What does it mean to really forgive someone?

My purpose in these posts is to bring a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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As you may experience and say, there are in life experiences of hurt and injustice that are so grievous and hurtful that they are in effect burned into your memory... and this can cause us to experience all manner of strong negative emotions at the very sight or sound or even thought of them... and such after effects can bring us to question whether or not we have forgiven them. For this and other reasons it is important to remember that forgiveness is not about forgetting... our memory faculty does what it is supposed to do, it remembers....

Even after having forgiven, and even years later, at the sight or even the thought of the person who hurt you, you could still feel a violent revulsion, elicited by the memory of the hurt, the injustice, but such revulsion is not precluded by forgiving them. In order to become fully human and fully alive and open to the love of God and eternal life, we are required to forgive so that our soul might be open and receptive to God. We are not required to like those who have hurt us, those who go on hurting us, enemies... because to like a thing or a person is to anticipate a good feeling, a good taste because of that thing or person. I like apples because they taste good and when I see a good one, I salivate from the memory of having eaten apples before. When I see a lovely person who elicits peace, joy, love, I like that person because of the goodness emanating from him or her.

No, I don't have to like those who are so self obsessed that they have no feelings for me or those I love. When I think of such persons, it might happen that when I consider how limited they are in their experience of human life and interiority, and in contrast how rich and blessed God has made me in giving me to experience wonder at all his creation and beauty and also the full range of deep human experience from compassion to charity, from kindness to heroic acts of service; then it might happen that upon looking at those who have little or none of these finer human capabilities, that I might feel pity for them, and perhaps regret that they have not allowed themselves to go further, or let God open them up to becoming more human, more like Him....

Pity is already the beginning of what Jesus commanded us to do with enemies, with those who hurt or do evil to us, that is, to forgive them, not return evil but good to them, pray for them and desire their good, not their harm. I know I have forgiven someone when I push them into God's arms, into Jesus' hands, and ask Him to take care of them, which may one day include punishment if they do not reform.

Beyond pity, what also helps to forgive evil doers is the remembrance of my own sinfulness and fallibility. The more I live and learn about myself, my inclination to selfishness or other faults or flawed virtues, the more I realize how much I depend on the mercy and forgiveness and understanding of God, then the more I can begin to feel some compassion for others who are also flawed human beings. When they multiply offenses against me, I can begin to realize how my faults have similarly offended and hurt others, and then can begin the work of pleading with God to repair the harm I have done to others. In this way, my enemies can provoke me towards having a greater heart of repentance, a greater will to not only do more good but also to repair the harm I may have done, often without realizing it.

When I have traveled this far on the road of forgiveness it could happen that I being to realize how those who have done me harm and even go on doing me harm have been used by God as some kind of "agent provocateur" to provoke in me attitudes, dispositions, acts of the will, and new paths by which God can not only repair my own harm but also bring me into a greater participation in his own work of creation... bringing about more life in others and in his beautiful world, in which after all I am but a creature....

This is already a lot that God is doing and can do as soon as I begin to open myself to forgiving and going beyond that, and all of this goes on by God's loving, merciful, and creative action even though I may still experience hurt, revulsion, and even anger at the sight or memory of my enemies. In these ways, the Holy Trinity brings me into the depths of the divine love among the three divine Persons, and they fashion me into their own resemblance, and my suffering into a resemblance of the suffering of the Son of Man... and in this way giving me more and more participation in the death of Jesus; so that I may also participate more fully in his life, both on Earth and now in eternity....

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My purpose in these posts is to help spread the contributions of a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal  QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC 

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Unlike finished objects, we are "happenings of being" made up of love we give and receive in communion - "Spiritual Development and the Gospel Narratives 6" by John Shea

My purpose in these posts is to bring a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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It very challenging for us to live in both the physical/flesh world and the spirit world all at the same time. We suffer a lot because of what is happening in our psyche and flesh, as a social, emotional, and physical being, and wonder what has become of our soul / spirit, but we realize that we were really identifying ourselves with our psyche and body – mind, emotions, and flesh - as though this were all that we are. We want and need to see clearly the difference between "me" and "I". We think that we are a living thing that is already created, finished, done, but that is not what we are. 

