Forgive and forget : healing the hurts we

don't deserve
1. Forgive and forget : healing the hurts we don't deserve
2. Table of Contents
 Forgive and forget : healing the hurts
we don't deserve
Smedes, Lewis B
This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive.
The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format
automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and
is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct
reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and
incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or
footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which
identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are
not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which
may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in
the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will
increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we
may have started numbering before the print book's visible page
numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning
process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this
book will be useful to you.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet
library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The
Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers,
historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to
historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive
includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived
web pages, and provides specialized services for information access
for the blind and other persons with disabilities.
Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.7.0)
ISBN □-□b-Db7MQa-3
“Lewis B. Smedes has written a warm, wise andhelpful book on an
important topic thatneeded attention. I know that many peoplewill be as
helped by it as I was.”—Harold S.Kushner. author of When Bad Things
Happen toGood People
Award-winning author Lewis B. Smedes for the firsttime shows how
anyone can tap the power of forgiveness to achieve healthier relationships
andpeace of mind. FORGIVE & FORGET explains andthen takes us step
by step through the four stagesof forgiveness: hurting, hating, healing,
andreconciliation. It provides solid guidelines for free-ing ourselves from
the burden of hurts we don'tdeserve and for reclaiming the happiness that
isours.
Smedes provides realistic answers to such agonizing questions as: How
can you forgive an unfaithful spouse? a parent's abuse? a friend's betrayal?
an enemy's spitefulness? FORGIVE & FOR-GET helps readers to deal with
the memories ofthe horrors of the Holocaust... "monsters" such asJim Jones
or Charles Manson ... or the "invisiblepeople"—the nameless, faceless
persons whobring on indiscriminate violence and suffering.Smedes teaches
us not only how to forgive others,but how to forgive ourselves by curing
deep-rooted guilts and getting on with our lives. He alsoaddresses the
hardest question of all: When youhave no one to blame, can you forgive
God?
Drawing on examples from his own experience,the experiences of those
he has counseled, andsuch well-known cases as Pope John Paul II
whoforgave his wouldbe assassin, Smedes points theway for us to move
decisively through the crisis offorgiveness to a healed relationship with the
per-son or persons who hurt us—absent or present, liv-ing or dead.
Clearly defining what forgiveness is and is not,showing us precisely
how it works, and offeringencouragement along the way, the author
presents an unparalleled opportunity in self-healingthat anyone can put to
work immediately. "Whenyou forgive someone for hurting you, you
performspiritual surgery inside your soul; you cut away thewrong that was
done you so that you can heal
(continued on back flap]
1015^Sfl^
Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2017 with funding fromChina-
America Digital Academic Library (CADAL)
https://archive.org/details/forgiveforgethea00smed_1
I
I

■■
k

V
t
FORGIVE AND FORGET
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR:
How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?
Love Within LimitsMere Morality
TO
my sister Jessieand
my brother Peter
"letters written not by hand, but by the Spirit"

f«

>
w <1
Contents
A Word of Thanks ix
An Invitation xi
The Magic Eyes: A Little Fable xiii
Part I The Four Stages of Forgiving 1
1. We Hurt 3
2. We Hate 20
3. We Heal Ourselves 27
4. We Come Together 31
5. Some Nice Things Forgiving Is Not 38
Part II Forgiving People Who Are Hard to Forgive 51
6. Forgiving the Invisible People 54
7. Forgiving People Who Do Not Care 64
8. Forgiving Ourselves 71
9. Forgiving Monsters 78
10. Forgiving God 82
Part III How People Forgive 93
11. Slowly 95
12. With a Little Understanding 99
13. In Confusion 105
14. With Anger Left Over 108
15. A Little at a Time 111
16. Freely, or Not at All 114
17. With a Fundamental Feeling 117
Part IV Why Forgive? 123
18. Forgiving Makes Life Fairer 125
19. Forgiving Is a Better Risk 134
20. Forgiving Is Stronger 138
21. Forgiving Fits Faulty People 147
Postlude 152

:s
 c
f
..(
8
%
Aa
A Word of Thanks
I learned about forgiving, not by reading good books, but bylistening to
good forgivers. Several of them appear in thisvolume, most behind names not
their own. I thank them forsharing their struggles and their triumphs with me.
I must also mention Dr. Paul Clement, who let me teach aseminar on
forgiving with him at the Fuller Graduate School ofPsychology and Dr. Carol
Visser, who invited me to teach aworkshop on the subject sponsored by the
Creative CounselingCenter in Hollywood. To Jan Gathright, who with patient
graceand imaginative skills converted my wretchedly scribbled draftsinto
flawless script, I owe much of any merit this book may havein style and clarity.
To my two editors, Linda Mead of L. T.Mead & Associates and Roy M.
Carlisle of Harper & Row SanFrancisco, who taught me more about how to
write a book thanI thought I needed to know, I can only say thanks for
teachingme so much so fast. My wife, Doris, on the other hand, taughtme a
love that makes forgiving possible, and I thank her from myheart.
1 wrote much of the book while I was a fellow at the Institutefor
Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota,during the fall of
1983. I could not have found anywhere a setting more pleasant and conducive
to remembering and writing;so I want to thank the trustees and, in particular,
Robert Bilheim-er, the director of the Institute, for their hospitality to me.
Thetrustees of Fuller Seminary generously gave me sabbatical leaveto make
my visit possible, and I thank them.
I must tell you, too, that I would know little about our humanfaculty for
forgiving had I not also felt Christ's gift of forgivinglove in my own life; so I
thank God for inventing the way to healthe hurts we don't deserve.
 I
f
N

An Invitation
Somebody hurt you, maybe yesterday, maybe a lifetime ago, andyou
cannot forget it. You did not deserve the hurt. It went deep,deep enough to
lodge itself in your memory. And it keeps onhurting you now.
You are not alone. We all muddle our way through a worldwhere even
well-meaning people hurt each other. When we in-vest ourselves in deep
personal relationships, we open our soulsto the wounds of another's disloyalty
or even betrayal.
There are some hurts that we can all ignore. Not every slightsticks with us,
thank God. But some old pains do not wash outso easily; they remain like
stubborn stains in the fabric of ourown memory.
Deep hurts we never deserved flow from a dead past into ourliving present.
A friend betrays us; a parent abuses us; a spouseleaves us in the cold—these
hurts do not heal with the coming ofthe sun.
We've all wished at one time or other that we could reachback to a painful
moment and cut it out of our lives. Some peopleare lucky; they seem to have
gracious glands that secrete thejuices of forgetfulness. They never hold a
grudge; they do notremember old hurts. Their painful yesterdays die with the
com-ing of tomorrow. But most of us find that the pains of our pastkeep rolling
through our memories, and there's nothing we cando to stop the flow.
Nothing?
The great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, toward theend of her
epochal study on The Human Condition, shared herdiscovery of the only
power that can stop the inexorable streamof painful memories: the "faculty of
forgiveness." It is as simpleas that.
Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a
world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair toeach other
and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgivingus. And he invites us all to
forgive each other.
Virtually every newspaper in the Western world told thestory of how, one
January dawn in 1984, Pope John Paul walkedinto a dank cell of Rebibbia
prison in Rome to meet Mehmet AliAgca, the man who had tried to kill him.
The Pope took the handof the man who had fired a bullet at his heart, and
forgave him.
But the Pope is a professional forgiver; and it may be easy forsuch a highly
placed professional to forgive when he knowsahead of time that the whole
world will be watching.
It is ten times harder for an ordinary person, whom nobody iswatching, to
forgive and forget.
Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. Ifyou twist it into
something it was never meant to be, it can makeyou a doormat or an
insufferable manipulator.
Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tellsus people
should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving islove's power to break
nature's rule.
Ask yourself these questions: What do I do when I forgivesomeone who
has done me wrong?
Who is forgivable? Have some people gone beyond the forgiveness zone?
How do I do it?
Why should I even try? Is there a pay-off? Is it fair?
I invite you to come with me in search of the answers I havefound along
my own journey.
 The Magic EyesA Little Fable
In the village of Faken in innermost Friesland there lived a longthin baker
named Fouke, a righteous man, with a long thin chinand a long thin nose.
Fouke was so upright that he seemed tospray righteousness from his thin lips
over everyone who camenear him; so the people of Faken preferred to stay
away.
Fouke's wife, Hilda, was short and round, her arms wereround, her bosom
was round, her rump was round. Hilda didnot keep people at bay with
righteousness; her soft roundnessseemed to invite them instead to come close
to her in order toshare the warm cheer of her open heart.
Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, asmuch as he
allowed her; but her heart ached for something morefrom him than his worthy
righteousness.
And there, in the bed oi her need, lay the seed of sadness.
One morning, having worked since dawn to knead his doughfor the ovens,
Fouke came home and found a stranger in hisbedroom lying on Hilda's round
bosom.
Hilda's adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and thescandal of the
Faken congregation. Everyone assumed thatFouke would cast Hilda out of his
house, so righteous was he.But he surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as his
wife, sayinghe forgave her as the Good Book said he should.
In his heart of hearts, however, Fouke could not forgive Hildafor bringing
shame to his name. Whenever he thought abouther, his feelings toward her
were angry and hard; he despisedher as if she were a common whore. When it
came right down toit, he hated her for betraying him after he had been so good
andso faithful a husband to her.
He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punishher with his
righteous mercy.
Xiv / FORGIVE AND FORGET
But Fouke's fakery did not sit well in heaven.
So each time that Fouke would feel his secret hate towardHilda, an angel
came to him and dropped a small pebble, hardlythe size of a shirt button, into
Fouke's heart. Each time a pebbledropped, Fouke would feel a stab of pain like
the pain he felt themoment he came on Hilda feeding her hungry heart from
astranger's larder.
Thus he hated her the more; his hate brought him pain andhis pain made
him hate.
The pebbles multiplied. And Fouke's heart grew very heavywith the weight
of them, so heavy that the top half of his bodybent forward so far that he had to
strain his neck upward inorder to see straight ahead. Weary with hurt, Fouke
began towish he were dead.
The angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart came toFouke one night
and told him how he could be healed of hishurt.
There was one remedy, he said, only one, for the hurt of awounded heart.
Fouke would need the miracle of the magiceyes. He would need eyes that
could look back to the beginningof his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife
who betrayed him,but as a weak woman who needed him. Only a new way
oflooking at things through the magic eyes could heal the hurtflowing from the
wounds of yesterday.
Fouke protested. "Nothing can change the past," he said."Hilda is guilty, a
fact that not even an angel can change."
"Yes, poor hurting man, you are right," the angel said. "Youcannot change
the past, you can only heal the hurt that comes toyou from the past. And you
can heal it only with the vision ofthe magic eyes."
"And how can I get your magic eyes?" pouted Fouke.
"Only ask, desiring as you ask, and they will be given you.And each time
you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebblewill be lifted from your
aching heart."
Fouke could not ask at once, for he had grown to love hishatred. But the
pain of his heart finally drove him to want and toask for the magic eyes that the
angel had promised. So he asked.And the angel gave.
Soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke's eyes, wonder—
THE MAGIC EYES: A LITTLE FABLE / XV
fully and mysteriously. He began to see her as a needy womanwho loved
him instead of a wicked woman who betrayed him.
The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from Fou-ke's heart, one
by one, though it took a long time to take them allaway. Fouke gradually felt
his heart grow lighter; he began towalk straight again, and somehow his nose
and his chin seemedless thin and sharp than before. He invited Hilda to come
intohis heart again, and she came, and together they began again ajourney into
their second season of humble joy.
t:
»
w
&.-■■■
m
n
Part 1
THE FOUR STAGES OF FORGIVING
What do you do when you forgive someone who hurt you? Whatgoes
on? When is it necessary? What happens afterward? Whatshould you
expect it to do for you? What is forgiving?
The act of forgiving, by itself, is a wonderfully simple act; butit always
happens inside a storm of complex emotions. It is thehardest trick in the
whole bag of personal relationships.
So let us be honest with each other. Let us talk plainly aboutthe ''magic
eyes" that are given to those who are ready to be setfree from the prison of
pain they never deserved.
We forgive in four stages. If we can travel through all four,we achieve
the climax of reconciliation.
The first stage is hurt: when somebody causes you pain sodeep and
unfair that you cannot forget it, you are pushed intothe first stage of the
crisis of forgiving.
The second stage is hate: you cannot shake the memory ofhow much
you were hurt, and you cannot wish your enemywell. You sometimes want
the person who hurt you to suffer asyou are suffering.
The third stage is healing: you are given the "magic eyes" tosee the
person who hurt you in a new light. Your memory ishealed, you turn back
the flow of pain and are free again.
The fourth stage is the coming together: you invite the personwho hurt
you back into your life; if he or she comes honestly,love can move you both
toward a new and healed relationship.The fourth stage depends on the
person you forgive as much asit depends on you; sometimes he doesn't
come back and youhave to be healed alone.
CHAPTER 1
We Hurt
If you live long enough, chances are you'll be hurt by someoneyou
counted on to be your friend. If you're like me, you may letthat hurt fester
and grow until it stifles your joy. When that happens, you have entered the
first stage of forgiving.
I'm talking about the kind of hurts that smart and ranklewithin us, the
kind we cannot digest as if they were only somuch fiber in our interpersonal
diet. Our wounds may looksuperficial to others, but we know better; after
all, we're the oneswho feel them.
I'd like to tell you a little story about a hurt I felt once, toillustrate how
something that may look insignificant to outsiderscan push you into the
crisis of forgiveness.
It's important, to begin with, to say that I come from a longline of
village blacksmiths. In fact, our family name, Smedes, isan old Dutch word
for smith. From the time people first took onsurnames, every male child in
our family grew up to earn hisliving pounding on an anvil, and it was a
source of family prideto be a smith worthy of the vocation.
Now on to the story. I graduated, without distinction, fromMuskegon
Senior High School one June Friday night. The nextday I rode a Greyhound
bus to Detroit, where I began work inthe yards of the Smedes Iron Works, a
family-run shop that myUncle Klass built up out of a smithy he operated in
a garage inhis early immigrant days. Because I had neither money
norpromising credentials for higher education, I was glad to acceptUncle
Klass's offer to get my start in the steel business.
I was put to work out in the yard, rolling steel beams intoneat stacks,
cutting them with an acetylene torch into the sizesthat building contractors
ordered and painting them with a blend
of gasoline and pitch to keep them from rusting too fast. I neverdid get
to use the forge at which ornate forms were pounded andtwisted out of red
hot steel bars, the only genuine smithing stilldone at Smedes Iron Works.
 To be honest, I was a sorry excuse for either a smith or asteelworker. I
was too tall, too thin, too dreamy for any of thejobs that called for the blend
of strength and talent it took towork with steel. No luster was added to the
name of Smedesduring my stint at the Iron Works.
My cousin Hank was different; he was born to the forge. Hiswrists were
powerful, his hands were obedient to his mind, andhe could see an artful
form of steel in his mind's eye before heeven put his hands to the hammer.
