Hi Puppet,
I struggled with forgiveness for a very long time. The tenets of my faith call for forgiveness but I had no idea what it really meant or how to go about it. Like a lot of people, I thought forgiveness meant acting like nothing bad had ever happened. (I once wrote a megapost on this topic, but despite searching for it high and low, I can't find it.)
I hit a point in my recovery where I was really grappling with the need to forgive and was reading Wounded Heart by Dan Allender and hit his definition of forgiveness which was the first time forgiveness made sense to me. His take was that forgiveness comes in two parts: relinquishing and restoration. Relinquishing you can do on your own but restoration can only happen if both people do their part. The relinquishing part is the principle that BB talked about. Its the acknowledgement that wrong was done to you, that you really were injured by the actions of someone else (this was so important to me, because there was SO much denial about what happened and part of the abuse had been to threaten me to keep me silent) and that they deserved punishment. That you had a RIGHT to punish them. But you relinquish that right and allow God to handle that.
The other thing I struggled with was that I didn't WANT a relationship with my father. I actually hadn't since him since I was 11 and I wasn't about to go looking for him. And that's where the restoration part of the explanation came in. While we can relinquish our right to return punishment for wrong, we should not have to, nor is it loving, to restore relationship with the person unless there is geniune remorse about what they did, which includes a recognition of how they wronged you. The principal underneath this is really that acts of hatred harm both the person who does the action and the person it is done to. So you refrain from acting on your hate (however well justified). But you don't forgive before they repent because to let someone to continue doing wrong will hurt them as well as you. So to withhold relationship is a loving act.
Just as I was reading that book, I got a call from my older sister that my father was dying in a hospital a 17 hour drive away. She wanted to go see him before he died, and asked if I would go with her. It is a very long, complex story but I when we got to the hospital my dad was unconscious and when I first laid eyes on him (for the first time in 28 years) I experienced the deepest, darkest wave of hatred I've ever experienced. I ended up going to the waiting room and was praying and realized I was tired of carrying that hate, that I didn't like knowing it was inside me. And I prayed that I could find the strength to let it go. And I was given that strength and I relinquished my right to punish my father. I was able to walk back into that room and place my hand on his arm and tell him that I forgave him (I later found out that he was paralyzed on one side from a previous stroke, so I had touched the one arm that actually had feeling.) My sister and I ended up paying for the funeral (I was also struggling with Honor your Father and Mother
) and when we were at the funeral home, despite saying no several times, the funeral director put us on the phone with the priest who took my father's last confession. And the priest was able to tell me that my father knew he had hurt me but that he had loved me. I didn't know how badly I still wanted to hear that until I heard it. In that moment I was relieved that my dad was God's problem, because I wouldn't know how to sort it out. I hope he found forgiveness because it is only in Heaven that I can hope to ever had the relationship with my dad I longed for.
All that said, it took me years, decades of dealing with what happened to me before I was ready to take that step. Sometimes forgiveness can be used as a way to bypass facing the pain and hurt of what happened and trying to rush past it. It's important that a person can look at what happened and acknowledge all of their feelings including rage and hurt. You have to know what you're letting go before you can let it go.
I also believe that whether or not to forgive is not something I can expect someone else to do. It's very difficult and in some cases, I believe, close to impossible. And knowing what some people have suffered, it feels incredibly presumptious to tell them they have to forgive.
There's a book you might enjoy reading called
Forgiving and Not Forgiving: Why Sometimes it's Better Not to Forgive by Jeanne Safer. She makes the case for not forgiving and I thought it was a good book.
AG
