Pageliasse

An english friend translated my text about forgiveness, as it was on my former blog, and you can read the result here. You can also find a most achieved version in french there.

Introduction: Forgiveness Today

Forgiveness is not good news: the impression could be given that through forgiving we are lowering ourself.  Our pride is quick to say no. No one wants to look weak by refusing to take revenge.

This tendency of our tainted nature has been re-enforced  in western culture by Marxism. For Marxists, it is quite wrong to forgive an unjust person; this outlook suggests that it is hatred that makes humanity get ahead. Revolution happens when people hate each other, which is why revolutionaries try to make forgiveness impossible. Everyone is more or less open to being taken in by this ideology of hatred – or at least by its commonest consequence:  ongoing peevish resentment.

Another ideology hostile to forgiveness is the ‘duty ‘of remembering – at least  a certain aspect of -  what’s involved. The study of History is of course important, as it helps us to judge past mistakes, in order to avoid them in the future. This should not prevent forgiveness. It’s no good re-opening old wounds and it’s no good exposing our consciences to the penetration of resentment. 

Moreover forgiveness, whether nationally or internationally, can do great things. What about the example of Fr Werenfried Van Straaten? This Dutch religious, after the 39-45 War, in which the Netherlands had suffered much more than the other western Allies,  succeeded in convincing his fellow-countrymen to forgive the Germans and to come to the help of  German catholic refugees in the East. He started ‘Aid to Priests in East Germany’, which was to become ‘Aid to the Church in Need’. Surely it is this type of activity on the part of  Catholics that opened the way to the building of Europe after two fratricidal conflicts! Nor was Father Werenfried alone. Remember also, for example, the Germano-Polish Friendship Association and its solemn meeting in the ‘Katholikentag’ of Freibourg im Breisgau in 1978… the table of honour gathered several cardinals and archbishops, among whom –  to general ignorance at the time -  two future popes: Cardinals Wojtyla  and Ratzinger.

Finally it’s worth pointing out that  forgiveness  is excellent for one’s own mental health . Some years ago doctors published a paper on the curative properties of forgiveness: they had noticed that very often their patients recovered if they disposed themselves to forgive. And it is quite probable that if an authentic culture of forgiveness were to develop there would be a hundred times less divorces and similar social ills such as afflict us today.

So let’s have a look first at the role of forgiveness in human psychology, before seeing how Jesus Christ lived and transformed it.

Towards a Psychology of Forgiveness

To begin with, forgiveness has three ‘moments’:

Forgiveness can be granted when the evil has no further consequences: it is reasonably easy, even if one does not always get there.

Forgiveness can be also granted even when the evil still has consequences … this is clearly more difficult, but it is actually a very good way of coming to terms with those consequences.

Finally, forgiveness can be granted when the evil done is in full flow: more often than not, this requires heroism!

In this way we can see that forgiveness abolishes the spiritual – and even psychological – consequences of evil. It’s what St Paul describes as overcoming evil by good. It can even happen that the constancy and peace of the victims can discourage their persecutors, who may then become aware of their own evil and cease.

A further point leads one to see the link between forgiveness and love.

Forgiveness should be seen as a superior type of love, since in forgiveness love is stronger than what is standing against it. Forgiveness restores the possibility of friendship between tormentor and victim.

Forgiveness being of the same family as love, both are governed by the same rules: In the same way that wanting to love is already loving, so wanting to forgive is already the beginning of forgiveness..

Too often nowadays we forget that forgiveness is not a passion or feeling: it is not something that we experience. Love begins when we desire the good of the person we love. Love is something wanted, or taken on. Love needs to be built … we have to work at it. If one kept this more in mind there would be far fewer divorces. It is in fact easy to make children understand this. We say to them, ‘If you want something it’s because you love it.‘ There is always a basis of love to wanting. So strong indeed is this connection between love and the will that in the philosophy of the  Middle Ages the two words were interchangeable.

All this provides a lot of encouragement for those who want to forgive but do not make it. If they really want to forgive they have already begun to forgive.

What prevents their full act of forgiveness does not always depend on them: this consideration may very often help them to go forward in forgiveness.  Just as in love this forgiveness must be worked at, must be built, must be the fruit of a struggle in oneself, in which one has to bear in mind the contribution of circumstances.

It is these circumstances that need now to be considered: here are the material and psychological conditions of forgiveness.

From time to time certain circumstances do not permit forgiveness. If we take the example of  harassment, where the injustice has been repeated many times over and where the instigator refuses any discussion, failing to acknowledge the wrong he is doing, and where there is every reason to believe that the situation will never have an end,  it is absolutely necessary to get out of the circumstances preventing forgiveness.

It happens that holidays can put things into perspective by allowing the victim of the injustice to have a break. In this way, physical relaxation comes to help the psychic let-up.