Hank sometimes took me along to construction sites, wherewe would
install a gate or a fancy railing that he had crafted atthe shop. He taught me
how to chisel square holes into a concrete floor and set the gateposts in,
pouring molten lead into thespace left over. He occasionally took me into
his confidence, telling me delicious family secrets about Uncle Klass and
dirty jokessuch as I had never heard before.
Gradually, Hank made me feel as if I were truly his friend.
But he seemed to have a dual personality. One side of himwas friendly
and fun; the other side was devious and cruel.
When he and I were alone, he showed me his friendly side. Iaccepted
that part of him; it was certainly the only part that Ineeded.
But whenever somebody else came along while we wereworking—a
building inspector, for instance—Hank showed mehis mean side. He turned
on me, and always within earshot ofthe man who was watching us.
"Hey, Lew, get your skinny butt over here and do this jobright for a
change."
"This jackass they foisted on me as a helper doesn't know thedifference
between a hammer and a curling iron, but he's theboss's nephew so I have to
put up with him."
"Lew, you ain't worth nothin' around here—you just betterknow that."
This is how Hank would talk to me, and about me, in front ofthe men
we both wanted badly to impress as competent work-men.
He would set me up by getting me to believe that 1 was hisfriend; then
he would humiliate me. 1 was a pushover, becauseat that time I needed a
friend more than I needed anything else.So when Hank would show me his
friendly side on our wayhome—even if he had made me feel like a fool that
very day—Iwould fall for it, only to catch his scorn again the next day.
I hated Hank a lot, I suppose, and for a good while, too. Andwhy
shouldn't I have hated him? It hurts to be taken in as afriend and then
treated like a stray dog. I knew in my heart that,even though I had set
myself up as a sucker for the hurt Hankgave me, I didn't have it coming.
My hurt brought me into the first stage of forgiving—the critical stage
at which I had to make a simple decision: Did I want tobe healed, or did I
want to go on suffering from an unfair hurtlodged in my memory?
We are always, all of us, pushed into this crucial stage whenwe feel that
somebody has hurt us deeply. Will we let our painhang on to our hearts
where it will eat away our joy? Or will weuse the miracle of forgiving to
heal the hurt we didn't deserve?
Of course, we suffer a lot of superficial pains that nobodyreally needs to
be forgiven for—mere indignities that we simplyhave to bear with a
measure of grace.
We need to sort out our hurts and learn the difference between those that
call for the miracle of forgiveness and those thatcan be borne with a sense
of humor. If we lump all our hurtstogether and prescribe forgiveness for all
of them, we turn theart of forgiving into something cheap and
commonplace. Likegood wine, forgiving must be preserved for the right
occasion.
The hurt that creates a crisis of forgiving has three dimen-sions. It is
always personal, unfair, and deep. When you feel thiskind of three-
dimensional pain, you have a wound that can behealed only by forgiving
the one who wounded you.
PERSONAL PAIN
We can only forgive people, we cannot forgive nature, eventhough
nature often hurts us. Sometimes the pain comes fromwhat nature fails to
give us—some people, through no fault oftheir own, are born into the world
with less health, beauty, orintelligence than they want. Sometimes we
simply reel from the
assault of nature's fury, the way close friends of mine felt as theyburied
their baby the other day, a victim of the mystery calledcrib death. Each of us
can be random victims of natural forcesthat strip us of our dignity and
smash us without respect formerit or need.
But we cannot forgive nature. We can curse it, rage against it,blame it
for all that is wrong with us, and finally surrender to itsbrute power. We can
use science to defend ourselves temporarilyagainst nature's whimsical
savagery. Or, in faith, we can lookbeyond nature and rest ourselves in God's
secret purpose behindnature's oddly perverse ways. But we do not forgive
nature. Forgiving is only for persons.
Nor can we forgive systems. God knows that systems canhurt people.
Economic systems can lock poor people in a ghettoof brutal poverty.
Political systems can turn free people intoslaves. Corporate systems can
push people around like puppetsand toss them out like trash. But we do not
forgive systems. Weonly forgive people.
People are the only ones who can be held accountable for whatthey do.
People are the only ones who can accept forgiveness anddecide to come
back to us.
Forgiving is always a personal event. It follows, then, thatyou should
forgive only the persons who hurt you.
I do not need to forgive people who have not hurt me. In fact,I have no
right to forgive them; only their victims have that right.I may be outraged at
what they do to others. I may judge them,condemn them, and call for their
heads to roll. I may, for instance, nurture a gargantuan rage at Joseph Stalin
for his massive murder of Russian people. But, unless he injured me,
Ishould not forgive him, not because he is too evil, but because hecan be
forgiven honestly only by the people whom he hurt. Iwould only cheapen
the miracle of forgiveness if I claimed toforgive the great hurters of people
who did not hurt me.
I do not mean that you have to feel the culprit's hands onyour own
throat. We often hurt most when we feel the pains ofpeople we love. I, for
instance, am almost neurotic about theway I feel the pain my children feel.
If you hurt my children, youhurt me worse than if you assault me directly.
In any case, wehave somehow to feel the hurt ourselves or else we do not
needthe healing that forgiving was invented to give.
If forgiving heals the pains we feel, we have good reason tokeep in
touch with our own hurts.
Some of us deny the pain we really feel. It just hurts toomuch to
acknowledge it. Sometimes it scares us; people betrayedand brutalized by
their parents are often afraid to admit theirpain for fear they may hate the
people they most dearly want tolove. So they use a thousand devices to
deny their pain.
I sometimes deny my pain, not out of fear, but out of sheerpride. I grit
my teeth in heroic refusal to concede that certainpeople have enough power
to hurt me. Just so, the betrayed wifesays, ''I know my husband has been
playing around with thatconniving little witch he calls his secretary, but I
am not going tolet him have the pleasure of seeing me suffer." So she
shoves herpain into the dark room of the soul where feelings are not
allowed to enter. And she may carry it off; she may outlast thesecretary. But
she will never forgive her husband as long as sherefuses to admit to herself
the pain she feels so deeply.
I am simplifying the scenario, of course. The story is not usually about
an innocent lamb and a bad wolf. Most of us have todo our forgiving while
we are being forgiven. And sometimesbeing forgiven gets so homogenized
with forgiving that we canhardly feel the difference between them.
But in its essence, the miracle of healing happens when oneperson feels
the pain and forgives the person who opened thewound.
UNFAIR PAIN
We always face a crisis of forgiving when somebody hurts usunfairly.
Forgiving is love's remedy to be used when we are hurtfully wronged by a
person we trusted to treat us right. There is adifference between suffering
sheer pain and suffering painfulwrongs.
It hurts to lose fifty dollars on a fair bet; it also hurts to bemugged on
the street and robbed of fifty dollars. But there is amoral difference between
what we lose fair and square and whatwe suffer in violent unfairness! It
hurts a boy to be bawled out byhis mother for slapping his sister; it also
hurts when a child isscreamed at by a drunken father for having been born.
But whata difference between fair hurt and brutal wrong!
Not everybody is out to get us. Our lives are cluttered withpeople who
wound our feelings in small ways, but who mean noreal harm. We suffer
some inevitable aches simply because weare vulnerable people living in a
crazy world where fragile spiritssometimes accidentally collide.
For example: There was once a person in my life who didoutrageous
things to me. She screamed at me all through dinner;she made me jump to
her service anytime, day and night, nomatter how busy I was with other
things; and now and then shewould pee on my best slacks. To make matters
worse, she gotacutely sick and drove me mad because she did not tell me
whatwas wrong. There were moments when I felt like whacking her.But I
never felt an impulse to forgive her.
She was my six-month-old baby, and I did not feel a need toforgive the
outrageous things she did to me, because she did nothurt me wrongfully. I
loved her and I took whatever she dishedout.
 My example may be a little far-fetched, but it does make thepoint; we
don't have to forgive people for every hurt we feel.
Many of us are hurt when we discover that an important hu-man
relationship we thought would last forever is, in fact, temporary. We part,
we leave each other, and being left is often avery sour sorrow.
Some friendships need to be dissolved, some love affairsneed to be
ended. And leaving usually hurts somebody. But awounded heart may be
only the risk of love in a world whereeverything that comes must also go.
Perhaps the worst way for people to leave us unfairly—yetwithout
wronging us—is to get sick and die and leave us allalone. But people die
because that is the way of nature; generally, they do not die because they
want to hurt us. Still, how cana child understand that the father who got
cancer and died didnot really mean to leave her all alone? How sensitive we
must bewith people who know better with their heads, but who still
feelwronged by someone who died and left them just when he wasneeded
most.
It is harder still when those we love decide to die in spite ofhow much
we needed them to stay alive. When Bob hung himself, he did not tell
anybody what his motives were. Did he haveto end his life? Is he to blame
for the awesome pain he left behind? Should his wife forgive him? I cannot
tell. Only she canknow.
Sometimes you can't know for sure whether you have beenthe victim of
an unavoidable accident or whether you have beenwrongfully wounded.
You may need help to sort out your hurts,so you can see the difference
between feeling the pain thatcomes from our vulnerability and the pain that
comes from beingthe butt of an unfair attack.
I do not mean that pain is unfair only when someone means tobe unfair.
Pain is unfair when we do not deserve it, or when it isnot necessary. So you
do not have to prove that someone meant towrong you before you can
forgive. You will be shoved into acrisis of forgiveness when you are
needlessly knocked around,no matter what the other person's intentions
were.
I have made a little catalogue of unfair hurts that everyonefeels from
time to time. In no case does the hurt-giver 7nean to beunfair. But in every
case, we experience the hurt as an unfair assault. Match my list of hurts
with your own experience.
PEOPLE HURT US BECAUSE THEY THINK WE DESERVE IT
 Some people aim to hurt, they mean to do someone harm;but they want
no more than just retribution. This is Shakespeare's Macbeth, resolved to do
in his king: "I am settled, andbend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible
feat." This is Boothtaking aim at Lincoln in a theater. This is Lee Harvey
Oswaldplotting to shoot Kennedy on the streets of Dallas. This is
Judasslouching into the night to betray his Master. Each one was do-ing
what he felt his victim deserved.
I am pretty sure that almost everyone who has ever hurt meon purpose
sincerely believed I was getting what I had coming.A colleague of mine
once wrote a private letter to my board toaccuse me of some theological
delinquencies. His letter was un-fair to me, and it caused me a lot of
trouble. I believe that mycolleague meant to be fair. But what he meant and
what I experienced were two different things. It was unfair, no matter if
hemeant it to be fair. And the unfairness of it threw me into a crisis:did I
want to let it fester in my memory, or would I use the"magic eyes" and be
healed?
Most people who mean to hurt other people believe they arebeing fair.
They set out, teeth grinding, eyes steeled, lips tight.
to do US harm in the belief that we deserve it. "It hurts me worsethan it
does you" is the ultimate piety of the person who intendsto hurt but means
to be fair. But what they intend does not takeaway the unfairness we feel.
When we are hurt in this way, we enter a crisis of forgiveness. We
cannot relate to the person who hurt us as a friend orlover until we come to
terms with the unfairness of the hurt.
PEOPLE HURT US COMPULSIVELY
Sometimes people hurt us, not because they want to do usharm, but only
because they cannot control themselves.
Jack did not mean to hurt his family; he simply could not stayaway from
booze. Walter never intended to hurt his wife by hav-ing a sexual affair with
another woman; he just could not har-ness his lively libido.
A year or so ago my friends Ben and Phyllis Sewall wereslammed into
as terrible a crisis of forgiveness as anyone hasever let me share. Their son,
Roger, was idling his moped at afour-way stop on a lazy summer evening in
Laguna Beach, California. Stopped, feet on the ground, he waited his turn
to moveon. A half-block behind him Sid Charid was gunning his
Camarodown the same street in Roger's direction. He did not slow downfor
the stop sign. Roger, hit from behind, was killed almost instantly by a car he
never saw coming. The driver stopped for amoment, then drove on, hit and
run.
Sid, apparently, was high on drugs. He did not mean to hurtanyone; he
was just out of control, driven by a mind-blowingchemical. But Roger did
not deserve to die; nor did my friendsdeserve to lose their son. It was not
fair. And this grotesqueunfairness created as painful a crisis as any
wounded heart canbear.
PEOPLE HURT US WITH THE SPILL-OVERS OF THEIR
PROBLEMS
Sometimes our personal struggles, too turbulent to contain,spill over to
affect innocent bystanders. We do not mean to hurtthem; they just happen to
be in the wrong place at the wrongtime.
Children are sometimes the most unlucky victims of the painthat washes
over from grown-up conflicts.
My friend Morgan was trapped in a miserable marriage and
had good reason to want to escape. But his two little childrenhappened
to be living in the same house, drenched in the backwash of adult rage, sure
that it must somehow be their fault thattheir parents hated each other.
Morgan was only trying to getout of a hopelessly bad marriage. The last
thing he wanted to dowas injure his children, but they got caught in the
crossfire. Theydid not have it coming; they were wronged as surely as they
werehurt.
PEOPLE HURT US WITH THEIR GOOD INTENTIONS
Sometimes people hurt us even when they mean to do usgood. Their
well-meant plans go awry, maybe through otherpeople's knavery, maybe by
their own bungling. No matter how,what they do to help us turns out to hurt
us.
The most generous friend I have ever had was Alec Morton,a selfless
surgeon who gave two years out of every four to healing poor people in a
shanty hospital on a mission compound inBurundi. He took no pay for his
work; he even brought along hisown medications and gave them generously
to the sick. He himself flirted chronically with borderline insolvency. But he
cared alot about his children and about their education. So he took
theadvice of a smart broker and sank all his savings into a real estatedeal
that, in a few years, promised to pay off well enough to seehis six children
through college and his wife through any troubles.
The payoff turned out to be a worthless piece of wilderness.
 Alec's mind was on suffering people in Burundi and on security for his
children. He intended it to turn out well, but hisgenerosity was turned to
unfair loss.
Alec—prone to depression anyway—sank deeper and deeperinto the
muck of self-condemnation. One night he drove up thehill behind his home
and shot himself. His suicide was the un-fairest cut of all. His children did
not deserve to lose him as wellas his money; and he was terribly unfair to
them, no matter howgood his intentions were. I think his children needed to
forgivetheir father even if he was a saint.
PEOPLE HURT US BY THEIR MISTAKES
Sometimes we get hurt because other people make mistakes.They may
be ministering professionals and they may surelymean to help, but
sometimes they bungle the job.
Not many people can hurt us by mistakes the way doctorscan. We trust
them to take care of us; we let them put us to sleepwhile they slice our
bodies apart and sew them together again.But they can err, and their errors
cost us a lot.
When my motherin-law was old and very sick she needed amassive
blood transfusion. Somehow they managed to pumpher veins full of the
wrong type of blood. Nobody in the hospitalmeant to hurt her. Mistakes can
happen to anybody. But shealmost died. Unfairly!
A young intern, trying to impress his nurse, went ahead onhis own with
a new treatment, when he should have checkedfirst with the surgeon in
charge. He prescribed drugs that, onceinside of his patient, clashed with
other drugs that she was tak-ing; the medic should have checked more
carefully, but he wasin too much of a hurry, and the consequences were
very painfuland very unfair.