Oh yes, the body is here, but who I really am emerges from within and is composed of the meaning I give to my life through my decisions, words, and actions, how I live out and order my thoughts and feelings. Who I am can’t come under my own observation, because it’s the transcendent “happening of being” where God breathes life into me and where I am one with God, from whom I flow and to whom I am returning. It is from this transcendent level of being that I can observe the rest of me in all its levels and parts, none of which really constitute who I am of themselves, either separately or together.

Those other levels and parts have a lot happening in them, they all have their own structures and ways of operating, and their interconnectedness is very complex, but in terms of spiritual development – my own and that of others – how do I identify myself? How does my identity truly come into being? The spiritual realm constitutes our identity as surely as the other realms do, (physical, emotional, psychological, social, intellectual, etc.) because we are related to a transcendent Source, but it also has the capacity to unify all the others in an integrated sense of who I am. Actually realizing this is a long (life time), difficult process, and a crucial factor is what my treasure is: that to which I give most of my attention, where my heart invests itself, and how it distributes my life force and energy.

Giving all our attention to sin – temptation, actually sinning, and torment over having sinned – is how we come to identify with sin and constitute our identity around sin. This only tends to lock us into producing more fruit of sin and injury as we get caught up with networks of social reinforcement. Jesus refused to take part in the complicities around sin, judging, and retribution but instead gave all his attention to his Father and the Father’s love, forgiving people in order to set them free from the traps of sin for the freedom of the children of God; so that they / we might freely receive love and in turn give ourselves in love like Jesus. Still, we struggle to accept God’s forgiveness and to then in turn offer it to others, in part because we are so invested in keeping track of our hurts and the offences of others.

Like the Pharisees, a fair amount of our identity has formed around distinguishing ourselves as different from or better than others. The Pharisees had a lot invested around the rituals of purification from sin and ritual uncleanness. Without sinners, the Temple economy would collapse. For my part, if I can’t sit in judgment over others, then I will have to look at my own sins, and I may not want to. A formidable obstacle to forgiveness is that holding a grudge and seeking revenge can make me feel powerful and be quite intoxicating, which makes other practices necessary for coming to freedom.

Restitution can give a sense of the damage caused by sin, penance can purify or burn away my sense of identification with my sin, and seeking a firm purpose of amendment brings me to face the decision to turn my attention away from sin and give it to God, others, and spirit. God’s love lets me face the fear of being exposed by his light of truth as a sinner, and in forgiving me, shares with me his power to turn to others with forgiveness. God’s limitless mercy and grace frees me from Pharisee stingy impulses to control and ration forgiveness.

In life, God’s Word opens up this territory of forgiveness; theology and theological reflection - like the pondering in the heart that Mary was always doing - maps the territory of forgiveness out, and practical spirituality walks the path and does forgiveness. These three - God's Word, theological reflection or pondering, and practical spirituality - are three essential disciplines for the Christian life. We cannot live our faith in Christ as Lord and follow Him as his disciples without practicing these. God is always there and lovingly bent over us, like a loving and doting parent, but like children, we are not always or constantly aware of, or appreciative of, this loving presence and attention of our Father.

Although I don’t recall ever articulating that every human being is at a certain level always in union with God; as I reflect on it, I sense that I have always believed that this is so, but could not say it in clear terms. Over time, I have gone from a static view of creation (like the universe, we were created all at once and are a finished product) to a dynamic one, where we are ever growing and developing and God is constantly holding us in being by his will and breathing his own Spirit into us. 

Jesus brought home to us the intimacy of this relation and the gratuity of the freedom with which the Father calls us to enter into this life more deliberately through love for God and of every other human person. In sin we cease breathing in and out the life and love offered us by God,  but we also hold back forgiveness, and stop receiving and giving ourselves in love - we begin to die. The great joy of reconciliation wells up from our restoration to being loved and loving. So, am I filled with joy today?

to be continued....

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My purpose in these posts is to help spread the contributions of a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal  QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC 

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Unselfconscious gratuitous acts of love make us most ourselves and unite us to all and to God - "Spiritual Development and the Gospel Narratives 5" by John Shea

My purpose in these posts is to bring a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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Beatrice Bruteau, in her book The Grand Option, inspired especially by Teilhard de Chardin, expresses a vision of human evolution that would have us be willing and conscious elements that will evolve into a higher order of being all together as a collective human organism. I like it though as a fresh way of looking at the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, and our willing and conscious participation as active members. She explores the distinction between our human nature ridden life and the loftier human / divine transcendence to which Jesus calls us in the Gospels and which the saints obviously attained in their lifetimes. 

