Words of forgiveness

An article in last week's Church Times  with lots of perspectives on forgiving, a lot based on the work of Liz Gulliford (a book on the topic has gone out of print and is now at horrific prices -if you can find a cheaper copy -say less than £20- let me know).
There are a few helpful and significant quotes I'd like to draw to your and my future attention.

“For most, though, forgiveness is a hard-won process, and in that process it is not unusual to feel mixed emo­tions. Everyone who goes on a journey of forgiveness will have times when forgiving is hard to hold on to.
“As Christians, we do not have to forgive from our own strength. The commitment to forgive may be all that we can put on the table, and hope and pray that it will be deep­ened. We pray that God will help us.”

That certainly chimes with pastoral and personal experience. It is useful to understand forgiveness as a process.
And when we deal with the issue of forgiveness, we have to be careful because there are lots of misunderstanding which have the effect of short-circuiting the process. One of those seems to be that forgiveness amounts to saying that the wrong is actually 'okay'. As Gulliford says,

Understanding the motive of the person who has injured you will only take you so far — forgiveness is not about condoning

And further down in the article Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying;

“Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what has hap­pened seriously and not minimising it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. In the telling of stories like these [in the Forgiveness Project website] there is real healing.”

I find this sentence by Gee Walker to be a good framing perspective:

Forgiveness is my sur­vival tool. If I hadn’t, it would have brought anger and resentment into my soul, and I hadn’t got room for that. Forgiveness frees me up to love; it brings me peace and helps me today.

It helps us to understand that not forgiving is giving house-room to a set of attitudes and emotional baggage that may cripple us and that the decision to (learn to) forgive is a decision to make room for love and peace (and, I think, joy).

And a clear example of how what we think forgiveness is affects how we approach things comes in the quote relating to Julie Nicholson who resigned as active clergy following her daughter's murder as part of the London bombings in July 2007 because she didn't feel able to forgive and felt she was in a contradictory place to the ministry she was supposed to exercise.

Her definition of true forgiveness involves establishing a rela­tion­ship between the injured party and the attacker — a relationship that she found impossible to have.

. This alerts us to different dimensions of the term. I think that when we are talking about God forgiving us, then Julie's definition is very important. However, God is always present but in human affairs death, geography or sheer weight of emotional work mean that relationship may not be possible. However, letting go of bitterness, coming to a position where a relationship might begin to be possible in appropriate circumstances, may be. And I wonder whether the issue of condoning lurks here too in Julie's words,

I think I will be angry for the rest of my life for what happened. [But] when a life is cut down, then you should be angry.

. I think she is right. And I suspect that at the heart of forgiving lies the acts of recognising that anger, discerning what 'belongs' with the perpetrator and what doesn't and then forbearing to direct that anger to the perpetrator in punitive fashion, but rather to bear the pain ourselves. Make no mistake, to forbear punitive reaction is painful because it is not condoning or excusing or making light of a misdeed and/or an injustice. It is recognising the wrong, recognising that it deserves a reaction but choosing to forego that reaction. Obviously that is easier to do if there is love, respect, understanding and a sense of common humanity. It is very hard to do when those things are not present in the first place and a stranger is the mis-doer. It is often (but not always) easier to forgive someone we love. Though sometimes a sense of betrayal makes it even harder. Harder too to forgive an act done in malevolence than one out of ignorance or weakness. Perhaps it is the malevolent acts that are those that particularly invoke the need for personal relationship reconciliation?

I'm inching towards a fuller understanding of forgiveness, with the awareness that a lot of the theological debate about atonement is probably too detached from the realities of forgivness. I have a suspicion we would do better to start with forgiveness and reflect on that as a way to theologise about God's forgiveness. I'm still captivated by the idea that the cross is an eikon of the pain that God bears to forgive.