Mistakes, all of them! Everybody makes them sometimes. Butwhen our
doctors make them, we pay. We pay in extra hospitalcosts. We pay in pain
that could have been avoided. Once in awhile we may pay with our lives.
And it isn't fair, no matterwhat the medics meant.
But enough! My catalogue of unfair hurts should be enoughto remind
you that the unfairness of the hurt often lies in theexperience of the victim,
not in the intention of the one whocauses it.
Should you forgive someone who hurts you unfairly, butwho never
meant to do you wrong?
 Not many people ever iiiean to be unfair. Even a Mafia hitman believes
he kills only people who have it coming. So if weneed to forgive people
only when they mean to hurt us unfairly,we may never need to forgive
anyone on earth.
In fact, you may feel the unfairness of your pain even moreterribly just
because the person hurt you carelessly. The drunkdriver who kills your
neighbor's child never meant to hurt anybody. But you may feel the horror
of his unfairness all the morebecause of its pointlessness.
Perhaps more to the point, however, is our need to forgive forour own
sakes. Every human soul has a right to be free from hate.
and we claim our rightful inheritance when we forgive peoplewho hurt
us unfairly, even if their intentions were pure.
DEEP PAINS
The third dimension of the pain that needs forgiving has todo with
depth. Hurts that need forgiving are deep hurts.
''Deep" is not a precise measure when it comes to pain; depthof pain lies
in the hearts of people who feel the hurt. So wecannot be exact. We know
for sure only when we feel the bruise.But surely we can at least agree on
some rough differences between the superficial wounds that we can tolerate
and the deep-er hurts that separate us from the person who brought them on.
Here are a few of my own experiences of hurts that are reallytoo
shallow for a falling-out.
ANNOYANCES
Our lives are sprinkled with annoyances. I can't stand thekind of
shoppers who check out fifteen items in the eight-itemexpress lane and then
talk about their cat with the cashier, whileI wait impatiently to pay for one
carton of milk. I drive my wifecrazy by switching channels mindlessly on
the television set. Sheannoys me when she stretches the short stories she
tells at din-ner into full-length novels. These are nettles against our
tenderskin; but they are probably not deep enough to raise the issue
offorgiveness.
If we were to turn every nuisance into a crisis of forgiveness,our
conversations would become revolving reconciliations. Betterto swallow
annoyances and leave forgiveness for the deeperhurts.
SLIGHTS
Slights are snubs, not as bad as being maligned, but badenough to make
us feel as if we've lost our standing in the peck-ing order. We want people to
respect our place in the line-up,and we hurt whenever we lose our place.
Once, when I was a graduate student in Holland, I was invited to spend
a Sunday evening at the home of a famous professor in Amsterdam.
Monday morning, I bragged to my fellow
American students and hinted that the great man and I hadbecome close
friends. A few weeks later, at a reception, I wasstanding with the same
American friends when the renownedprofessor came into the room. We
were all introduced to him.When he got to me, he did not remember ever
having laid eyeson me before. He did not tell my friends that I was a worm,
hedid not spit at me or revile me. He just slighted me when I want-ed badly
to be noticed. I could have killed him. But I did notneed to forgive.
Slights hurt because we are unsure of ourselves, needy creatures
walking among people whose notice we need to supportour self-esteem. We
hurt when people walk by without lookingat us; but we do not exile people
from our lives for not noticingus. Slights are really for shrugging off, not
for forgiving.
DISAPPOINTMENTS
We are hurt by people who do not do what we expect them todo for us.
We invest our lives in our children; they take ourinvestment for granted, as
if they had it all coming. I was once acandidate for a cherished award; I did
not get it, and I later discovered that my closest friend did not vote for me.
A friend ofmine stayed with his company out of loyalty when he was
offered a better job somewhere else; when a position he wantedopened up
his boss passed him by to promote a youngster wav-ing a fresh M.B.A.
Disappointment! It can slap you in the face of your pride andleave you
feeling cheated. Yet, though deeply disappointed, youare not betrayed and
you don't need to forgive.
COMING IN SECOND
One mother gives her daughter all the advantages, more thanshe can
afford; her daughter drops out of school and becomes awaitress while her
best friend's daughter becomes an attorney.One student knocks himself out
for a B while his roommate, whohardly tries, gets nothing but As. Your
friend's horse prancesinto the winner's circle every race; your horse never
manages toshow.
When someone else gets the glittering prize you wanted, itsmarts to
come in second. The hurt is hardest to bear when theperson who gets there
ahead of you is a close friend. You have to
 put your arm around his shoulder and celebrate his good luckwhen you
would really rather run away and drown your sorrowsalone.
To be honest, we would feel better if our friends lost whenwe lost, their
stocks tumbled when ours tumbled, and their kidsfailed when ours failed.
But we do not quit a friendship becauseour friends got something we
wanted, nor do we have to forgivethem.
It is wise not to turn all hurts into crises of forgiving. If youneed to
forgive every minor bruise that you suffer in your run fora place in the sun,
you will dam up the ebb and flow of all yourfragile human relationships.
We put everyone we love on guardwhen we turn personal misdemeanors
into major felonies.
What sort of unfair hurt, then, does go deep enough to createa crisis of
forgiveness? How do you know you have been hurtseriously enough to
cause a falling-out? When does the woundrequire the radical spiritual
surgery we call forgiving?
I will offer three examples of unfair hurts deep enough tobring us into a
crisis of forgiving: disloyalty, betrayal, and brutality.Let me try to explain
what I mean by each of them.
DISLOYALTY
I am disloyal when I belong to a person and I treat him or herlike a
stranger.
Most of us have several circles of people to whom we belongby
personal bonds of loyalty. Inside the circle we are bonded toeach other by a
promise we have made to stay at each other'sside. Sometimes the promise is
made, head bowed, before witnesses, as a public vow. Sometimes the
promise is tucked silently into what we do; a mother makes a silent
commitment to carefor her newborn baby simply by taking the child into
her armsand two friends can vow a deep loyalty to each other withoutever
saying a word. Either way, our freely given promise to staytogether and care
for each other is the invisible fiber that holdsus together; we belong to each
other in the only way one humanbeing may ever belong to another.
The promises we make to each other give birth to the trust wehave in
each other. People count on people who make promises.A baby counts on
his mother to be there when he needs her. Awife counts on her husband to
be there for her. A friend counts
on a friend. Wherever people promise to be with us in care andsupport,
we are bonded to them by our trust just as they arebonded to us by their
commitment.
So when a father leaves his family in the lurch, he is disloyalbecause he
has treated people who belong to him as if they werestrangers. When a son
makes a habit of lying to manipulate hisparents, he treats them as strangers
though he belongs to themby the bond of trust. A woman feels violated
when she learnsthat her husband has played around with other women for
several years because someone who belongs uniquely to her hastreated her
as if she were just another woman.
The loyalties of friendship may not be as binding as the loyalties of
family, but if I discover that a friend let me down after hepromised
something to me—a favor, a loan, a blessing—let medown when I needed
him badly, and only because he did notwant to go out of his way for me, I
feel as if the fundamentalterms of our friendship had been violated.
Someone I trusted tocare for me as a loyal friend treated me as if he and I
werestrangers.
A person who breaks a promise of loyalty violates a relationship based
on promise and trust. We cannot go on as usual inthe relationship unless the
wrong of it is healed. The hurt is toodeep to go on as if nothing had come
between us.
Disloyalty is not acceptable; it is offensive. We must eitherseparate and
carry the hurt alone or forgive the person who wasdisloyal to us.
BETRAYAL
Turn the screws a little tighter and disloyalty becomes a betrayal. My
partner is disloyal to me when he treats me like astranger, but he betrays me
when he treats me like an enemy.
Peter was disloyal to Jesus when he denied that he ever knewthe man.
Judas betrayed Jesus when he sold him to his enemiesfor thirty pieces of
silver. We betray people we belong to whenever we sell them out for a
price.
Can anything hurt worse than a friend's betrayal?
We do not have to parlay for huge sums to be betrayers. Mostbetrayers
are minor Iscariots, playing for petty stakes. A friendwho tells another my
special secret about my private shame.
knowing that I may be hurt, betrays me. A husband who belit-tles his
wife in front of guests commits minor treason. A closecolleague who
promises to support my bid for a promotion, butsecretly signals to my boss
that I am not competent to do the job,betrays me. A father who seduces his
own daughter most certainly betrays her.
Caesar had his Brutus, his dearest friend who turned on himand slew
him. But a friend, lover, spouse, or partner who letsothers do us harm just as
surely betrays us. No matter what themethod is or how superficial the cut,
we are betrayed
Something lying close to our souls cannot indulge treason,not even
trivial treason. We feel fouled and we feel diminished.Every human
relationship built on trust is fractured by betrayal.To be friends or lovers
after betrayal would be a sham. We knowit is so because we feel the stab so
deeply. And when we feel it,we are in the crisis of forgiveness.
BRUTALITY
As a rule, we forgive people who belong to us in some way—spouses,
children, parents, close friends. But sometimes weneed to forgive strangers
who bind themselves to us with a ropewoven of brutality.
A stranger breaks into your home at night while you areasleep,
vulnerable, alone in the ultimate privacy of your bedroom. You feel so
personally violated that you cannot ever feelindifferent toward this man, not
the casual way you feel indifferent toward an ordinary stranger who never
got close to you. Hedid not touch you. You did not see his face. Yet, he
came insideof your special private place where he had no right to be. He
isnot a mere stranger anymore; he is now, though faceless, a personal
enemy.
Consider an assault far worse. A stranger rapes a woman in adark
parking lot. She is violated to her core. She does not knowhis name. She
only felt his violence. But he can no longer be amere stranger to her. He
ravaged her and became her personalenemy; and because they are bound by
violence, she is alienatedby hate.
But brutal people are not always strangers. In fact, most bru-tal people
assault those they belong to. Men who never sleep
18 / THE FOUR STAGES OF FORGIVING
with other women beat their wives, and claim credit for fidelity.Fathers
who would never desert their families batter their ownchildren. We can be
cruelest of all to people who belong to us.
There are also brutalities that never blacken an eye or break abone. We
can brutalize one another without touching. I haveheard mothers tell their
sons, for no good reason, that they wererotten kids, worse than worthless. I
have known fathers whoregularly told their daughters that they were no
better than prostitutes.
At a party once, in Europe, I watched an American try toamuse his
guests by coaxing his wife—who knew only Hungarian—to repeat English
four-letter words that she would be horri-fied to speak had she known what
they meant. I thought that hewas brutalizing her as surely as if he had hit
her. And 1 feltbrutalized with her.
We are brutal whenever we reduce another person to lessthan human
excellence. It may be a violent rape. It may be adegrading insult. Brutality,
no matter who commits it, confrontsus with one of the most agonizing
crises of forgiveness.
So much, then, for the sorts of personal, unfair, and deephurts that lead
us into the first stage of forgiving.
Minor hurts that would ordinarily not call for forgiving canbecome
major offenses by sheer repetition. For example, if Bettypersists in an
action just because it is annoying, and throws thispetty annoyance at you
regularly, she probably wants to demeanyou without having to risk too
much. She wants to hurt you withher contempt, but she does not have the
courage to make a frontal assault. Her annoyances then become moral
injuries, and youcannot let her get away with it.
The same goes for slights. If your boss always forgets her appointments
with you, her slight demeans you. If your father nev-er takes time to listen
to your troubles, his slight edges towarddisloyalty. If your friend never calls
you when he knows you aresick or in trouble, his slight slides into
disloyalty because hetreats you like a stranger.
How do you know when forgettable misdemeanors becomeinsufferable
felonies that need forgiveness? You can tell for sureonly when you are on
the scene. You cannot draw lines for oth-ers; you need to feel the difference
for yourself. Some people
WE HURT / 19
turn all misdemeanors into felonies whenever they are hurt bythem.
Other people make themselves passive targets, invitingalmost anybody to
take a crack at them. But there is a difference,and one of the signs of
growing up is the insight you need to tellthe difference in the painful pinch
of a moment when you are thevictim.
CHAPTER 2
We Hate
Hate is a tiger snarling in the soul. Hate is our natural responseto any
deep and unfair pain. Hate is our instinctive backlashagainst anyone who
wounds us wrongly.
But what is it that we feel when we feel hate for anotherhuman being?
Especially when we hate someone we also love, orused to love?
Maybe we feel no more than a passive hatred—the grain ofmalice that
robs us of energy to wish a person well.
I have felt passive hatred often—and, if the truth wereknown, so have
other people who love at least as easily as I do.When I think about a man
who once whispered lies about me, Icannot find it in my heart to hope that
he will be a great successin his work. I do not wish he would die; I simply
have no desirefor him to do well while he lives. At the very least, I don't
wanthim to do better than I do. I cannot raise an honest prayer thathe will
become a bright star in the little sky we share.
On the other hand, there is an aggressive fury that drives usout of our
wits. A woman wishes her former husband wouldcatch herpes, or at least be
miserably unhappy with his newwife. You hope the friend who hurt you
when he told your se-cret will get fired from the new job he found. We may
settle forlesser retribution, or we may wish our enemy would drop dead.In
any case, we are not only drained of the positive energy towish someone
well, we devoutly wish them ill. We are poised toattack. This is aggressive
hate.
When you hate passively, you lose love's passion to bless.When you
hate aggressively, you are driven by a passion to
whip someone with a hurricane—or at least a stiff March wind—of
hostility.
j
Passive or aggressive, our hate separates us from those weought to
belong to. It shoves them away from us. Where? Anyplace where no good
can reach them or harm can miss them.Hate is the elemental inner violence
that drives people apart.
Sometimes hate divides our own souls; one part of us hatesand the other
part loves. And we both hate and love the sameperson. A wife loves her
husband for his sexy attractiveness andhates him for his savage put-downs.
A husband may love hiswife's devotion to their marriage and hate her for
her pallid indifference to his needs. We love the father whose love we
gaspfor; we hate him for driving us crazy with a love he keeps justbeyond
our grasp, like a prize held just out of reach. Oh yes, wecould play the love-
hate duet infinitely.
The point is that hate's searing flame coexists with love'ssoothing flow;
the hate that pushes us apart lives inside us rightalong with the love that
pulls us together. Indeed, we can hatemost painfully the people we love
most passionately.
Hate eventually needs healing. Passive or aggressive, hate isa
malignancy; it is dangerous—deadly, if allowed to run itscourse. Nothing
good comes from a hate that has a person in itssights; and it surely hurts the
hater more than it hurts the hated.
We must not confuse hate with anger. It is hate and not angerthat needs
healing.
Anger is a sign that we are alive and well. Hate is a sign thatwe are sick
and need to be healed.
Healthy anger drives us to do something to change whatmakes us angry;
anger can energize us to make things better.Hate does not want to change
things for the better; it wants tomake things worse. Hate wants to belch the
foul breath of deathover a life that love alone creates.
Let me point out some things about hate that make it such ahard
sickness to cure.
IT IS PEOPLE, NOT MERELY EVIL, THAT WE HATE
It is said that we are supposed to "hate the sin and love thesinner." If we
manage to do this, our hate can be creative. But Imust admit that I do not
easily find the power to do this—the
evil I hate wants to stick to the person I hate the way skin sticksto the
body, and I can seldom tear them apart.