                 Another way of emerging from the spiral of injustice is to forbid oneself to think about it. It’s another thing that we forget nowadays: our will is able to guide our thoughts. In practical terms it is only really possible not to think of the injustice when this has come to an end. But often evil spreads all its tentacles in us because we fail to be able to put our mind to other things: we need to be strong-minded about escaping from these obsessions … a struggle that is often very hard and very long, but even from the start it bears fruit.

Let’s add that to be complete forgiveness should end up with mercy. It’s not enough to forget the evil or to succeed in no longer thinking about the person who committed it. Mercy is that higher form of forgiveness which enables the one offended to love the offender. It is a question of giving oneself a new way of seeing the offender without remembering the offence, in such a way that he is once again perceived as worthy of love. Mercy ‘picks up’ the evil-doer and gives him once again his place in the society of honest people.

It’s worth pointing out here the law of reciprocity: we are only able to forgive if we are able to ask forgiveness. If we are able to ask forgiveness it’s because we realise that we are not perfect. And thinking of our own failures helps us to become more aware of the imperfections of the person who has been offending us.

And in the same way that we would want to be loved in spite of our imperfections, so would our enemy, whatever his faults, want to be loved because of his. So even suffering these defects of  our enemy, we must be capable of offering him our mercy. 

Finally, we need to know how to forgive ourselves. So often we would like to be perfect and we are not able to pardon our own failures. But forgiving does not mean turning evil into good, but what forgiving does mean is that we have understood that perfection does not belong to the here below. So if I don’t know how to forgive myself, how can I know how to forgive others their imperfections, above all when it is me the victim?

All that has been offered to the reader so far is within the grasp of  pagans … which is why we began with this approach, so as to help everyone, even unbelievers. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that it is Christian Revelation that establishes the reality of forgiveness in all its width and depth, and that those civilisations which fail to take account of this fact condemn themselves to the inevitable spiral down to hatred and vengeance. With this in mind, let’s find out how Jesus Christ has given us the example of pardon.

Christian forgiveness

Christ has two prayers of forgiveness. It is vital to notice that Jesus’ forgiveness is so complete that it is expressed precisely in the prayers He utters for the people who are doing him harm. The Christian who forgives prays for his executioners, even taking on their defence and asking God to do good to them. Thus the charity of Jesus lives in his disciple.

The best known of Jesus’ prayers of forgiveness is the one He uttered on the cross: “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. “  Jesus is putting into effect the most difficult form of forgiveness, by pardoning even while He is being tortured. He is not waiting for the torment to be over, nor is He waiting for the moment when the resurrection wipes away the consequences of the evil done to Him … so it is at the worst moment for Him that he finds the strength within  to excuse His enemies: “ They know not what they do. “

Christians’ forgiveness is based on that of Christ, just as St Stephen’s was, since he also prayed for his executioners at the very moment that he was being stoned.. And this forgiveness on the part of the martyrs is just as fruitful as that of Jesus. That a very great number of priests and levites of Jerusalem were converted after Pentecost is surely an effect of Jesus’ prayer for His executioners. And among those executioners of Stephen was Saul, who became the great apostle Saint Paul. We attribute to this way of forgiving what has been said about the blood of the martyrs: it is the seed of Christians.

Jesus’ second prayer of forgiveness is too rarely interpreted as such. It is the one He makes on the eve of His passion; “ Father, I want that where I am, they should be also. “  This prayer gets its whole strength from the fact that it is one with the other: “ Father, forgive them… “  In fact, at the moment when Jesus prays for His disciples – so that the Father will take them with him – these disciples have not yet been bought back by  the death and resurrection of Jesus, even though He tells them that they have been purified by His teaching.

So a Christian’s forgiveness is not total if it doesn’t lead the victim to want his tormentor to be with him in paradise. Difficult though it may be to admit, but since Jesus said that we can only be forgiven if we ourselves forgive, our place in heaven depends on the place that we want to make there for our opponents. If we recognise that this is by no means easy to live, we can make things easier with a touch of humour: imagine the expression on the face of our tormentor when he realises that we are his neighbour! ( How important humour is in the spiritual life.)  But let’s above all imagine his gratitude when he realises that his place at the right hand of Jesus is owed to our prayer… but neither should we forget that, if the pardon we have extended to him means a place of honour next to Jesus for us, we have in some way a debt of gratitude towards him, since he was the means of spiritual advance for us. This is the perspective of true mercy. We should of course be very careful, at the moment of self-defence, not to compromise in any way the relationship that we are going to have with our repentant tormentor in eternity.

If all forgiveness is a superior form of love, Christian forgiveness is a superior love of charity. It is said that our own charity is measured by the love we experience for our own worst enemy!

