To forgive, truly to forgive, involves letting go of the feeling of resentment and of the vision that underlies that feeling—the vision in which we see ourselves as being offended against, the vision of self-as-victim. As in all matters relating to the spiritual, focusing on feeling distracts from the more profound and truly important issue—the actuality of be-ing. The core of resentment is less a “feeling” than the “seeing” of one’s self as being a victim. To see “self-as-victim” is to adopt a worldview in which forgiveness becomes impossible.
The main spiritual shift that takes place in the event of being-forgiven/ forgiving is thus a new experiencing of self; blaming others falls away, and we begin to accept primary responsibility for who we are. Forgiveness comes when we let go of the feeling of resentment by surrendering the vision of self-as-victim. If we have been injured, we no longer experience the injury as a barrier to relationship. Instead, we see the injury in the perspective of our own imperfection: How can we expect anyone else to be perfect if we ourselves are imperfect? Within that understanding comes the profound realization that we have been forgiven for our own imperfections. And then there follows, in time, a second and equally profound internal transformation: we understand that we have already forgiven others.
Thus it is that we do not forgive; instead, we discover forgiveness in both its forms—both that we have been forgiven and that we have forgiven. Spirituality’s mutuality holds true here as everywhere: We are forgiven only if we are open to forgiving, but we are able to forgive only in being forgiven—we get only by giving, and we give only by getting.
Modern culture, with its tendency to “absolutize fulfillment as the basic truth and the final goal of human existence” has lost all sense of the experience known as forgiveness. The competitive mind-set fostered by untempered market economies mistrusts such giving with no assurance of getting, seeing it as foolishness in a world that lives less “on” the edge than “by” the edge. But there is another source for our loss of faith in forgiveness: the confusion of forgiveness with other phenomena. And so it may be helpful to travel once again down the path of the via negativa, exploring what forgiveness is not in order to understand better what it is.
Forgiveness is not explanation. Remember the story about the Episcopal priest who went to her confessor and discussed with him her tendency to control and other troublesome behaviors? When she began to explore possible psychological facets of her behaviors, the confessor interrupted to ask: “Do you want forgiveness or an explanation?”
Explanations have to do with exploring causes, with digging down into the past in an effort to exert whatever control is still possible over the past. Forgiveness, on the other hand, has to do with letting go of the past—giving up the claim to control the past and refusing to be controlled by it.
But forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting. “Letting go” of the past is not some kind of erasure; forgiveness is not an attempt to obliterate the past or wipe the slate clean. “The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive, but they do not forget,” commented radical psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, echoing the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who phrased this core insight in another way: “To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.”
For-GIVE-ness, recall, connotes gift; to confuse forgiving with forgetting would lose—even violate—that reality. If forgiving were the same as forgetting, then forgiving would be an act in some way under our human control. But we are capable of forgiveness only if we are acted on by some reality outside of, beyond, and in some way greater than ourselves. We cannot bestow forgiveness either by or on ourselves.
Confusing forgiving with forgetting sets another trap: We become convinced that mistakes and wrongdoings not only can, but should, be forgotten. Spiritual tradition sees it as a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of; instead, the sages and saints suggest, such difficulties are best put to use. The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by remembering it that the possibility of atonement (making at-one) occurs and forgiveness comes to fruition. “Salvation lies in remembrance.”
And so, finally, because the past is important, there can be no “unconditional forgiveness.” Because we are human, and therefore limited, there can be no unconditional anything. We are not God. Forgetting that, as is our all-too-human tendency, we commit idolatry by assuming that since God loves and forgives unconditionally, we can be like God and do the same. But all “idolatry” has ironic consequences, producing the opposite of the goal intended. Thus the claim to “forgive unconditionally” is the antithesis of benign, for it devalues the one we are supposedly forgiving by implying that he is not responsible for his choices.
Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility. Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions. If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance—it comes to be interpreted as not caring. Every human being is responsible for his or her choices: which means, quite simply, that each of us has a need to matter—somehow, to someone. We especially need to know that our actions have an effect on the people we love.
When behavior, no matter how selfish or bizarre or hurtful, is repeatedly met with what is intended to be unconditional forgiveness, one must wonder whether “who I am” or “what I do” matters at all. What is needed in such instances is not unconditional forgiveness but confrontation—the kind of confrontation that every alcoholic fortunate enough to be truly loved eventually encounters. Until we are ready to accept our own responsibility and stop blaming someone else for our problems, change and healing will not occur. That does not mean that people who have been victimized by others are to blame themselves for their hurt and their pain. But as A.A.’ s first spinoff, Al-Anon, rediscovered, even victims are responsible for what they do now. And one thing they must do now, if healing is to occur, is to stop looking for explanations, to stop seeing themselves as victims and to start “cleaning themselves up.” In short, to forgive.
*All Bolds My Adds – Bruce M