So I am not talking about hating cruelty; I am talking abouthating cruel
people. I am not talking about hating treachery; I amtalking about hating
traitors.
 If David betrays me, and I hate him for hurting me, it is because my
mind cannot separate his action from his person. Heand his broken promise
are one reality, stuck together within myhurting soul.
This is the pain, this person-directed hate; it is not health, it isnot
strength, it is the soul's sickness.
None of us wants to admit that we hate someone. It makes usfeel mean
and malicious. So we deny our hatred. We hide it fromourselves. Hate is too
ugly for us; we cannot admit that we havea bucket full or even a spoonful of
it in our system. We deny, wedisguise, and we suppress the real hate that
ferments in oursouls.
But we do hate people. Only an unearthly saint or an unfeeling oaf gets
far in life without hating someone, sometime—passively, at least, and now
and then with the bursting belligerenceof aggressive malice.
When we deny our hate we detour around the crisis of forgiveness. We
suppress our spite, make adjustments, and makebelieve we are too good to
be hateful. But the truth is that we donot dare to risk admitting the hate we
feel because we do notdare to risk forgiving the person we hate.
We make believe we are at peace while the furies rage within,beneath
the surface. There, hidden and suppressed, our hateopens the subterranean
faucets of venom that will eventually in-fect all our relationships in ways
we cannot predict. Hate left toitself, denied and hidden, leaves us in a cold
hell behind insulat-ed masks of warm conviviality. Hate, admitted and felt,
compelsus to make a decision about the healing miracle of forgiving.
Why worry about it? Why fret so much that decent peoplehate people
who do them wrong?
The reason is that hate focused on people is very hard to heal.When we
only hate the wrongness of a thing, our hate dieswhen the wrong we hate is
righted. But when we hate peoplewho do us wrong, our hate stays alive
long after the wrong they
did is dead and gone, the way the ashen smell of charred lumberlingers
with a burned building long after the fire is out.
We attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt,endowing it
with immortality. And we let it assault us every timeit comes to mind. It
travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers overus while we make love, and
broods over us while we die. Ourhate does not even have the decency to die
when those we hatedie—for it is a parasite sucking our blood, not theirs.
There is only one remedy for it.
 WE MOST OFTEN AIM OUR HATRED AT PEOPLE WHO LIVE
WITHIN THE CIRCLEOF OUR COMMITTED LOVE
We usually hate someone who is close to us—close enough tolove. We
hate the person we trusted to be on our side, the per-son we expected to be
loyal, the person we trusted to keep apromise.
We do not usually hate strangers. We get angry at strangers.At baseball
games I have raged at the cross-eyed umpire andgotten mad at the loud
drunk sitting near me. But I have neverhated an umpire 1 didn't know
personally, or a drunk I neversaw again. The only time we really hate
strangers is when theyget close enough to violate us intimately.
Hate for people within our circle of committed love is themost virulent
kind. It does not affect us so much when we hatea person who never
promised to be with us, never walked withus on our private paths, never
played the strings of our soul. Butwhen a person destroys what our
commitment and our intimacycreated, something precious is destroyed.
Hate for people welove makes us sick.
The virus resists every antibody save one.
WE HATE PEOPLE WE BLAME
Whenever I hate someone I pronounce that person guilty ofhurt in the
first degree, and I hold that person responsible forhurting me personally—I
blame them. I refuse to excuse How-ard's brutality on the grounds of his
own brutal childhood. Icannot suspend judgment on Jean's unfaithfulness
on groundsthat she is only a hapless victim of torrid hormones. If they
havehurt me, I feel hatred for them.
Unless we are a little crazy, we hate only the people we blamefor doing
us wrong.
Our hatred is a compliment, in a strange sort of way. Thehated person is
set apart from other creatures and honored as afree person. Our hate tells us
that this person has a will and heused this will to do us harm.
When we hate a person who deserves our hate we feel veryrighteous in
our hating. The jerk has it coming. What we feel isprecisely what we ought
to feel. Heaven and earth would shakeif we did not hate the person who
meant to do us harm.
Moll/ hatred is the toughest kind of all to cure. Only one reme-dy is
worth prescribing. But it comes hard. And the longer wehate, the harder it is
to heal us.
 I recall Michael Christopher's play The Black Angel, where hetells the
story of Herman Engel. Engel, a German general inWorld War II, was
sentenced by the Nuremberg Court to thirtyyears in prison for atrocities
committed by his army. He survivedhis sentence and was released from
prison. At the time of theplay he is in Alsace, building a cabin in the woods
where he andhis wife intend to live out the years left to them—incognito,
forgotten, at peace.
But a man named Morrieaux, a French journalist, is waitingin the
wings.
Morrieaux's whole family had been .massacred by Engel'sarmy during
the war. When the Nuremberg court had refused tosentence Engel to death
thirty years before, Morrieaux privatelycondemned Engel to die. His
condemnation was kept alive andhot by the fire of hate he kept kindling in
his heart. Now thetime had come.
Morrieaux had stoked up the fanatics in the village close byEngel's
cabin. That very night, they were going to come up thehill, burn down the
cabin, and shoot Engel and his wife dead.
Morrieaux, however, wanted to get to Engel beforehand.Some gaps in
Engel's history plagued the reporter's need for afinished story. So he went
up the hill, introduced himself to ashaken Engel, and spent the afternoon
grilling the former general about the village massacre that lay like a
forgotten shadow inEngel's past.
But Engel's feeble humanity—he seemed less like a monsterthan just a
tired old man—confused Morrieaux. Besides, he was
WE HATE / 25
having a hard time putting all the pieces of the terrible storytogether;
and so he was plagued by newborn doubt. His vengeance was blurred; the
purity of his hate was contaminated.
Toward the end of the afternoon, as the sun fell deep and thewoods
became a cavern, Morrieaux blurted out to Engel that thevillagers were
going to come and kill him that night. He offeredto lead Engel out of the
woods and save his life.
But the afternoon's inquisition had brought other kinds ofdoubts into
Engel's soul. Engel paused, eyes fixed on a cone justfallen from a black
pine: "I'll go with you," he slowly said, "onone condition." What? Is he
mad? Does he lay down a conditionfor having his own life saved? What
condition?
 "That you forgive me."
Forgive? Morrieaux had exterminated Engel a thousand exquisite ways
in the fantasies of hate that he had played in hismind for thirty years. But
face to face with the ambiguity of En-gel's humanity, Morrieaux's
vengeance was unsettled. He wouldsave the man's life. Yes, he would
cancel the execution.
But forgive him? Never.
That night, the enraged villagers came with sacks over theirheads,
burned the cabin, and shot Engel and his wife dead.
Now I ask, why was it that Morrieaux could not forgive En-gel? Why
was forgiving even harder than saving Engel's life?
It was too much for Morrieaux, I think, because his hatredhad become a
passion too long lodged in his soul. Morrieauxcould not live, could no
longer be the person he was without hishatred; he had become his hatred.
His hate did not belong to him,he belonged to his hate. He would not know
who he was if hedid not hate Engel.
The tragedy was that only forgiveness, the one thing he couldnot give to
Engel, could have set Morrieaux free.
Hate can be fatal when we let it grow to enormous size insideof us. The
best of people can get their bellies full of it. And it isjust as real whether it
involves a nasty little scene betweenfriends or a question of international
immorality.
Sometimes hate only nibbles at the edges of the heart; it doesnot always
burn out the lining of the soul. Sometimes it onlyasks that the hated person
keep away from us for a while; it doesnot always go for the jugular.
But whether your hate is a carcinoma growing hell-bent for
death inside your soul, or only a pesty heartburn, it will hurt youif you
do not use the right remedy. Your healing may take heroicsurgery of the
soul. Then again, you may get by with a quickcauterization. But eventually,
unchecked hate will do you in.
Such hate can be healed, however, and it is to the healing thatI invite
you next.
CHAPTER 3
We Heal Ourselves
We are ready to take our first step inside the healing heart. Pullyour
mind away from the person who needs to be forgiven; donot ask yet what
happens to the forgiven wrongdoer. Look onlyat the wounded forgiver.
Think only of Fouke and his ''magiceyes." Never mind Hilda for the time
being.
When you forgive someone for hurting you, you performspiritual
surgery inside your soul; you cut away the wrong thatwas done to you so
that you can see your "enemy" through themagic eyes that can heal your
soul. Detach that person from thehurt and let it go, the way a child opens his
hands and lets atrapped butterfly go free.
Then invite that person back into your mind, fresh, as if apiece of
history between you had been rewritten, its grip on yourmemory broken.
Reverse the seemingly irreversible flow of painwithin you.
The first gift we get is a new insight.
As we forgive people, we gradually come to see the deepertruth about
them, a truth our hate blinds us to, a truth we cansee only when we separate
them from what they did to us.When we heal our memories we are not
playing games, we arenot making believe. We see the truth again. For the
truth aboutthose who hurt us is that they are weak, needy, and fallible hu-
man beings. They were people before they hurt us and they arepeople after
they hurt us. They were needy and weak beforethey hurt us and they were
weak and needy after they hurt us.They needed our help, our support, our
comfort before they didus wrong; and they need it still. They are not only
people whohurt us; this is not the deepest truth about them. Our hate wants
to cloak them, top to bottom, only in the rags of their rottendeed. But
the magic eyes of forgiving look beneath the tatteredrags and let us see the
truth.
New insight brings nezv feeling.
When forgiving lets us see the truth about our enemies, itgives us a new
feeling toward them.
 When we talk of feeling, the word '"irrelevance" may help.When you
forgive me, for example, the wrong I did to youbecomes irrelevant to how
you feel about me now. It does notmatter, does not count, has no bearing,
cannot be figured intoyour attitude toward me, the person you hated until
now. Thepain I once caused you has no connection with how you
feeltoward me now.
Of course, we cannot pry the wrongdoer loose from thewrong; we can
only release the person within our memory of thewrong. If we can peel the
wrong away within our forgiver'smemory, we can see the person who really
lives beneath thecloak of the wrongdoing.
Forgiving, then, is a new vision and a new feeling that isgiven to the
person who forgives.
The Bible talks the same way when it describes how Godforgives. In the
ancient drama of atonement, God took a bundleof human sins off a man's
back and tied it to a goat. He gave thegoat a kick in the rear and sent it off,
sin and all—a scapegoat—to a "solitary land," leaving the sinner free of his
burden. Or, asthe poet of the Psalms put it, he wipes our sin away, as a
motherwashes grime from a child's dirty face; he removes it from us asthe
East is removed from the West, and "ne'er the twain shallmeet."
A scapegoat? A washed face? It is poetic language for whatGod does
within his own mind. He changes his memory; what weonce did is
irrelevant to how he feels about what we are.
It is like that when we first forgive someone. When you forgive your
friend Linda, you may be the only person healed. Youdo not have power to
woo Linda back into your life. She is out ofyour control. It could be that she
does not give a fig for yourforgiveness; maybe she would prefer your hate,
maybe your hatefor her justifies her hate for you. So when you forgive you
mustoften be content with the editing of your own memory. It is theediting
of your memory that is your salvation.
WE HEAL OURSELVES / 29
If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them asthe needy
people they are, you enslave yourself to your ownpainful past, and by
fastening yourself to the past, you let yourhate become your future. You can
reverse your future only byreleasing other people from their pasts.
Forgiving is an honest release even though it is done invisibly,within the
forgiver's heart. It is honest because it happens alongwith honest judgment,
honest pain, and honest hate. True forgivers do not pretend they don't suffer.
They do not pretend thewrong does not matter much. Magic eyes are open
eyes.
How can you tell when it happens?
If the first stage of healing is release, and if release happens inyour
vision of the person who hurt you, is there an early signthat your healing
has begun? Is there a clear symptom of theonset of forgiveness?
You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall thosewho
hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.
Forgiveness is love's antidote for hate, beginning with passive hate, the
loss of energy to wish people well. So, when wefeel the slightest urge to
wish that life would go well for them,we have begun to forgive; we have
started to release those whohurt us from the blight of the harm they did to
us.
This sign of the healing stage of forgiving was made clear tome as I
talked with my friend Myra Broger about forgiving herformer husband.
Myra is a beautiful woman, an actress, who was almost killedby a hit-
and-run driver a few years ago. She was left crippled,but still gorgeous and
luminous. Her husband, a TV and filmstar, stayed with her only until she
recovered from the accident.Then, coldly and quickly, he took off and left
her alone.
I asked Myra if she had been able to forgive him. She said shethought
so. I asked her what made her think so. "I find myselfwishing him well,"
she said. I bore down. "Suppose you learnedtoday that he had married a
sexy young starlet, could you praythat he would be happy with her?" I
expected her to bristle at mypushy insensitivity. But she responded almost
casually, "Yes, Icould and I would. Steve needs love very much, and I want
himto have it."
I was skeptical. She sounded far too simple and sweet. But Icame to
know that her forgiveness was genuine, and that she
was living within the free flow of a healed memory. She reallydid wish
him well!
A modest beginning, to be sure. Not yet an Olympic plungeinto a new
relationship. I do not know whether her magic eyesmake any difference in
the life of her former husband, but theymake all the difference in the world
to Myra's life. The hate isgone; and when the mortar of hate goes, the wall
eventuallycrumbles.
 The act of forgiving, at this stage, has not achieved its climax.It is not
yet the embrace of two people simultaneously releasedfrom the grip of a
painful past.
Many profound thinkers do not want the healing of the mem-ory—short
of climax—to count as forgiveness. Take the lateAmerican theologian Paul
Tillich, for instance; he says that"genuine forgiveness is participation,
reunion overcoming thepower of estrangement." In Tillich's opinion
forgiving does notreally happen unless people are brought together in a
renewedrelationship—close, intimate, mutually accepting.
Forgivenesscompleted, fulfilled in the coming together of two people, is
theonly genuine article.
I think Tillich was wrong; I think we can have reality even ifwe do not
have the whole of it. We can have a great experienceclimbing a mountain
even if we never reach the peak.
Sex can be good—if not all we want—even if orgasm escapesus;
forgiving can be real even though the person we forgive isout of our reach.
We need not deny ourselves the healing ofincomplete forgiving; we can
forgive and be free in our ownmemories.
But forgiving does create a momentum that, left unbraked,can carry a
healed person back to the one who wounded him.
Let us move on to the next stage, then, the new beginning,the place
where we who are separated come together again.
CHAPTER 4
We Come Together
I have always liked the way Scottish theologian H. R. Macintoshtalked
about forgiveness. Forgiveness, he said, '4s an active process of the mind
and temper of a wronged person, by means ofwhich he abolishes a moral
hindrance to fellowship with thewrongdoer, and reestablishes the freedom
and happiness offriendship."
Abolishing the "moral hindrance to fellowship"—this is thekey to
complete forgiving.
Remember that it is what people do to us that creates the"hindrance" to
our getting together, really together, in spirit aswell as in space. When
people hurt us unfairly and deeply, thewrong they do comes between us.
They make us feel wronged ina way we cannot easily brush aside. And we
know in our heartof hearts that things will never be right between us if we
ignorethe wrong that separates us.
