Forgiveness as openness to relating

I warmed to this page because it pretty much gives a definition of forgiveness that I had come to a few years back when wrestling with the issues raised by what forgiveness would be in relation to situations faced by parishioners: "It means being willing to take the initiative in dealing with any barriers that I may be raising towards a restored relationship. It means that I am willing to have a relationship with the other party that is based on Christian love and not on what has happened in the past, if the response of the other person makes that possible."

I felt [and feel] that forgiveness is a point in a journey to reconciliation -but since reconciliation is two-way, then forgiveness may be as far as we can get. I seem to recall some fo the issue for me was reflecting on God's forgiveness of us human beings: it's not the whole story; we need to be prepared to be reconciled by, firstly, accepting that forgiveness. However, for us as opposed to God, it is important to be able to lay aside the un-wholeness that lack of forgiveness brings into our lives. I'm not sure how far that could apply to God, if at all. Though it may be interesting to linger with that isssue a while longer.

Of course even desiring to make a relationship possible may be hard to face, and that seems to me to be the value in those things that have been mentioned in some of the previous blogs in this series: finding a common humanity, empathy, excusing and so on. They all make it easier to make the possibilty of reconciliation [of some kind] envisionable and even desirable.

But of course -it takes two and we are not the only ones in the equation. We may have to live with the impossibility of relating positively because of death or other incapacity on the part of our 'enemy'.