Forgiveness

Why would someone hold a grudge? If someone has offended us, harboring the injury makes that individual indebted to us and therefore inferior. This is all the more attractive because we’re angry at them and so the imposed inferiority seems fitting and relieving.

However, grudges require frequent nurturing. We have to build in our mind a case for the other individuals wrong. We consider arguments why the offense is hideous and we continually scour for reasons that our own presence, manner, or actions did not induce the offense. Naturally anger subsides quickly. But grudgers are different because we sustain the anger to propel our continued power over the offender. This process is taxing, and can consume an incredible amount of time, focus, and enjoyment.

In our mind’s rolodex, we write little minuses next to these offenders and keeping the offense alive empowers us to exact the justice we feel we deserve when the opportunity to slander, embarrass, or undermine them arrives. Sometimes simply the existence of inferiority motivates the continuance of grudging.

Understanding this clear illumination of what the lack of forgiveness is gives radiance to the principle itself. Simply consider its definition:

Forgiveness is to stop blaming or to absolve from payment, concluding or forsaking resentment, indignation or anger as a result of perceived offence or mistake and ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.

In this clarity we can understand that withholding forgiveness is purely selfish. We withhold our forgiveness to imprison the other individual to our own judgment. Moreover, both the grudger and the unforgiven are measurably worse off while producing no positive outcome elsewhere. The burden of maintaining a grudge can be stunting, paralyzing, and imprisoning. As the Chinese Proverb says:

“The fire you kindle for your enemy more often burns you.”

Meanwhile forgiveness comes from a place lacking self. But how do we come upon this selfless mastery. Many who believe they have forgiven in fact have not.

Most forgiveness comes easily when we realize that most offenses are unintentional and that unintentional offenses ought not hurt. What is hurtful is the willful injury—that someone willed you harm; so the realization of likely unintentionality makes forgivness relatively easy. Second, most intentional harm is a response to something we have done in which in which the other individual is indulging their own grudge. Realizing our own part makes forgiveness clearly mutually beneficial, for we both need it. The third case is the most difficult. We often enjoy the belief that everything happens for a reason or that there exist no coincidences. Instances of rape or other life abuses are difficult situations that appear to pose a counterexample to this belief. How are we to forgive those whose offenses are exactly intentional and completely unelicited? This is a difficult and sensitive issue but I’d like to read you a story:

“Margaret had been in counseling or therapy continuously for fourteen years, chronically depressed and almost non-functional. She blamed her inability to get on in life on her mother—though she claimed she would go for long periods without allowing herself to think of her mother…At any one time, she said, she had at most one friend, toward whom she would behave so possessively that after a few weeks or months the friend could not tolerate her anymore and would then leave her alone. Her lips trembled when she talked and were pinched in when she didn’t, and almost always her eyes were downcast…In private I learned that her mother had frequently abused her seually when she was a child and, as Margaret thought, ruined her forever.

The class extended over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. When we reconvened [in January], Margaret was the only participant not present. We started anyway, and about twenty minutes into the session a woman whom I did not recognize entered the room and tood a seat at one of the tables where the participants were sitting. As I usually do in situations like this, I let the discussion continue—interruptions can break the class’s concentration. After a few minutes I realized with a shock who the woman was and whispered to the person next to me, “It’s Margaret.” Simultaneously, I noticed, others were doing the same thing. Margaret’s face was relaxed, and there was a natural dignity in her bearing that had been completely absent before. And when she spoke, as she did presently, her lips did not tremble. The self-pity was gone. To me, her countenance seemed to be illuminated.

She asked to speak, and told us she had taken the train over the holiday to see her mother, whom she had freely forgiven. She told her mother that, more than anything else, she wanted her to have some peace before she died. She asked her mother’s forgiveness for the hatred she had borne toward her through so many years. In the days following her return she often had tender feelings toward her mother, and called and wrote to her.” (Bonds that Make Us Free, p. 296-297)

One may wonder, why is it that we are in some sense held to a higher standard than God. Didn’t he say “I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men” (D&C 64:9–10); which implies we ought to forgive at least as much as God is forgiving or that we should forgive in all cases including those cases where God won’t. I have before thought that this contained a soft contradiction. However, none exists. Mankind is in no position to judge and therefore, no position to withhold forgiveness. “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, I understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.” ~Orson Scott Card. Perhaps this is why the Lord is so forgiving. And when hesitating to dispense our forgiveness, we may do well to remember “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility” Wadsworth Longfellow.

You may remember the story P Hinckley shared on forgiveness shortly before his death. A young man threw a stolen, frozen turkey through the windshield of an oncoming car which almost killed the driver, Victoria Ruvolo. The woman was constantly badgering the defense attorneys to know the wellbeing of her assailant. On the court floor she hugged him, stroking his hair, saying ‘It’s OK. I just want you to make your life the best it can be.’

These experiences demonstrate a subtle lesson. The 19-year-old vandal could do nothing to earn the forgiveness of Victoria Ruvolo. It was this God-like quality that is often in the Hispanic people and many of the poor of the earth that is rarely among us. It was mercy. It was unearned, undeserved, and un-earnable and un-deservable forgiveness. This is how we must understand God’s loving forgiving mercy. Which is why it’s a miracle, something where a higher law has superseded a natural law of the natural man. To consider it is breathtaking.