If we ignore the "moral hindrance" as if it did not really mat-ter, we take
our first step into an opiated life where nobodyreally gives a damn.
It is not a matter of our being too touchy; we are not overloading on
peevishness and pique. We are only holding on torespect for what we are
and for what has to be right between usif the two of us are going to have
honest love between us.
Only the magic eyes can take away the "moral hindrance" inthe heart
and mind of the forgiver.
Now let's say that your magic eyes have done their healingwork in your
mind and heart. You have emptied out your hateand doused your lust for
getting even. You no longer need thesour satisfaction of revenge.
But what will it take to "reestablish the freedom and happiness
offriendship?"
Both parties—the wronged and the wrongdoers—must bringabout an
honest coming together. Magic eyes cannot do this partalone.
You hold out your hand to those who did you wrong, andyou say:
"Come on back to me, I want to be your friend again."
 But when they take your hand and cross over the invisiblewall that their
wrong and your hate built between you, theyneed to carry something with
them as the price of their ticket toyour second journey together.
If they cannot or will not pay their fare, you will have to settlefor your
own healing, your private freedom from hate, your owninner peace.
What must they bring?
They must bring truthfulness. Without truthfulness, your reunion is
humbug, your coming together is false. With truthfulness, you can make an
honest new beginning.
But what is truthfulness?
Truthfulness is a state of mind; it has to do with your realintentions. You
must want your words to carry your real intentions. What you say must
vibrate with what you feel in yourheart. Harmony between the message you
give to the outsideworld and the feelings you keep on the inside.
But there is one thing more about truthfulness, just onething. You must
at least try to bring both your heart and yourwords in tune with reality.
This is the truthfulness those you forgive must bring withthem as their
entree back into your life.
To be specific, you must expect those who hurt you to behonestly in
touch with the reality of your falling-out, your pain,and their responsibility
for them.
FOR ONE THING, THEY MUST TRULY UNDERSTAND THE
REALITY OF WHAT THEYDID TO HURT YOU
They need to know that the pain you suffered at their handswas unfair to
you. You did not deserve to feel the hurt; no matterwhat was meant by it,
you suffered what you should not havehad to suffer.
They also need to know that the hurt they caused you wentdeep. Deep
enough for you to feel that you could not go on asbefore unless something
happened to remove it. They may bedumbfounded that their little lance
could have sliced so close toyour heart. Never mind. People are always
surprised at howmuch their '"little" faults can hurt other people. The point is
thatyou felt it so deeply that you could not let them come near youand share
what was left of your heart in the same way it wasshared before. And they
must, with their mind, feelings, andwords, reflect the truth of your hurt.
You cannot expect them to agree with you about every littledetail. No
two people in the history of personal misunderstand-ings have ever
remembered their painful experience in the samecolors and the same
sequences, because no two people haveexperienced the same hurt in
precisely the same way. So, if youwant total recall, blow for blow, insult for
insult, hurt for hurt,you will never get what you need.
But they must be truthful about what happened in the eye ofthe storm of
your sad falling-out. And you need to believe thatthey are truthful before
you can let them all the way back intoyour life.
THEY MUST BE TRUTHFUL WITH THE FEELINGS YOU HAVE
FELT
To be truthful with your feelings, they must feel the hurt thatyou feel.
What they know intellectually must percolate to thebottom of their heart. It
is not enough to admit that they hurtyou; they must feel the very hurt they
hurt you with. Their feelings need to be one with your feelings.
How can they feel your pain? They can feel your pain as itechoes deep
within them. You felt their disloyalty as an unfaircut that made you hate
them enough to turn them into partialstrangers. Now they must feel as if
their real selves are strangersto the persons they were when they hurt you;
they must hatethemselves for what they did to you.
Their pain and your pain create the point and counterpointfor the
rhythm of reconciliation. When the beat of their pain is aresponse to the
beat of yours, they have become truthful in theirfeelings. Their feelings are
moving to the tempo of your feelings.They have moved a step closer to a
truthful reunion.
THEY MUST BE TRUTHFUL IN LISTENING TO YOU
They cannot give you truthfulness in their words alone. Thetruthfulness
of a soliloquy is never enough to reunite twopeople. So, in your coming
together, their honesty must be bornin listening. The price of their ticket
into your life is an open ear;an open mouth gets them only half way.
They must listen to you until they hear your claims and yourcomplaints
and your cries. At first they will filter your messagethrough the screen of
their own desires and fears. They willwant to reshape every little syllable
you speak until it suits themessage they want to hear you speak. So you
must make surethey have listened long enough.
And you must also listen to their response, to make sure thatthey really
did hear you. You must lure them into a response,several times over, seduce
them into many repetitions, until youcan be sure that they are truly hearing
you, and hearing yourneeds as you reveal them. This is the only way you
can knowthey are being truthful.
 THEY OUGHT TO BE TRUTHFUL ABOUT YOUR FUTURE
TOGETHER
For two people who are coming together again after a falling-out,
truthfulness requires a promise made and a promise meantto be kept. Those
who hurt you must return to you with a promise that they will not hurt you
again; and you need to believe thatthey intend to keep the promise they
make.
They promise to be there for you in the future, when youneed them, to
be there in a style that lives up to the kind ofrelationship you have together.
You should not ask for a lot more; but you should ask for noless. They
cannot offer you a guarantee; they cannot be depended on the way you
might rely on a computer or a well-traineddog. They are ordinary, fallible
human beings; they are not God.You lay a bet on them; you need to take a
risk. But if they aretruthful, they intend to keep their promise. And their
honest intentions tilt the odds in their favor.
You don't have to have total truthfulness before you can beginto forgive
them. The forgiving you do to heal the wounds in yourmemory has no
strings attached; it is your free act of grace, donefor yourself within the
innermost cells of your soul. The demand
of truthfulness is for the fulfilhnent and climax of your forgiving,the
coming together again of two people who once belonged toeach other and
were separated from each other in their spirits.
We have been speaking of the requirements for reconciliation. Now we
can shift our focus and talk about the realistic limitsof every coming
together.
We come together within the unrelenting boundaries of ourtime and of
our circumstances.
Time shapes all our reunions with a mastery that not even themiracle of
free forgiveness can loosen. We cannot turn our calen-dars back to a happier
day. Time does not let us come together asif nothing had happened between
our falling-out and our forgiving. We change personally, and we take on
new roles; we cannotsimply abandon our new places in life the moment a
friend isforgiven and invited back into our lives.
If you have forgiven another person and want that personback in your
life, you must be realistic enough to ask this question: What has happened
to each of us between our falling-outand our forgiving?
 Sometimes, I know, the time has been mercifully brief andour roles
unchanged. A woman forgives her husband for hisblundering infidelity. He
wants terribly to come home to her; hehas languished in the loneliness of
his true love's unsatisfiedneeds. She opens her arms. Chances are he will
sail back to heron the frenzied winds of recharged eros. Their coming
togethermay be a sexual crescendo, ecstatic, enough to make them
bothplayfully grateful for the separation that rekindled their
stormyhankering after each other.
Not aways so. Maybe she has forgiven her husband a hundred times for
putting her down in the presence of handsomeyoung women. She forgives
him and takes him back again, notwith a voluptuous bedding down, but
with a muted sigh thatwhispers nothing more seductive than, "Well, let's get
on with itthen." But they do get on, and they bind their lives together
withthe invisible thread of loyalty, strong enough at least for a
newbeginning. Not a rapturous embrace; but better, no doubt, whenall is
said and done, than staying strangers separated by hate.
Sometimes, given the way things have stacked up since thefalling-out,
you have to do with a very limited sort of reconciliation. My friend's
husband wronged her so badly that she found
36 / THE FOUR STAGES OF FORGIVING
no way to go on with him. They had a spiteful divorce, andafterward
she hated him lavishly for leaving her out in the coldwhile he found warm
love nestled in the lap of a woman twentyyears younger. But that was four
years ago, and she has sinceforgiven him; she released him as she let her
hate go away, andas she was able to see him for the needy person he really
was. Soshe invited him back into her life. But he could not come far.
He has been married for three years, to the woman he lovedtoo much
while he was still married to my friend. So their com-ing together will have
to leave them at a distance. He can be afriendly former husband, and she
will wish him well with thewoman she hated him so much for loving.
Maybe they will talkon the telephone and trade stories about the kids;
maybe thechildren will get them together for an hour on Christmas Eve.
We cannot breathe back all the old life; we forgive and reuniteon the
terms that time and circumstance make available to us.
I know a splendid woman who is struggling to forgive herfather and
wants some sort of reconciliation with him. Her fatheris a fundamentalist
preacher who knows right from wrong inevery nook and cranny of
everyone else's life. He proclaims thejudgment of an angry Almighty for
every infraction of any of hisrules; his ways are very narrow and his gates
very straight.Nonetheless, he sexually abused my friend when she was a
littlegirl, convincing her that a father who lived close to God could dono
wrong. She left home at seventeen to get away from him andswore she
never wanted to be near him again.
Now, after fifteen years of alienation, she is freed from herhate, and
wants him to be her father again. But she knows shecannot take him back
into her life as a little girl welcomes herdaddy home. She cannot be a child
to him again.
Their roles will be reversed; she may have to take care of himand let
him be a child to her. In any case, she cannot have herdeepest wish—to
crawl back into his lap, resting in his strongarms, finding the loving care he
once betrayed by twisting loveinto cruel abuse. If it is possible for them to
come together againat all, she knows it will have to be a reunion that cannot
giveback her lost childhood.
Here is a sad little story that is heard more and more thesedays. Jack and
Jan were more than good friends once, but Jackwas married and Jan was
not. The sexual part of their friendship
WE COME TOGETHER / 37
eventually destroyed the rest of their friendship altogether. Jackmade
promises he could not keep and then cut the knot quickly,crudely, cruelly,
leaving Jan very empty. She filled the void withhate. She was badly
wounded, and for two years raged againstJack for using her. Then ever so
gradually, and to her own surprise, she forgave him. She was healed.
But she could not bring Jack back to their true love of threeyears before.
Their reunion, honest as it is, must be long-dis-tance—letters, a Christmas
card, a conversation on a busy cor-ner, concern for each other's well being,
no more. Reunion with-in the bounds of reality.
We practice love's high art framed and fringed by the boundaries of time
and place. We heal the wounds of our painful pasts,but the healing is
limited by things that have happened to usduring the time since our falling-
out began. We make our newbeginnings, not where we used to be or where
we wish we couldbe, but only where we are and with what we have at hand.
Accepting limits is its own kind of honesty. Wine out ofwater, OK—but,
please, not out of Elmer's glue! New beginningsmust fit within the arena of
one's own circumstances. The onlyday we ever have to forgive each other in
is this one, the day wehave at hand; and with the options we have on this
particularday we must make our new starts on the adventure of
reconciliation.
We start over, too, in the semidarkness of partial understanding. We will
probably never understand why we were hurt. Butforgiving is not havmg to
understand. Understanding may comelater, in fragments, an insight here and
a glimpse there, afterforgiving. But we are asking too much if we want to
understandeverything at the beginning.
You must start over again in your mysteries. He is a mysteryto you. And
you want to be a mystery to him. There is a lot moreto you than meets his
eyes, he must know that. So you can shareeach other's private demons and
secret angels, and leave your-selves room for wonder at one another. As
long as you are readyto move on with him without first unraveling his
mystery, yourshared mysteries can unfold as you go.
CHAPTER 5
Some Nice ThingsForgiving Is Not
When you forgive the person who hurt you deeply and unfairly,you
perform a miracle that has no equal. Nothing else is thesame. Forgiving has
its own feel and its own color and its ownclimax, different from any other
creative act in the repertoire ofhuman relationships.
Forgiving gets its unique beauty from the healing it brings tothe saddest
of all the pains. We need to do it at all only becausewe live in a world in
which human love can be fractured byunfair suffering. It has something in
common, in this respect,with the beauty of artful surgery. But precisely for
this reason, asthe healing of wounds left open from our painful pasts,
weshould not let it slip into a sloppy blend of several other nicethings
people can do for each other in unpleasant situations. Weneed to develop a
fine taste for the distinctive quality of the forgiving art.
So let us go on from here and test our sense for the subtledifference
between the miracle of forgiving and other things weneed to do in order to
get along well together in our unfairworld.
FORGIVING IS NOT FORGETTING
When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act,as if
forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the waystrings come
with a violin.
Begin with basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all.
You can never forgive people for things you have forgottenabout. You
need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did;
your memory keeps the pain alivelong after the actual hurt has stopped.
Remembering is yourstorage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the
first place.
Forgetting, in fact, may be a dangerous way to escape theinner surgery
of the heart that we call forgiving. There are twokinds of pain that we
forget. We forget hurts too trivial to botherabout. We forget pains too
horrible for our memory to manage.
 We don't remember every trivial hurt, thank God, not all thebruises we
have felt from people along the way; if it doesn't godeep, we let it heal itself
and we forget. An old friend came tome not long ago to ask me to forgive
him for something he did tome that I could not remember, not even when he
tried to stir myrecollection. He needed to be forgiven, he said. I persuaded
himthat 1 felt for his needs, and that I would be his friend just as ifhe had
never told me, but that I could not forgive him. If he hadbrought back old
pain by bringing back my memory, I shouldhave forgiven him. But as it was
I could not really forgive him; Icould only love him and by loving him heal
the separation thathe felt, though I did not.
The pains we dare not remember are the most dangerouspains of all. We
fear to face some horrible thing that once hurtus, and we stuff it into the
black holes of our unconsciousnesswhere we suppose it cannot hurt us. But
it only comes backdisguised; it is like a demon wearing an angel's face. It
lays lowfor a while only to slug us later, on the sly.
Forgetting can be Russian roulette, the same sort of game awoman plays
when she "forgets" the little lump she felt on herbreast a month ago.
Enough, then, to light up a warning sign: never mistake forgetting for
forgiving.
Once we have forgiven, however, we get a new freedom toforget. This
time forgetting is a sign of health; it is not a trick toavoid spiritual surgery.
We can forget because we have beenhealed.
But even if it is easier to forget after we forgive, we should notmake
forgetting a test of our forgiving. The test of forgiving lieswith healing the
lingering pain of the past, not with forgettingthat the past ever happened.
True, the Bible says that God promises to forgive us and for-get.
Jeremiah speaks for God: will forgive their sins, and willremember their
sins no more." But does he forget the way weforget when we can't
remember where we left our keys? Ofcourse not. God does not have
amnesia; to say that God forgetsis to say that he feels about us the way he
would feel if he hadforgotten.
We are the same. Can you stop your memory on a dime, putit in reverse,
and spin it in another direction the way you canreverse direction on a tape
recorder? We cannot forget on command. So we just have to let the
forgetting happen as it will; weshouldn't rush it, and we certainly should not
doubt the genuineness of our forgiving if we happen to remember.
 The really important thing is that we have the power to forgive what we
still do remember.
I will say more about forgetting later on, and about a healingway to
remember bad things. But enough for now: forgiving andforgetting are not
the same.
