Forgiveness

Forgiveness. Who doesn’t seek it? Who doesn’t need it? Who doesn’t crave it? How do we get it? We all carry around resentments, wounds that impair our ability to function as a whole person. 

There is a story that the author Corrie Ten Boom was asked to forgive one of the Nazi guards from Ravensbruck, the prison camp where she and her sister were imprisoned and where her sister died. She found that she wasn’t able to do it. She prayed to be given the strength, and at the moment she committed to making the effort she reported that she was filled with a healing warmth that she called the love of God.

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare tells us “…in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” In that prayer we ask, “forgive us our trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us.”

This can be understood as meaning ‘in the same manner’ as we forgive others. To the extent that we can completely forgive someone else we can be completely forgiven. If the best we can summon up is incomplete and grudging forgiveness that’s what we find for ourselves. Our forgiveness of others is a prerequisite for being forgiven ourselves.

“AS we forgive others” can also be understood as meaning ‘at the same time’ as we forgive others. It’s a simultaneous process of healing which we initiate. Francis of Assisi is credited with saying “it is in pardoning that we are pardoned” I think that this is what Corrie Ten Boom experienced.  It’s an interlocking action. Or is it the same one? Is forgiving others the same as forgiving ourselves?

The moment when we are able to give up our identity as the wounded one is the moment we are made whole.