Blog Your Blessings Sunday: Forgiveness

For­give­ness

If you’ve been read­ing this blog reg­u­larly, you know that I have been work­ing a great deal on the con­cept of thank­ful­ness, feel­ing thank­ful, and giv­ing thanks in a mean­ing­ful way for all things.

This week I have turned my atten­tion to the topic of for­give­ness. More specif­i­cally, I have been focus­ing on the man­ner in which we are called to for­give one another and how well I live up to that directive.

Con­sider these two passages:

Jesus spoke to his dis­ci­ples. “Things that make peo­ple sin are sure to come,” he said. “But how ter­ri­ble it will be for the per­son who brings them! Sup­pose peo­ple lead one of these lit­tle ones to sin. It would be bet­ter for those peo­ple to be thrown into the sea with a mill­stone tied around their neck. So watch what you do.“If your brother sins, tell him he is wrong. Then if he turns away from his sins, for­give him. Sup­pose he sins against you seven times in one day. And sup­pose he comes back to you each time and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ For­give him.”

Luke 17:1–4

“For­give peo­ple when they sin against you. If you do, your Father who is in heaven will also for­give you. But if you do not for­give peo­ple their sins, your Father will not for­give your sins.”

Matthew 6:14–15

Is there a con­tra­dic­tion? Note that in the first pas­sage, Jesus tells us to let another per­son know that they have done some­thing wrong. But then he com­mands us to for­give him/her, “if he turns away from his sins, …”

How­ever, in the book of Matthew, he tells us to for­give oth­ers who sin against us because, if we do not, we will not be for­given by the Divine for our own sins. There is no men­tion of for­give­ness as a reac­tion to some­one else’s behav­ior. Sim­ply a com­mand­ment to grant it, because we will fail to com­ply at our own peril.

So which is it? Do we wait for the other per­son to change their ways and then offer our for­give­ness? Or just for­give them with­out wait­ing for any fur­ther action from them? And if they ignore what we tell them about their behav­ior, are we off the hook? Can we just stomp off in a huff, annoyed that they did not heed our obvi­ously better-informed opin­ion and imme­di­ately change course?

For­give­ness is some­thing that many peo­ple strug­gle with. For a lot of peo­ple, for­give­ness is extremely dif­fi­cult to ask for from another per­son and vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to give freely and generously.

You know peo­ple like that … in fact, maybe those two sen­tences describe you.

Do you hold grudges? Do you dis­as­so­ci­ate your­self from peo­ple when there is con­flict in the rela­tion­ship and feel ani­mos­ity toward them from that point on, never let­ting go of that emo­tion and expe­ri­enc­ing it again when­ever you are reminded of that per­son or the incident(s) involv­ing them?

Some­one asked me recently if I thought that the abil­ity to for­give is a gift of the Spirit. I had to think about that because we tra­di­tion­ally con­cep­tu­al­ize gifts bestowed by the Spirit as being pri­mar­ily the abil­ity to proph­esy and speak in tongues. (1 Corinthi­ans 14) Other gifts include wis­dom, knowl­edge, faith, heal­ing, wis­dom, mir­a­cles, dis­cern­ment, and inter­pre­ta­tion. (1 Corinthi­ans 12:7–10)

I believe that list is illus­tra­tive, rather than deter­mi­na­tive. In other words, that is not an exclu­sive list of gifts bestowed by the Spirit, as 1 Corinthi­ans 12:4–6, 11 states the following:

There are dif­fer­ent kinds of gifts. But they are all given by the same Spirit. There are dif­fer­ent ways to serve. But they all come from the same Lord. There are dif­fer­ent ways to work. But the same God makes it pos­si­ble for all of us to have all those dif­fer­ent things … All of the gifts are pro­duced by one and the same Spirit. He gives them to each per­son, just as he decides.

So yes, I believe that the fact that some peo­ple have an eas­ier time ask­ing for and/or grant­ing for­give­ness than oth­ers is, in fact, a gift of the Spirit. My inter­pre­ta­tion of 1 Corinthi­ans leads me to con­clude that the abil­ity to for­give is a gift of the Spirit, tac­itly encom­passed in the cat­e­gory of “heal­ing.” The abil­ity to for­give with ease is a per­son­al­ity char­ac­ter­is­tic, part of our core nature. We can change our core nature, of course, through prayer and con­scious efforts to think and behave dif­fer­ently, and the Divine asks that of us in areas of our lives where we struggle.