EXCUSING IS NOT FORGIVING
Excusing is just the opposite of forgiving. We excuse peoplewhen we
understand that they were not to blame. Maybe thedevil made them do it.
Maybe there were extenuating circumstances. They were not to blame. So
why should we forgivethem? We forgive people for things we blame them
for.
We excuse people because we understand why they had to dowhat they
did. A French proverb says, "To understand all is toforgive all." But this is
not quite right. We only excuse all if weunderstand all.
It takes no saving grace to excuse someone. All excusingtakes is a little
insight.
We all need a lot of excusing. All of us are what we are partlybecause of
what other people have made of us—our parents, ourteachers, our
ancestors.
We were dealt a hand of cards when we were born, and wehave had to
play our game with those cards. Some of our cardswere strong; we were
blessed. But there were some jokers in thehand as well. Surely we do not
need to be forgiven for the weak
cards that were in the hand that was dealt to us, cards we didnot ask for
and have never wanted. All we can be blamed—andforgiven—for is how
we played the hand we were dealt.
Think of the reasons you could submit to show someone thatyou were
not to blame for the rotten thing you did.
Your genetics. An X got where a Y was supposed to be in
yourchromosomic building blocks; your genetic structure is shaky.The fault
lies in your DNA. You do not need forgiving; you needto be re-engineered!
Your psychic conditioning. You had a crazy upbringing; yourfather was
passive-agressive and your mother was manic-depres-sive. Together, they
made you what you are today. You do notneed forgiving, what you need is
therapy.
Your culture. Your culture made you what you are. You
wereconditioned to do whatever in your culture gave you pleasureand to
avoid whatever in your culture caused you pain. We donot have to forgive
you for anything; if we want to help, we canchange the culture that made
you.
You see, there is no grace needed. All it takes is a little savvyabout how
human beings work.
But when you finally say, 'There is no explaining what theydid," we
have, at that moment, admitted the mystery of theirfree choice and we have
come to where the crisis of forgivinglies.
Sometimes, frankly, the difference is a matter of very delicateshading.
Frank Kooster and Leo Sedman come floating out of myboyhood to show
how subtle the difference between excusingand forgiving can sometimes be.
First, Frank. One summer in Michigan I was picking cherriesfrom one
of those tall, rickety stepladders that get you highenough to reach the top
branches of a cherry tree. A few treesaway, I could hear Frank Kooster
saying terrible things about meto a stranger. He couldn't see me, but I heard
it all; and I felt asthough I had died.
Frank had become my special friend. Every summer, when Iwas ten or
so, my mother took me to visit some old friends ofhers, people she had
known back in the old country, who livedon a farm about fifteen miles up a
gravel road from our house inMuskegon, Michigan. Three days on that farm
were our summer's vacation. They were my idyll, the more so as I got to
theage when farm boys did men's work.
When it actually came to doing the jobs, though, 1 was badlymiscast,
badly enough to make a farmer thank the Almighty hehad no son with my
lack of aptitude. I really did fail farming.
But Frank, a real farmer's farm boy, embraced me and tookme in. I felt
like an insider with Frank; we had sat on the ampleseat of a tractor for hours
in the fields, had walked on the samepath as we flanked the cows coming in
for milking, had pitchednew mown hay side by side. I felt we were bonded
by our hoursof silence in the sun, by the secrets of the soil we shared,
thenest of baby rabbits we almost plowed under but skirted aroundinstead
because Frank had an eye for the slightest variation inthe ground's make-up,
the bucket of baloney sandwiches we atetogether for lunch in the shadow of
a Macintosh apple tree at tenin the morning. Oh yes, we were bonded all
right.
That day in the orchard he was picking cherries too, with afarmer friend
his own age, a few trees from where I was picking,hidden from view, but
not out of earshot.
He was gossiping about his parents' friends from the city—us. I heard it
all. Pete and Wes, my brothers, were fine, goodguys. But Lewis is good for
nothing, he said. "He wouldn'tknow enough to come in out of the rain if it
was hailing coco-nuts. He's worthless."
Me? Yes, Frank was bad-mouthing me. The one person,above all others
in the world, I wanted to like me was telling astranger that I was a bust, a
fizzle, a washout, a piece of wastedcreation. I felt stabbed.
Yet, as I remember the moment now, I find myself excusingFrank for
making me feel outcast. He was only sizing up realityas he saw it, through
the only lenses he had available to him—the lenses of a farmer. He was not
interested in the possibilitythat I might survive as a traveling salesman, or a
jazz singer, ormaybe a preacher. He judged me as a farmer, the way a
baseballscout sizes up the potential of a bush-league third baseman.
Whocares if the guy can do calculus if he can't hit a curve ball?
So, Frank is excused; he is almost blameless in my eyes.
Leo Sedman is different; he needs to be forgiven. Leo was thecoach of
the Muskegon High School football team, the Big Reds,
when I was a skinny kid trying to run through the obstaclecourse of
what they smirkingly called physical education.
What did they care if a kid was ashamed to show his skinni-ness in the
locker room? I hated my body. I hated the bonybumps where other kids
were smooth and round. More thananything else, I hated the hip bones, the
pointed nubs that juttedfrom my sides like swords sticking out from twin
scabbardsbeneath the flesh.
The moment of painful truth came to me at the end of everygym period,
when the curtain went up on my side-bones. Show-er time! Twice each
week, my side bones were flung on centerstage in the boys' locker room!
Every kid in the class would lookat the bones and—I knew it in my heart—
would laugh insideand be glad he was not made like me.
So I cheated. I would get undressed, open my locker door,fiddle with it,
and wrap a towel around the hip bones. I wouldshuffle, cagey, over toward
the showers, hang around just outside them for a minute or two, whistling,
eyes on the lockerroom door, just in case the coach walked through, with
the towelcasually draped over the bones. Then I would amble back over
tomy locker, unshowered, and sneak my clothes back on over mysweaty
body.
 Mostly I got away with it.
One day big Leo caught me; he waddled right up to my lock-er, the very
head coach of the Big Reds, standing right alongsideme. Leo was big, really
big; hipbones cushioned under three lay-ers of the most beautiful fat a
toothpick kid could covet. He musthave weighed 300 pounds. And there he
was, looking me over,hard-eyed, tight-lipped, tough. He had been watching
me, hebawled. Well I had better believe him, buddy boy, that I was
notgoing to get away with it. He would teach me not to cheat on theshower.
Off with my clothes, and into the shower, while everybody gawked.
A crowd of kids came around, like a bunch of people at a curbwhere a
man lies bleeding. They were all looking at me, grin-ning, waiting for me to
bleed and die. Good show.
Leo knew what he was doing. He was out to hurt a kid whowas
ashamed of his body. He was a college graduate, trained inthe human
behavior of skinny kids, six feet tall. Somebody could
put up a case for him, I suppose; maybe a fat man needs to bereassured
that fat is nicer than skinny. But I think he knew whathe was doing. And I
cannot excuse him.
You were guilty, Leo Sedman, and I hated you. Boy, did Ihate you. All 1
can do with you is forgive you.
Forgiving is tough. Excusing is easy. What a mistake it is toconfuse
forgiving with being mushy, soft, gutless, and oh, sounderstanding. Before
we forgive, we stiffen our spine and wehold a person accountable. And only
then, in tough-mindedjudgment, can we do the outrageously impossible
thing: we canforgive.
FORGIVING IS NOT THE SAME AS SMOTHERINGCONFLICT
Some people hinder the hard work of forgiving by smothering
confrontation. When they are in charge of the shop, theynever let people
heal conflict through forgiving; they stage-manage conflict so that people
never get a chance to forgive.
Some parents are dedicated to smothering conflict. Theyshush us and
soothe us and assure us that whatever makes usmad is not worth raising a
fuss about. They get between us andthe rotten kid who did us wrong,
always protecting, always pin-ning down the arms of our rage, forever
pacifying. Their "nowthens" and "there, theres" keep us from ever
unloading our an-ger and from ever forgiving. They say, "Forgive and
forget," butwhat they mean is: "Don't make a fuss, I can't stand the noise."
 Ministers tend to be compulsive managers of conflict. Thechurch needs
controversy no more than Arkansas needs a tor-nado. So if the vestryman's
wife is involved in hanky-panky withthe organist, and somebody threatens
to blow the lid, smother it,keep it out of sight until we can get the mess
swept under therug of churchy discretion. If a deacon is put down by the
chairman of the board and wants to thrash it out at the next meeting,smother
it, get the deacon to see that nobody will like him if heraises a hullabaloo.
We must have no confrontation.
There is a lot to be said for managing conflict. Goodnessknows not
many of us are good at it. My meager message here isonly that we should
not confuse the technique of smoothingthings over with the high art of
forgiving those who transgress
against us. Quieting troubled waters is not the same as
rescuingdrowning people, and smothering conflict is not the same ashelping
people to forgive each other.
ACCEPTING PEOPLE IS NOT FORGIVING THEM
We accept each other because we are acceptable in spate ofblemishes
that sometimes make it hard. People come to us witha cluster of
unacceptable qualities; but we accept them as ourfriends anyway. We spot
fine people slouching behind a brush ofdisagreeable traits. So we accept
them because of what they are,or can be, to us—in spite of what we have to
get through to findthem.
Accepting a person can feel a lot like forgiving. But it is notthe same.
The difference between accepting and forgiving is very sim-ple. We
accept people because of the good people they are for us. Weforgive people
for the bad things they did to us. We accept peoplefor the good they are, we
forgive them for the bad they did.
It will help us see the difference if we look at three ways wehave of
accepting people. First, social acceptance. Second, professional acceptance.
And, third and most difficult, p^ersonal acceptance.
We accept people socially when we embrace them inside ofour
community. Some of their customs may be odd and distaste-ful to us. Their
lifestyle may stick in our craw. We may not taketo their ways at all. But we
accept them, not necessarily aspeople we want as friends, but as people
whom we reckon deserve a place of respect within our group.
We accept them socially because they qualify socially. Wehave no call
to forgive them for anything; they have not hurt usunfairly. We just accept
them within our group even thoughthere may be things about them that we
do not much like personally.
We accept people professionally because we need to acceptthem in
order to help them. The really nifty people-accepters areour friendly
therapists. We can spill all our beans to them without having to worry that
they will throw us out. "Hmm, youwould like to shoot your motherin-law
through the head. Interesting. Oh, you want to sleep with your sister-in-law?
Yes, of
course, I understand. No, no, I don't think it is terrible for you towant to
sleep with her. Do you?"
Our broad-spirited counselors ignore all our oddities, overlook our
weird inclinations, and treat us with unconditional re-gard. They make us
feel accepted, unjudged, secure.
But what is happening is not forgiveness.
For one thing, we did not hurt them. They would need toforgive us if we
were trying to seduce their spouse, or if, Godforbid, we refused to pay their
bill. But, in their professional relationship with us, they accept us "in spite
of" our neuroses, andthey do not confuse this acceptance with forgiving. So
much forthe technique of accepting people for professional reasons.
We accept people personally as our friends or our lovers because they
are worth a lot to us in spite of a lot of things aboutthem we would rather do
without.
A wife accepts her husband in spite of his odd need to telldirty jokes in
company once he has had a drink or two. And hehas to accept her
compulsion to hover over him like a motherhen to see that he does not drink
too much, or eat too much, orpick his nose in public.
No marriage could last, no friendship survive, no family en-dure if we
could not see each other as people worth acceptingbeneath our crazy-quilt
patterns of kinks and cranks. We acceptthe people we love partly because
we are committed to them, nodoubt, but also because, on balance, tolerating
their quirky hab-its is a decent trade-off for the good things they bring to
ourlives.
When we forgive a person we do more than overlook a blemish for the
sake of the beauty behind it. A woman who forgivesa lover for betraying
her secret knows that when she forgiveshim she does something very
different from what she does whenshe accepts him in spite of his bad
breath.
 There is one right word for the amazing moment when werelease a
person who dug a deep hurt into our lives. The rightword for this moment is
not acceptance. The right word is forgiveness.
FORGIVING IS NOT TOLERANCE
Forgive me and you heal yourself. Tolerate everything I doand you are
in for a lot of trouble.
You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannottolerate
everything.
Whenever people try to live or work together, they have todecide on the
sorts of things they will put up with. The groupthat puts up with everything
eventually kills itself.
Take my friend Joe, a squatty, balding Italian who sold bargain bread
out of a tired old store in a nervous neighborhood onthe border of blight.
We used to buy bread from Joe at half thesupermarket price, and kids came
from a mile around to buysweet rolls from him with a good chance of
getting a sugar-sprinkled doughnut thrown in. Joe turned second-day bread
intoa symbol of a neighborhood trying hard for a second timearound.
One afternoon, near closing time, three neighborhood kidswalked into
Joe's store, pulled a gun, cleaned out the cash, andthen, for no reason, one
of them—a kid named Sam—shot Joe inthe stomach. He almost died.
While Joe was in the hospital, the parents of the kid who shothim came
to see him. They were decent, devout folks, poor likemost people in the
neighborhood, and now bent heavy withshame. One night they brought
Sam; nobody ever thought theycould get him to come.
Joe forgave Sam. He decided he was going to look at Sam asa weak
human being who needed a chance instead of as therotten kid who shot him
in his stomach. In fact, he talked withSam's parents about giving him a
chance to earn a little moneycleaning out the store.
But Joe never meant to put up with shooting people in thestomach. Nor
was his neighborhood ready to tolerate what Samdid.
So when Sam came to trial, Joe was a sad but convincingwitness for the
prosecution.
Sam spent a year at a juvenile detention center.
Take Pastor Gambit, a man with an enormous appetite forhuman
adoration, especially female, preferably up close, andprone if at all possible.
He cultivated quite a knack for parlayingspiritual counseling into erotic
campaigns, and before long hehad more than a few adoring women singing
ecstatic doxologiesin response to his secret ministrations. So many, in fact,
that hecould not keep them all quiet about it. The upshot: Gambitbecame
the center of scandal.
48 / THE FOUR STAGES OF FORGIVING
He was charged with ministerial malfeasance in the court ofthe church.
Some of Gambit's colleagues (who knew that there, but forthe grace of
God, went they) made a pitch for the court to forgivehim, in the style of
Jesus, who once turned to a woman guilty ofa like sin and said to her:
"Neither do I judge you, go and sin nomore."
But the kindly clergy were getting forgiving mixed up withtolerance.
Gambit needed forgiveness all right, from somebody.But the court's job was
not to decide whether Gambit could beforgiven, but whether the church
could tolerate what Gambithad done.
Take a different sort of situation, one where no one offendsmorality, but
where a bad judgment threatens efficient procedure.
Dr. Harry Den Best runs an elite surgical team at AtlanticMedical
Center where he is head heart surgeon and where thebrightest and best
young surgeons on the East Coast get theirstart toward the brilliant career
they assume is their birthright.But the limits of tolerance for goofs in Den
Best's operating roomare so narrow that few students make it through
residency atAtlantic without a chronic case of terror.
Some mistakes are tolerable—once. Anybody using a toughtechnique
for the first time can fumble. Even a second time,though, they had better
come up with a good excuse. A thirdtime? Better start thinking of a
residency in Sioux Falls. But thereis one error that Den Best does not
tolerate even once: an internor resident surgeon does not initiate a new
medical procedure fora Den Best patient without consulting him first.
