When harm is being done, our prime concern should be to stop it. Until that is done, forgiveness is not appropriate—we should be focused on ending the abuse and righting the wrong. Women are always being asked to forgive our abusers—but unless the abuse is stopped, forgiveness can easily become collusion and victim blaming.
Once the wrong has been ended, when the wrongdoers have shown remorse, admitted their fault, offered apologies and made amends, forgiveness can be a way of letting go and moving on. If we continue to nurse a hurt or chew on a resentment, we give away our power and compound the hurt that was done to us.
The Goddess does not preside over a system of reward and punishment. Our framework for spiritual growth and ethical behavior is one of learning. If we hurt someone, if we make a huge mistake, we are supposed to learn from the experience and shift our pattern of behavior. There’s no Wiccan equivalent to the Christian hell—but there are some pretty nasty, unpleasant spiritual places we get in when we harm others without remorse, or wallow in bitterness and hate in response to hurts done to us. The Goddess—or life, if you prefer--also tends to present us with the same lesson over and over again, often in more and more extreme forms, until we get it and change. If we find ourselves repeating a destructive pattern, we can ask, ‘What am I not learning here?’
In some ways, I think it’s easier to forgive our enemies than our friends, at least in small things. The hurts that really sting are not the attacks from someone we know is against us. They’re the small betrayals of friends and loved ones, the mean piece of gossip passed on, the unkind word, the sharp criticism and the unfair judgment. If we value the relationship, we need to honestly confront the person who has hurt us, tell them so, and ask for the change we want. Only together can we change the quality of the relationship—and then we can put the past behind us, forgive and move on.
It’s even harder, sometimes, to forgive ourselves. All of us make mistakes, sometimes huge ones. All of us at times fail to live up to our own expectations. But mistakes are also what we learn the most from. The questions I ask myself when I’ve made a mistake are, “Have I acknowledged the wrong—directly to the person I’ve hurt. Have I made amends? What have I learned that can keep me from making a similar mistake again?”
There are great models of forgiveness around us in the world today. I think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process as one example. Another might be the Marshall Plan, when the U.S. helped rebuild the economies of Japan and Germany, our enemies in World War II. Our reward is that today, our former enemies are strong allies. Maybe that can give us hope, as we look at the bitter conflicts in the world around us, that someday they too may be reconciled.
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