Forgiveness Note

In the middle of the night, surfing the web looking for something else, I came across something I wrote and forgot in 2008. These reflections about forgiveness may some day be helpful for someone struggling to forgive someone or come to terms with injustice to themselves or others about which they know. Forgiveness is the most challenging of all Christian ideas.

I finally got around to following up this comment thread. Thanks for the promo!

You raise the central question: Should one forgive in the midst of the ongoing unrepentant practice of evil?

If we use Christ as our model his dying words suggest exactly that. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Thankfully I no longer work for him, but for nearly twenty-seven years I was subordinate to one of the meanest men in the company for which we worked. Without going into detail, it is sufficient to say that he was known by one and all to be insulting, sarcastic, abusive and unaccountably indifferent to the feelings of others. He kept his job because he was knowledgeable and well-organized...and his father was well-placed. Anyway, at one particularly stressful point a sympathetic customer who knew the situation said something helpful: "It will build your faith," she said. And she was correct.

I thought about that a lot as the years went by, and I had to forgive this man, sometimes several times a day, for what he said and did. In time I came to feel sorry for him, much the same way one feels sorry for any of God's pitiful creatures. I learned in time actually to defend him when talking about him with others, despite his ungrateful, relentless verbal and psychological abuse. (It was some comfort knowing that he was not just picking on me. He was that way to everyone at one time or another, scapegoating or insulting them for situations over which they had no control.)

You put your finger on the dynamic in your post. We forgive, not because of what forgiveness does for the perpetrator, but for what it does for us. When we fail to forgive we get infected with a corrosive, septic spiritual condition that poisons everything in life. All our senses are affected, and we can no longer hear, see, feel or experience life without distortion. For me, it is the same dynamic that makes me oppose capital punishment. The reason has more to do with what it does to me than what happens to the criminal. In the same way that capital punishment caused me as a citizen to become a perpetrator of evil, unforgiveness also transforms me into someone I know I don't want to be.

It's easier said than done, of course. But that's the best I can do in a comment thread.

I wrote about Leila Abu Saba at my first blog if anyone cares to know the backstory. She died of cancer shortly after this was written but thankfully some of her writing remains accessible, including this link to one of her several blogs.   This post is not linked to my social media platforms because some of my friends from the past will recognize the person about whom I wrote and I want to avoid conflict.