Dr. Fred Bush, a brilliant but arrogant young resident, was inthe unit
one night when one of Den Best's patients in intensivecare took a turn for
the worse about twelve hours out of surgery.Something had to be done, but
it was 2 a.m. and Bush knew DenBest had to be in the operating room again
at five. Why wakehim up? So Bush wheeled the patient back into the O.R.,
wherehe, on his own, patched her up brilliantly.
Ten minutes after Den Best arrived at Atlantic that morning.Dr. Bush's
career, like Den Best's patient, took a quick turn forthe worse. The best
hope Bush has now is a secure residency ata general hospital in central
Iowa.
 SOME NICE THINGS FORGIVING IS NOT / 49
Den Best could have personally forgiven Bush; but he couldnot tolerate
what Bush had done. Bush had gone beyond thetolerable even though he
was well within the range of the forgivable.
Every group has to decide what it will put up with and whatit cannot
tolerate. But what we need to remember is this: wedon't have to tolerate
what people do just because we forgivethem for doing it. Forgiving heals us
personally. To tolerateeverything only hurts us all in the long run.
Let me put together the sum and substance of what I havebeen saying in
this chapter.
You do not have to forget after you forgive; you may, but yourforgiving
can be sincere even if you remember.
You do not excuse people by forgiving them; you forgivethem at all
only because you hold them to account and refuse toexcuse them.
You do not forgive people by smothering conflict; if you forever
smother people's differences, you rob them of a chance toforgive.
You do not forgive people merely by accepting them; youforgive people
who have done something to you that is unacceptable.
You do not have to tolerate what people do when you forgivethem for
doing it; you may forgive people, but still refuse totolerate what they have
done.
fv
%T
!5'.-
4
(
■.
0*
. '• '
&
Part 2
FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO AREHARD TO
FORGIVE
A wonderful woman recently told me how, long ago, some menshe
never saw and whose names she never knew had done athing so terrible to
her that it changed her life forever. Her storyhelped me to see how hard
some people are to forgive.
She was a dark Armenian beauty, with black eyes that boreinto mine as
if she were trying to seduce from my eyes what mywords were not giving
her: release from her painful memory ofthe worst thing any human being
could do to another. Howcould 1 give her a key to freedom from the hate
that possessedher for almost a half century, glowing like incense on the altar
ofholy vengeance?
Whom did this splendid lady need to forgive? She needed toforgive men
with no faces and no names, a gang who invadedher home one late night in
Teheran and slaughtered everyone inher family. She had grown up in Iran,
early in the century, mod-erately upper class. One night five terrorist Turks
with hoodsover their heads came to her house and tied up'her husband
andher two children, her father and her mother, dragged them outof the
house and outside the city and butchered them all. Shelived only because,
unlike most any other night, she was awayon an errand for the prep school
where she taught Iranian children.
'Tell me," she softly demanded, "tell me how 1 can forgivepeople who
have no faces, no names, no numbers, but were realenough to murder my
children?" I felt an awesome turbulencemoving inside her gentle
confrontation.
Her problem was the faceless anonymity of those who didevil against
her. Can you forgive the invisible people, the oneswhose faces you cannot
see, but who do you terrible wrong?
1 have told you about my gentle interrogator so that she could
FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD TO FORGIVE / 53
 lead us into what we must talk about next: people who are veryhard to
forgive.
It is hard to forgive people we cannot see, or touch, or maybeeven
know.
It is also hard to forgive people who do not care whether weforgive
them or not.
It is hard to forgive some people because they seem too evil tobe
forgiven.
And it may be hardest of all to forgive ourselves.
But what about God? Some of us have wondered, in toughtimes, why
God let us down when he could have helped us? Canwe forgive God? Do
we dare ask?
1 invite you to explore with me the lives of some of thesepeople, the
kind that are very hard for us to forgive even whenwe want both to forgive
and forget.
CHAPTER 6
Forgiving the Invisible People
Some people invade our lives for a tragic hour or a sad lifetime,leave us
with hurting memories, and then move away where wecannot see them.
They are invisible, people whose reality is nowwoven from the thin fabric
of a time that no longer is. They arenot less real to us than people we see
before us, people withfaces and names and bodies to touch. They are only
harder toreach with our hands and with our forgiveness.
People become invisible when they die before we can forgivethem. Or
when they hide their faces behind the masks of corporations. People
become partially invisible, too, when they donot leave a clear picture of
themselves in the minds of their victims—mentally handicapped people,
and children, hurt bypeople whose faces they can only dimly see.
Walk with me slowly through a few fields of the most fragilefeelings
that can haunt a human memory.
THE PARENT WHO DIED
I know a woman who hates her father for inflicting her lifewith a bad
memory of the perverted sex games he made her playwith him when she
was too young to say no to Daddy. Now heis dead.
She hates him. But she hates herself even more.
She is sure she cannot free herself from the hatred she feelsfor herself
until she forgives her father. But how does she forgivea father who is not
here to say, 'T'm sorry"?
Most of our mothers and fathers were ordinary people withordinary
flaws. They do not need to have been savage slatterns
or raging bulls to make them hard to forgive. Morally straightparents
who could not love their children may be as hard toforgive as morally bent
parents who molest their children. Butonce they become invisible, they are
all terribly hard for us toforgive.
No matter, then, whether we were walloped by a hot-tem-pered father or
hung out to dry by a cold-hearted mother—whyis it so hard to forgive
parents who pulled a fast one on us bydying before we got the freedom to
forgive them?
Dead parents are hard to forgive for the simple reason thatthey are so far
out of reach. We cannot hug them after we forgivethem. We can't crawl on
their laps and let them love us now theway we needed it then; and they
cannot tell us how sorry theyare. They cannot do any of the reconciling
things that make forgiving a little easier.
Dead parents are hard to forgive, too, because something inus does not
want our departed parents to need forgiving. Wewant to remember a saintly
mother and a noble father, and toforgive them means to catalogue them with
ordinary folk. It isn'tnice to hate someone—and then to forgive someone—
who sacrificed so much to get us to make something of ourselves.
Especially if they have died and gone to heaven.
Still, hard as it is, a lot of us need to forgive dead parents ifonly for the
sake of peace within our own living selves. And wecan do it.
Keep in mind these facts when you try to forgive your deadparent.
NO PARENT IS PERFECT
No parent is a god, few mothers are saints, and hardly anyfathers
deserve to be idols. Even "ideal parents" are at best gen-tle folk, and gentle
people do cruel things. You will not shake thefoundations of life if you
admit that your father could have beencruel to you and your mother could
have left you in the cold.
Once they are dead, we want our parents to be sheer light,with no
darkness in them at all; and we feel a little foul if weallow shadows to
darken our memory. We don't want them toneed forgiving; because if we
forgive them, we must have foundfault with them first, maybe even hated
them. I still shudderwhen I think about forgiving my mother. She gave her
body and
soul to put food in our stomachs and steer us toward godlinessand a
steady job. You could go to hell, I thought, for hating amother like her. Yet,
she had a shadow side, as every parentdoes. And I learned that hate does
not have to cancel love, thatI could love her as much as I ever did, and still
hate and forgiveone part of her.
If you feel a need to forgive a dead parent, you must face upto the
reality that your father or mother could truly have doneyou wrong.
OUR PAINFUL FEELINGS ARE VALID
 You may remember childhood hurts, and one part of youmay hate the
parent you blame for them; but you do not dare tofeel the pain and do not
dare to feel the hate. We do not dare letourselves follow our feelings into
their depths because we areafraid the pain will be unbearable and the hate
too ugly for us toadmit.
There is a flow to feeling that can, if you follow it, carry youto its own
deep well. It will carry you to the depths if you arewilling to put away your
defenses.
If you let them, your feelings can take you into terrible nightsof
awesome sadness. You will feel again the loneliness of yourchildhood
struggle to be loved. You will feel again the dread ofnot being good enough
for a parent's love. You may feel as if youare lost, without hope and without
light, such'feelings as youwould hardly dare admit to your best friends.
And they can take you into an ugly place where you will feelthe heat of
your hate. Even hatred for a saintly mother or a beloved father! They may
lead you into your own private hell. Butthere is no freedom to forgive your
dead parents unless you letyourself feel the pain you need to forgive them
for.
Your feelings, of course, may be exaggerated. They may alsobe
distorted. No matter. They are what you feel. So they are valid.And you find
freedom to forgive your dead parents when youadmit the validity of your
feelings about them and when you letyourself feel the pain you want to
forgive them for.
YOU NEVER COMPLETELY FORGIVE A DEAD PARENT
You can't finish the four stages of forgiving when you forgivea dead
parent. Perfect forgiving ends in a reunion of two people
estranged by hurt and hate. But when death intervenes, thishappy
ending is postponed for a time beyond all earthly relationships. You must be
satisfied for now with a healing of memory.
You may not even complete your own healing; the cure mayneed to be
repeated many times. Forgiving dead parents works alot like quitting
smoking; you may need to start over again several times before you finally
pull it off.
YOU NEED TO FORGIVE YOURSELF EVEN AS YOU FORGIVE
YOUR DEAD PARENTS
The hurt we get from parents almost always makes us feelguilty or
ashamed of ourselves; I have never met a person whohated his father or
mother who did not also hate himself.
Most people who try to forgive their dead parents have afrightened
hunch that they deserve the miserable feelings theirparents left them with.
Ask a woman who was sexually molestedby her father what the worst effect
of it is. She will probably tellyou that the worst part of it is the way it made
her hate her ownself.
Even if our parents were saints, they could get us to hateourselves by
infecting us with the hatred they felt for themselves. My own saintly mother
developed self-accusation into afine art. The fact is that she had little time
and less energy to domuch hard-core sinning. Yet she remembered every
little sin shedid manage to sneak into her life, and she ruminated over it
andinflated it until she felt like one of the great sinners of the age.
To us she was both holy and heroic; but her goodness onlymade things
worse for us. If a saintly mother could not forgiveherself, how could moral
midgets like us ever forgive ourselves?
I discovered after she died that I could forgive the motherwho nurtured
my self-hatred only when I forgave the self Ihated. But I honestly do not
know which came first, forgivingher or forgiving me.
But dead parents are not the only invisible people.
THE INVISIBLE MOTHER WHO GAVE HER CHILD AWAY
Here is a conversation we have heard at our house more thanonce:
'"Why should I?"
"'Because I asked you to."
''Why should I do what you ask me to do?"
"Because I am your mother."
"You are not my mother."
"I am your mother and I love you."
"You never were my mother and I hate you."
The angry young lady in the conversation was our daughterCathy, a
flaming hothead of sixteen at the time, a beautiful ladyof twenty-six now,
and our best friend. The woman she wasraving at was my wife, Doris.
As we look back on those rip-roaring domestic tempests andas we enjoy
our friendship now, we are sure that the toughestchallenge for adopted
children is their struggle to forgive theinvisible birth-mother who gave them
away.
When Cathy was a little girl we put the best possible face onit for her:
"She gave you away because she loved you too muchto keep you." Maybe
so. But somewhere in her heart, Cathywondered whether it wasn't just the
other way around; maybeher birth-mother gave her away because she was
not worthkeeping. Besides, if she loved her that much, Cathy suspected,she
could have kept her if she had really wanted to; what sheprobably wanted
was to get rid of a baby who could only get inthe way of what she really
wanted out of her own life.
In any case, Cathy had to hate somebody. She had everyright. Being
given away and adopted can be a crummy way to besmuggled into a family
nest. And since the invisible birth-motherwho gave her away was not
around to hate, why not hate thevisible parents who were all too close at
hand? Our love was onlya reminder to her that somebody else had let her
go. So shecarried a double load of hate.
The only remedy for the pain of her hate was her power toforgive.
But how do you forgive a mother who has no face, no name,no address?
How does an adopted child forgive an invisiblemother?
I will share my sense of how Cathy came to be healed by thepower of
forgiving. I do not mean to suggest that every adoptedchild has to move
toward forgiveness along Cathy's route. But itcan't be zvhoUy unique to her.
One thing Cathy did was to get some information about herbiological
parents. Not everything. She did not track them down
and meet them face to face, as some adopted children do. Butshe
learned enough about them to get a feel for their personalreality: they were
very young, they were poor, they belonged toreligions that did not seem to
mix, and, of course, they were notmarried. And she learned that her birth-
mother was Italian, adelightful ''explanation" for the romantic spirit in
Cathy that hersober Dutch parents could never tame. Her birth-mother
becamea more real person to her, even though she was still invisible.
Then Cathy learned more, and in a new way, about the agonies a young
woman goes through before she decides to give herbaby for adoption. One
of her special friends became pregnantand, after upheavals of fear and
doubt, gave her child to a child-less couple for adoption; Cathy loved her
friend deeply, sharedher terrible conflict, and was sure that, all things
considered, herfriend did the right thing for her child. She came to feel in a
newway how her own birth-mother was probably a wonderful per-son who
was caught in a terrible conflict and really did give heraway because she
loved her too much to keep her. Cathy was toosmart to believe that it was
all love and no self-interest; but shecame to see that there could have been
enough love to make ittrue that she was given away because she was loved
too much tobe kept. Her new empathy with her natural mother did not
washout all of Cathy's hatred, but it did bring it down to forgivingsize.
Cathy's next move was the most important one of all. Shecame—with
help—to see herself as she really was, a splendid,strong, intelligent, and
valuable person. Having been givenaway as a baby could not diminish her
own superb worth as awoman. But here too, she was smart enough to see
herself as amixed bag. She needed forgiveness as much as she desired to
beapplauded.
Finally, she came to believe that God forgave her invisiblemother, for
whatever wrong she did. And if God could forgiveher birth-mother, why
shouldn't she forgive her too? And, forthat matter, why shouldn't she forgive
herself in the bargain?
I do not want to give the impression that Cathy walked aneasy and
straight line to freedom and peace. But she did it; shemanaged one of the
toughest jobs in the whole arena of forgiving: she forgave the invisible
person who brought her into theworld and then gave her to us.
Doris and I have muddled through the rearing of three adopted children.
They have handled the forgiving challenge in theirown ways. Not one of
them has done it the same way as theothers. But each has proven to me that
forgiving is the onlyremedy for the hurt of being given away as a child.
THE INVISIBLE GHOST BEHIND THE ORGANIZATION
People sometimes hide behind organizations and hurt uswith
institutional systems.
Their faces are hidden from us by desks and boardroomdoors,
secretaries' smiles, and minutes of committee meetings.
They are the invisible people we need to forgive when theorganization
hurts us and we hate the organization for doing it.
For Bob it was the textile factory where he worked in Bostonfor twenty-
five years, without a day's work lost for sickness; thecompany "released"
him without a pension when it moved tocheaper labor in South Carolina.
Charlie was promoted to a job that gradually got too big forhim to do.
He had put in twenty years, the best years he had togive. But they fired him
at an age when no other company waslikely to pick him up. And they hired
two people to replace himat the job they had asked him to do alone.
For some, it is something much worse.
