her needs to Mark, he was able to drop his mask of anger. In mutual forgiveness, they creatively combined their weaknesses and strengths to forge a healthier relationship without illusions.
When we forgive, we come as close as any human being can to the essentially divine act of creation. We heal the hurt and create a new beginning out of past pain.