She says it’s really up to us to move towards a collective awakening that as human beings we are really all united and all responsible together for our collective outcome on this planet. She goes to the root of the Gospel message to seek for an understanding of the giftedness in us and our potential as human beings that can include all of humanity, irrespective of religion or other distinguishing attributes. Christians have been entrusted with the revelation of how we are connected to our Source and with each other; so we have the responsibility to make this good news known. In addition, Jesus has given us as his Church means to remain in communion with Him and be transformed into Him by the Spirit as we accept to love, obey, and follow Him.

As Gandhi took Jesus and his good news to heart and put his approach into practice; so we must follow Jesus literally and actually live the familiar and comforting revelation that we are children of God and in our practice renounce privilege, titles, and influence in exchange for the truth and the solidarity to which it calls us. These are the very same things Jesus formally renounced in the desert as He was tempted, and then continued to renounce until the end. Like Jesus at his Baptism and temptations, we must hear God the Father call us his beloved children, and go discover all that we are not – no magic, no miracles, no domination for the sake of our own interest – and what we are – regarding all as equal, impartial as God is, loving our enemies, pure in fact as well as in ritual, and considering ourselves blessed even in misfortune. Against the entrenched “routine assumption that we are all separate, isolated, but comparable units” we are children of God who do “inherit the nature of our parent” – an integration of the metaphysics of a global spirituality uniting East and West.

As children of God we are incomparable – just as there can be no adequate description of God, so there can be no adequate description of who we are – mysterious and indefinable as God. Any description of our self remains limiting, and points to only a part of who we are. Our true self is mysterious, flowing with life from our Source. We are “transcendent of all descriptions” as God is. Like our Father, we are love, that is, we are most fully ourselves in the very act of loving the other with no interest for or awareness of ourselves, not responding to external stimulation, request, or need, but creatively going out to another – especially those unworthy of our love – such as enemies. God’s love, ever creative and original, is unexpected from the world’s point of view. Loving like God, I become a lover, distinguishing myself from my beloved at the same time that I unite myself to the one I love. The more I love, the more I become who I am, a lover, in the image of God.

When we creatively and freely love another, our distinctiveness as persons is clarified at the same time our love joins us to the other, and our loving them actually brings us into them, and them into us. This is what happens between the contemplative and God. God loves us first, and as we contemplate God we become aware of his love and surrender to it, loving our Lover back. In self-giving love, “each subject sees through the other’s eyes, feels with the other’s heart, wills in conjunction with the other’s will, and flows together with the other’s action.” The more distinct and free the person is, the more perfect their love can be. The original paradigm for such total union is the “perichoresis”, the union of love among the three Divine Persons in the Blessed Trinity, an essential doctrine of Orthodox and Eastern Rite Churches which is at the heart of how they understand and deliberately intend to live their lives of faith in love in following Jesus.

This love truly creates and gives life, enabling the newly beloved to in turn become filled with life and overflow with love to others. God in Jesus visibly pours himself out to give us life; we too become conscious of the deep desire to pour ourselves out into others in love. Inhabited by God’s active love, like Jesus we become “incarnate as creative process” as we too learn to pour ourselves out in love for others. Our “central self is full, luminous life, safe from all injury, and is most itself when it is most giving itself.” It is at the level of person, not of nature, that we pour our love and forgiveness towards others for their future good, whether they accept it or not. 

What is evil in our lives and our suffering both fall in the “order of reaction and choice freedom” within the confines of this physical world and life, but we transcend it by loving impartially like God, simply for the good of the “I am” in the other, ignoring attributes of nature. We are the activity of the Trinity drawing us into their perichoresis – as we live it most deliberately in Holy Communion – uniting with our activity in a moment of self-realization that we are loved and lover, and God unites with us as we love another and in turn unite with their self-realization and outreach of love to a third. 

