CS Lewis on forgiveness

It's been a week since I last blogged on forgiveness though in between I had a conversation in which I was sharing what I've been learning with a friend. I also felt that I really wanted to engage now with some thinking about forgiveness rather than the case studies -perhaps with a view to looking at some more case-studies after some reflection.

So here we look at CS Lewis. He links forgiving with loving ones enemy. I think it is Lewis' deistinction between loving the sinner and hating the sin that has stuck with me and lies behind somewhere the way that I have reacted to the stories of forgiveness I have been looking at. He applies the notions to forgiveness so that it becomes clear that forgiving someone does not mean we have to agree with what they did [or do] and it does not mean that we have to like them. In this piece we close on the words "Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again."

And I certainly feel that the themes that come in the article here have been seen in the stories we have looked at so far: forgiveness doesn't mean calling what is bad good nor pretending that we like it. It is about humanity and finding or refinding humanity.