So, what is charity?  It is God Himself, because we say that “ God is love “ ( “ Deus caritas est.” ). It is God in Himself and in the radiance of His love for His creatures. God’s charity reaches each of us, who can freely respond to it. In this connecting link between us and God we can see the link that connects God to our neighbour. From now on, we cannot cease loving the one whom God loves. We cannot love God without loving His other children. Our charity towards our neighbour  aims not only at arousing his love for us, but above all for Him who is the origin of our charity.  It is in fact the purity of the love that a Christian has for him that helps his neighbour realise that this truly comes from God. So, in his turn, he can understand that God is love and come to face Him in charity. We can see that charity is a vast movement of exchange between God and His creatures, which by binding them to God their Creator binds them to each other.

Forgiveness finds its place in this movement, as the offended Christian will not lose sight of God’s charity towards his offender. There is a false idea widespread that sin suppresses God’s love for the sinner… as if one could suppress infinite love for all and for each! The tormentor does not cease to be illumined by the radiance of God’s love for him. Of course his sin will prevent him from profiting from God’s charity. But this is precisely why the Christian victim’s charity is so important: like that of Christ it looks towards the re-establishment of the reciprocal charity between God and the tormentor.

So, as long as we may find forgiveness too difficult, it must be given ‘in Christ’: we have to allow Jesus to pardon through us. In our prayer, we can say: ‘Lord, please may your pardon reach my enemy through me.’ Now we are on the inside of the love of God for our offender. Whatever our personal powerlessness may be, we are strong with the strength of God.

We need now to take a look at the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. We know that when God has forgiven, the sin has been destroyed … it no longer exists, no longer stays in God’s memory. However in the heart of the sinner the trace of God’s mercy remains. Once we have reached heaven we needn’t be afraid that ‘all will be revealed’! What others will see in us are not our sins: they will see all the love with which God has loved us in order to remove our sins … and we’ll be happy about it.

Forgetting poses a different problem for men. Of course, forgiveness should wipe out completely the memory of the offence. And it is often true that this memory of the offence only remains as part of the effort that has been made to overcome the disagreement, and the resulting friendship is stronger than previously.

But sometimes we have to bear in mind, if not the offence, at least to capacity for the other to commit it. We need to be sheltered from a repeat of aggressive behaviour. This is specially important when other people are involved. A leader needs to take into account the possible incompetence of a lieutenant, one partner of a married couple needs to bear in mind a defect of the other that might have a detrimental effect on the health of the children, and so on. Here, forgetting means helping the offender to feel that he or she continues to be loved,  even if this cannot be expressed as trust in everything. Looked at this way, the death penalty remains just, if it means protecting possible future victims, or society in general, not to mention that this punishment  can be seen as the way that the condemned pays his debts and merits the mercy of  the victims of his aggression.

God’s forgiveness comes to us in a special way in the Sacraments. In Baptism, original sin and all those sins committed before it are wiped away, destroyed. However traces of the destruction wrought by these sins remain in the baptised person. This effect is understandable if it is compared with leprosy; Blanche of Castille called mortal sin ‘the leprosy of the soul’. Leprosy destroys the flesh. By taking the correct medicine, one can be cured; that is to say, the bacillus of the leprosy is destroyed  and the flesh become healthy again. However the destroyed limbs do not grow again, and artificial replacements may be necessary. In a similar way for the soul cured of sin, a certain number of virtuous acts are required to restore its capacity to love God in a complete and all-embracing way. Sacramental absolution received in Confession follows the same pathway.

The law of reciprocity takes on a new dimension in the Christian perspective of forgiveness. In the Gospel Jesus insists on the need for reconciliation in order to be in a relationship with God. What is indispensable for receiving God’s forgiveness is pardoning our neighbour, and evidently God’s forgiveness is indispensable in order to pray in truth. If we do not know how to forgive our brother, we do not know what forgiveness means, and so cannot ask it of God. But asking God for forgiveness is indispensable for us to be able to receive divine mercy, although it is always available. Forgiveness is not an extra in our lives … it is a fundamental, life-defining

issue.

Conclusion: repentance in the Church

To finish, let’s touch on the theme of Christian ‘repentance’. First of all, we need to pray God’s forgivenesss for those sinners who have dirtied in some way His name through evil behaviour in activities where they appeared to depend on His authority.

Then we need to ask forgiveness of those people who may have been distanced from God and His Church by the sins of Christians; recognition of this sinfulness demonstrates the Church’s condemnation of it, so that it does not block adherence to gospel values.

Denouncing evil is therefore an act of mercy. But we mustn’t forget that the Church is holy. If she is made up of sinners, this is not because of their sins … it is because of  sanctifying mercy received from God.

So true is this that the best way for the Church to forgive the faults of some of her members, is to emphasise the fruits of divine mercy in her saints. To pardon, is to switch one’s gaze to what is good, having turned it from what is evil.