Many people think that forgiveness is about the person or people who have done a great wrong. Can THEY be forgiven? But the great secret of forgiveness is that it is about the person or people who have been wronged. Forgiveness is the path to freedom from being dominated by the harm that has been done to you or to those you love.
When you have been grievously harmed, those who hurt you in the past can continue to have control over you. They can dominate your thoughts, your fears, your whole life. Forgiveness is about letting go of the control they have over you. Forgiveness is letting it go.
This is the important lesson that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught the world. The victims of the horrendous system of apartheid decided not to let it control their future as it had controlled them in the past. They put it down. They demanded the truth be told and thus illustrated the biblical injunction that “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) The truth allows you to let go of the harm and in letting it go became free from its total grasp. This work is never fully done and it is a process rather than a once-for-all kind of total release, but it is very real.
So many women with whom I have worked in the domestic violence movement are pressed by clergy or by friends and family to “just forgive him” and return to the battering relationship. That’s not what I mean. That type of pressure to “forgive and forget” is about the victimizer and not about the victim; forgiveness while the hurt and harm goes on is meaningless and just perpetrates more harm by inducing guilt in the victim. There is no truth in that kind of “forgiveness” and so there can be no reconciliation. It is just another version of victimizing.
People who have been wronged need to be at the center of our consideration of forgiveness. It is they who know when and how and even if they can let it go. We can support them in that process, but ultimately it begins and ends with their feelings.
For the victimizer, the path of forgiveness is also through truth. When you can truthfully and profoundly admit that you have done a great wrong you have taken a step on the path of forgiveness. It is not something that anyone does “for” you by “forgiving you.” You and only you can admit to yourself, to those you have harmed and to your God what you have done. It has been my frequent pastoral experience that people spend a lot of mental energy trying to hide from themselves that they have done wrong, but the knowledge seeps out and makes them loathe themselves without fully knowing why. It is truly a poison in the soul. It wrecks a lot of lives.
The great secret of forgiveness is that the truth really does set you free.
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