This is how we are in the image of the Trinity, persons in union with all other persons, and loving in God’s love, rising above our nature. We can force none to this love, but can freely love others, as Jesus did. Virgil Elizondo’s “I Forgive but I Do Not Forget” seems to bypass or at least ignore traditional teaching on the 7 capital sins as the root cause of human sinfulness and misery, but it’s only that he makes a very good point, namely, that much of our human misery comes from our originally sinful inclination to cry out for justice when we feel wronged and to secretly desire, if not demand or exact, punishment or vengeance for those who offend us. We just can’t forget wrongs, because our memory of them continues to stimulate feelings like anger, resentment, and desire for revenge or at least to see the offender punished. Our damnation is continuing to cling to this misery and refusing to let it go. 

He makes a very good case for wanting to be free of these destructive feelings and desires, which I agree eat away at our “innards” until we become free of them, and the only way to do that is to forgive the offender as though we had never been offended at all. I like his conclusion that this means undoing or “uncreating” the offense, but as only God can create and uncreate; only God can effectively forgive. We lost our God-given ability to do that in the original sin, and what has now become natural is a deep-seated desire for retribution justice. This enlightens what it means to be enslaved by the law, and why God himself had to come in Jesus to clear a new path, make a new humanity possible, through loving forgiveness of offenders, which only divine love makes possible.

This text too, like the others we have been reading, affirms that it’s our condition to live in both the flesh and the spirit at the same time. While our remembrance of offenses continues to generate feelings of hurt, anger and desire for retribution justice; our own experience of God’s inexhaustible and undeserved forgiveness, mercy and love set us free to manifest the same superabundant love and mercy to others. This is the new man, the new life in the Spirit which is the freedom of the children of God and such good news. Like Jesus and his Father, we refuse to allow offenses against us to become the basis of our relationships with our offenders or anyone else. We refuse, like Jesus, to identify or to reidentify with sin; having once and for all left sin and failures behind in order to embrace life in God.

In chapter 8 “The Living One’ of Beatrice Bruteau’s The Grand Option, she seems to pick this up when she states that forgiveness is not directed to the corpse of the past offense, but rather “unites with the other’s creative act of stepping forward into the next moment… is an act of making the future.” Forgiveness is just one dimension of self-giving love that emerges not from the psyche and other elements of my personality, but from the spirit which is profoundly centered in union with God and shares in God’s “sense of sheer ‘I am’… (and) is radiating in all directions the intention ‘May you be!’” The self that we give to others in love is not the self we are normally conscious of, our living soul, but the deeper self, which, united to God, is also a life giving spirit. Agape is more than contemplative or appreciative love, is active, bursting “with energetic desire that there be more being.” Creative, free self-giving desires to bring into being what does not yet exist for the other’s good.

It is this transcendent spirit in us which is our true self – in union with God and flowing from God as its Source – and the new life revealed in Jesus and shared with us since his Resurrection. It is a challenge for us to be aware of this spirit and creative freedom, unpredictable and bringing forth life that is ever new, as our true self and to deliberately live out of it from moment to moment, and to be further aware of pouring ourselves out in love into the same fluid spirit self in others and of all others pouring themselves out in love into us. At this level, we realize that the boundaries of our selfhood are interpersonal to the limits of the Body of Christ, rather than the narrow limits of our psyche and physical traits and awareness. We are so familiar in the confines and comfort of our body / psyche self, that we require spiritual disciplines to cultivate the ongoing awareness of our spiritual self in communion with God and with all the others like ourselves.

In “The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels…” John Shea demonstrates how Jesus provided us with means to live out of this sense of communion with all others through ongoing reconciliation: talking it out one to one, then if they refuse to listen including a few other people, but if they continue to refuse to listen only then finally appealing to authority, and finally when their refusal becomes obstinate, simply considering the offender as one needing ministry or work. At every stage, relational skills and the willingness to dialogue and be open to other possibilities are necessary for reconciliation to occur.

More importantly, we need to bridge the disparity between the psycho-social level within us and Spirit. Prayerful attention to Spirit can help all those involved get in touch with their deep desire for peace and enter into the process of reconciliation from the deeper spirit self from which radiates the love of God, which makes the process infinitely more fruitful and life giving for all. Our psycho-social self tends to keep a record of wrongs and hurts, so that forgiveness tends to put pressure on letting go of the score keeping; whereas our spirit self is aware of receiving itself from God and more willing to give itself in forgiveness in order to see the future life of the other come to pass in peace and love.

to be continued....

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My purpose in these posts is to help spread the contributions of a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.

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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal  QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC 

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