The sub­ject of for­give­ness came up in con­ver­sa­tion because a friend of mine read this blog and, more par­tic­u­larly, my very first post.

Pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 13, 2007, I updated it on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2007, and added the following:

I have found for­give­ness to be sur­pris­ingly and amaz­ingly quick in com­ing and eas­ily dis­pensed which is just one more way, I believe, of the Holy Spirit affirm­ing that I am exactly where I am meant to be at this time.

My friend did not believe that I could so quickly and, appar­ently, effort­lessly, for­give not only the Nox­ious Pas­tor, but the other mem­bers of the con­gre­ga­tion I left ear­lier this year. My friend remarked that, dur­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, I showed no sign of anger, resent­ment or resid­ual hurt about the things that tran­spired in that church or my need to dis­as­so­ci­ate myself from the insti­tu­tional church, and ques­tioned if I was just “putting up a brave front,” hid­ing my true feelings.

No, there is no “brave front” or attempt to mask my gen­uine emo­tions. I wrote the above state­ment truth­fully, hon­estly, from my heart and soul.

I do not feel badly at all about hav­ing left the church. I do not miss it. In fact, with each and every week that passes, I real­ize over and over the cor­rect­ness of my deci­sion to aban­don not just that con­gre­ga­tion, but all forms of orga­nized reli­gion. I am find­ing new and inspir­ing ways to use my tal­ents, and can see with absolute clar­ity that I am pre­cisely at the place in my life to which the Spirit has led me.

For­give­ness was, for me, easy to give. But, you see, it is not my nature to hold a grudge against any­one. Never has been. Grudge-holding is not part of my core nature. And I believe that char­ac­ter­is­tic to be a gift of the Spirit, for which I am thank­ful and feel blessed.

That does not make me bet­ter than or supe­rior to any other per­son who does strug­gle with for­giv­ing oth­ers and/or tends to hold a grudge because, believe me, I have plenty of other unde­sir­able char­ac­ter­is­tics with which I strug­gle! It’s just that for­give­ness doesn’t hap­pen to be one of my issues.

The only thing I did and still do find shock­ing, frankly, was the behav­ior of the Nox­ious Pas­tor. I am still amazed that, being a pas­tor, he did not ask for my for­give­ness, choos­ing rather to pro­claim his inno­cence even in the face of indis­putable evi­dence of his wrong­ful con­duct. I give thanks for my amaze­ment because it shows that, even at this junc­ture, I strive to see the best in other peo­ple and I am deeply dis­ap­pointed when it is impos­si­ble to do so.

You see, for a few weeks, I truly thought that I might have been too harsh in my assess­ment of his char­ac­ter and my dec­la­ra­tion that his actions utterly lacked integrity. I thought that my phone would ring or I would receive an e-mail in which he would say “pas­toral things” along the lines of “we need to set things right. What­ever hap­pened should not have hap­pened. For my part in it, I apol­o­gize and ask your for­give­ness. For your part in it, I for­give you. This con­gre­ga­tion needs your tal­ents, your con­tri­bu­tions to its min­istry. They were mas­sive and are sorely missed. Can we meet, pray and resolve this breach?” Not that I would have gone back to that con­gre­ga­tion. Not that I would nec­es­sar­ily have par­tic­i­pated in any such meet­ing because, truly, what is there to be gained from it?

But no such out­reach effort has been forthcoming.

So today, I blog my bless­ings and include among them the fact that I have dis­tanced myself from that con­gre­ga­tion and its pas­tor. A pas­tor who is inca­pable of and does not feel con­victed to reach out in the man­ner described above to a mem­ber of the flock who has gone miss­ing is a pas­tor who can­not stand in a pul­pit and preach to me. He/she has noth­ing to say to me because his/her words have no valid­ity and can­not res­onate in or with my soul, my core self. He/she can­not serve as a role model to me which is what I expect a pas­tor to be. That is not behav­ior I would ever want or seek to model.

No, I am thank­ful that I was freed by the Spirit and no longer squan­der my many tal­ents and abil­i­ties toil­ing for that con­gre­ga­tion. The Spirit has redi­rected them, inspir­ing me daily in new ways to express myself (includ­ing this blog!), explore my spir­i­tu­al­ity and dis­cover all the bless­ings in my life, the abil­ity to for­give and move on being only one of them.

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