 Organizations have little grace. They can knock you down,drag you
across a bed of nails, throw your remains into thestreet, and, just before you
hit the pavement, hand you a tendollar plaque with your name on it to show
the company's grati-tude. Organizations are amoral; they can leave you
bleeding inthe street with no breathing human being around to accept
theblame: it is all company policy.
So you end up hating an impersonal organization.
What do you do when you hate the organization and yourhate is
tarnishing your golden years, turning you into a crotche-ty, maybe surly, but
surely wounded old soul?
What you have to do is find yourself a living, breathing, responsible
person in the organization and forgive that person (orpersons, if more than
one were involved).
If you were thrown out of your job before your time by acallous
company policy, you must not try to forgive the impersonal company. You
will never pull it off. You need to find avice-president or a personnel
manager, someone who could haveseen to it that you were treated fairly.
And, if you can, youshould make an appointment for a confrontation. He or
she willprobably put you off with a reasonable explanation. But it is bet-ter
to forgive someone whose name you know and who may notbe solely to
blame than to be saddled for the rest of your life withthe pain caused by an
impersonal system.
You shouldn't waste your soul's vitality trying to forgive anorganization.
The secret to peace is: get to a person behind thecorporate facade.
Chances are he or she will tell you the system was to blame.You mustn't
let the company's spokesman off the corporate hooktoo quickly. You must
declare him or her guilty of second-degreehurt, at least, and then you can
use the power that God givesyou to hold your hand out to the vice-president
or the foremanand say, "I forgive you." After that, you are on the way to
healing. Only on the way. But it is enough for starters.
PEOPLE BADLY OUT OF FOCUS
Some people cannot get a clear picture of the culprits who didthem
harm because the "cameras" in their brains are out offocus. But they, too,
need to forgive those who wrong them.
I wonder how mentally retarded children forgive peoplewhose identity
is always fuzzy in their eyes. Is a Down's Syndrome child equipped with
special powers to forgive?
 When I wonder how intelligent a person has to be to forgivesomeone, I
always think about Toontje. I am not proud to tell it,but I want to tell it so
that I can show how easy it is to hurtsomebody who cannot get a firm fix on
the person doing thehurting.
In our graduate student days, I was living with Doris on thegrounds of a
large mental hospital outside a village called Benne-broek, in Holland,
where we had splendid rooms in a ramblingDutch mansion. The grounds of
the hospital were landscapedlike a park, with winding walks lined by oaks
and dotted withpatches of hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils. The beauty of
theplace encouraged me to take a snappy walk every morningthrough the
hospital grounds and alongside the flowered fields.
62 / FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD TO FORGIVE
It was on my walks that I met Toontje, close to noon everymorning.
Toontje (''Little Tony" in English) was microcephalic;his brain was too
small to organize his world or learn the alpha-bet.
But Toontje learned to perform one useful service. He had asmallish cart
with two large buggy wheels for easy steering, astraight handle for pushing,
and two legs behind the wheels sothe cart could stand almost upright when
Toontje parked it. Healso carried a stick about three feet long, with a sharp
point onone end for stabbing pieces of paper along the sidewalks of
thehospital grounds.
You could see him every morning jabbing at crumpled cigaretpackages
or chewing gum wrappers, carrying them to his cart,pulling them off his
stick, and cautiously laying them there, oneby one.
If he walked a ways without finding any litter to pick up, hewould
provide his own. He would stop his cart, lift out a piece ofpaper, carry it to
the edge of the sidewalk, drop it to the ground,walk back to the cart for his
spear, stalk the piece of paper, pierceit through, carry it back, and soberly
deposit it back into hisbarrow. Toontje was exercising his human right to be
useful.
How, you may ask, did Toontje know when it was time tocall it a
morning and head back to Building Nine for his lunch?Simple. He had
learned to ask one question and to recognize theone answer that gave him
his signal. He learned to ask: "Hoe laatis't?" ("What time is it?"). When he
heard one answer—"TwaalfUur"—he knew it was time to turn the cart
about and headhome. So, with his respectful, squeaky drawl, he asked
everybody he passed on the hospital walks: "Hoe laat is't?"
Everybody,every morning—same question.
One sunny Dutch morning I spotted Toontje poking his stud-ded stick
through another crumpled cigaret pack, and I felt anasty impulse of the sort
that leads decent persons to do verymean things.
What would Toontje do if I asked him his own question?
My timing had to be exquisite. I had to catch Toontje on thevery verge,
lips puckered for the H in Hoe, and then sneak in myquestion before he had
a chance to ask his.
"Hoe laat is't, Toontje?"
He froze. His hand dropped limp from the handle of his cart.
FORGIVING THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE / 63
his eyes gaped, fixed on blank space, and he began to shake, firsthis
hands, then his head, and his entire body quaking, whilefrom his mouth
came inchoate stuttering sounds. He shook forall of fifteen horrible seconds
and then he gradually put hishands back on the handle of his cart and
pushed it past me, notlooking, not saying anything.
I knew the evil 1 had done the moment I saw him shake. Inthe conceit
of my temptation I thought it was a harmless game,maybe even a
psychological experiment. But after I did it, I knewwhat it really was that I
had done: I had demeaned a person whohad no tools to play my unfunny
game with me. I had betrayedmy brotherhood with this man, and hurt a
child of God who didnot have it coming.
Could he forgive me? Were my chances of forgiveness lesswith Toontje
than with a nasty Ph.D.? Could this man with abrain too small to count
change get a clear enough focus on meand what I did to him, even to sense
that I needed forgiving? Oris it possible that a large heart made up for his
small brain?
I do not know whether Toontje, and all other people who areshort-
changed on cerebral skills, are given a special power toforgive. Toontje died
some time ago. In heaven, Tm sure,Toontje learned what a wretched thing I
had done to him thatApril morning twenty years before. He also got a clear
profile ofme as the person who did it. And I am sure he forgave me,though I
never deserved it.
When we meet maybe he will teach me how people withsmall brains
forgive people with small souls.
 I think we are all like Toontje in our own ways. Everyone is atbottom a
mystery to me, just as 1 was a mystery to Toontje. 1 cannever get a
perfectly clear fix on anyone. The difference betweenthe partial way we all
understand each other and the partial wayToontje understood me is really
not all that great.
We all see and know each other in part, as through a glassdarkly.
So we forgive in part, too.
CHAPTER 7
Forgiving PeopleWho Do Not Care
The scenario of forgiving does not always end in a happy reunion.
Sometimes the story is suspended in mid-air, where theresponse to our
forgiveness is, couldn't care less."
A person who hurts us and does not care digs the first wounddeeper and
makes the miracle of forgiving ever so much harder.
We do not want to forgive someone who laughs at our pain.For that
matter, we do not rush to forgive someone who justshuffles off and leaves
us alone to suture the cuts he sliced intoour life.
When someone hurts us meanly, we want him to suffer too.We expect
this clod to pay his dues; we want him to grovel alittle. The old-fashioned
word for what we want is repentance.
But the people who hurt us do not always come through.
The question is: should we forgive them anyway? Does iteven make
sense to forgive someone who would rather we keepour forgiveness and
feed it to the dog?
Before we decide, we should make sure of what we want.What do we
want people to do for us when we ask them torepent?
Not every hurt calls for repentance, any more than every cutneeds
stitching. In the cross-town traffic of human relationshipswe have limitless
chances to rub people the wrong way, thoughtlessly, carelessly, and
stupidly. But we do not dig a ravine between each other every time we get
hurt. Mini-wrongs can besoothed with a modest gesture that falls well short
of repentance.
An apology!
Apology? What a conversion that word has had! In the olddays, an
apology meant a plea of innocence against a dreadfulcharge. Today we
apologize when we plead guilty to a trifle.
The other night my wife came home in a stew about a crudemale who
shoved his way into her place at the gas station. It wasraining, hard. Doris
was fourth in line at the self-service lane,where there was one diesel pump
that could be gotten at fromeither side. Three cars were lined up ahead of
her. When it wasfinally her turn at the pump, she got out of the car, put her
backto the pump while she spun off the gas cap, and then turned toreach for
the nozzle. But a new station wagon full of familysplashed up in the other
lane; the driver sprang out of the frontseat, grabbed the nozzle just as Doris
reached for it, and thentook the cap off his own tank and whistled while he
filled it withdiesel fuel.
My wife watched him, buffaloed, and then pulled herself together to
make her counterattack. "'You saw that I had beenwaiting in line for this
pump before you got here." "That makesno difference to me," he said. "I
think what you are doing iscontemptible." "I don't give a damn what you
think." "Yourchildren are watching; do you care what they think?"
"Look,lady, I told you I don't care what you think."
She recycled the dialogue to me as if I stood for every rudemacho driver
in the world: "He would never have dared to dothat to me if I had been a
man!" Probably not.
Would an apology do? Suppose she met the man next weekat the same
pump and he offered to let her move ahead of himand said, "Sorry about
last week, the kids had been driving memad, I was in a dreadful hurry to get
home, and I was terriblylate." I think Doris would have gulped and
grudgingly indulgedhim. His apology would have done the job.
Apologies keep life oiled when the bearings begin to wear.Nicely timed
and sincerely meant, the graceful apology is a curt-sy to civility, a gesture
that helps crowded citizens put up witheach other with a smidgin of courtly
humor, a modest bow tokeep the the hassle within tolerable bounds.
All the more reason, then, to see that apologies do not try todo the job
that only repentance can do.
Powerful and sneaky people use apologies as end runs
around repentance. They betray a trust; and, when they havebeen found
out, they say they are sorry for ''mistakes in judgment." They smile through
their oily apologies when their crimecalls for quakes of repentance. They
get by only because we havelost our sense of the difference between
repentance for wrongand apologies for bungling.
Ordinary people do it too. We do something painfully wrong,but when
we are called to account we try to slide through ourfault on a slippery
apology: "Oh, my dear, you are exaggerating.But if you insist. Til say 1 am
sorry, so let's forget it." A quickmaneuver around the pain of penitence!
 We should not let each other get away with it. A deep andunfair hurt is
not a mere faux pas.
We cannot put up with everything from everyone; somethings are
intolerable. When somebody hurts us deeply and unfairly an apology will
not do the job; it only trivializes a wrongthat should not be trifled with.
If Jackie apologizes for having betrayed you, you must callher bluff and
throw her "Sorry about that" into the garbage dis-posal. If Fred lies about
you after he promised to be your friend,you must accept no apologies from
him; you must tell him to faceup to the truth or leave you alone.
Well now, if some wrongs are matched only by the sorrow ofrepentance,
we must get a clear picture of what we want whenwe ask a person to repent.
Repenting is a four-storied mountain. We must pass throughall four
levels before we are finished. Let me name them.
THE LEVEL OF PERCEPTION
The first awakening moment dawns when you see your ownaction
through another's eyes. You perceive that their feelingsabout what you did
are true. You have reached the level of interpersonal perception.
You do not need to see every detail of your falling-out precisely the way
they see it. You will probably never, even after athousand explanations,
agree on exactly how it all happened. Nomatter. You see that they are right
when they say that what youdid to them was mean and unfair and
insufferable.
THE LEVEL OE EEELING
You move now from perception to pain. Here you feel thepain that you
made someone else feel. You share the hurt thatyou inflicted.
You somehow enter another's soul and share his suffering.Once there,
you feel as if you are out in the cold, barefoot in thesnow, stuck for a while
in the inner hell of your own deservedcondemnation. The family name of
this pain is "guilt."
THE LEVEL OE CONFESSION
When you can tell those you hurt that you realize what youdid was
intolerable and that you share their pain, you reach thelevel of confession. If
they believe you, your separate sadnessesbegin to melt into one.
When you confess this way, you do more than admit yourblame.
Criminals are sometimes trapped into admitting whatthey can no longer
deny; lawyers call this a "confession," but itisn't what I am talking about.
Terrorists break their necks toclaim blame for the worst sorts of brutalities;
but they do notconfess in our sense of the word.
Confession is different, too, from spilling the beans. Celebrities are not
confessing when they hire ghost writers to tell theirprivate stories.
Confession is not for payoffs; it is for healing.
When you confess to another person, you do not merely ad-mit that you
did something; you tell the person you hurt thatyou hurt too, with the very
hurt that you hurt them with, andthat you want terribly to be forgiven.
It is awesomely hard to confess to friends, I know—a lot easi-er to
confess to God than to a wounded brother. And the deeperyou hurt them,
the harder it is to confess to them.
When you confess, you put yourself helpless in the hands ofthe person
you wronged, trust him with your very self, bringingnothing with you but
your hope for a sign of love. Confession isthe rumbling of a crumbling
heart.
THE LEVEL OF PROMISE
If you know and genuinely feel the wrongness of what youdid, you also
feel a passionate desire not to hurt again. So youmake a promise.
Why should you expect anyone to take your confession seriously unless
you promise that you do not intend again to foulyour relationship with still
more of the same unfair pain?
You can give no guarantee; the best of us go back on promises. But
anyone who has been hurt should expect a sincere intention, at least.
These, then, are the four stories of the mountain of repentance:
perception, feeling, confession, and promise.
It seems right that people who want you to forgive themshould give you
a signal that they repent.
Most of us who have read the story of the Prodigal Son feelgood when
the son says to his forgiving father, "I am notworthy." But try changing the
scenario. See the son swaggeringhome and hear him say: "I've decided to
do everybody a favorby coming back to my old place in the family circle."
We will nothave it that way. We want him to stick to the orginal script:
"Idon't deserve even to be a hired hand."
Take Marmelodov. Dostoevski tells us about him in Crime
andPunishment.
Marmelodov was a wretched lush who ruined everyone wholoved him.
He pushed his angelic daughter Sonia out on thestreet to sell her body to
keep him on the bottle. He stole grocerymoney from his longsuffering wife,
Katerina.
But Marmelodov fully expected to be embraced in the end bythe loving
arms of a merciful God. Decent folk mocked hishopes, chided him, louse
that he was, for presuming on themercy of the Lord. Where did he get off,
the most loathsome ratin the sewer, thinking that he could deserve a
mansion inheaven prepared for him?
Ah, said Marmelodov, that is just the secret: he knew hedidn't deserve it.
He had had a vision in which God welcomedhome all the prodigals of the
world. "'Come forth ye drunkards,come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye
children of shame!'And we shall all . . . stand before him. And he will say to
us, 'Yeare swine . . . but come ye also.' And the wise ones . . . will say,'Oh,
Lord, why dost thou receive these men?' And this is whatthe Lord will say
to his critics: 'This is why I receive them, oh yewise, this is why I receive
them, oh ye of understanding, that notone of them believed himself to be
worthy of this.'"
The art of getting back into fellowship after we have done
FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO DO NOT CARE / 69
someone dirt is knowing we don't belong there. We must knowwe are
not worthy. And, like Marmelodov, we need to say so. Ifwe are the ones
who hurt someone, we should repent; repentance is the only honest entree
to forgiveness.
But supposing we are the ones who have been hurt. Must wedemand
repentance before we forgive the person who hurt us?Should we hold back
on forgiving when the other one holds backon repentance?
God takes the tough line, it seems, from what we read in theBible.
When Jesus sent his disciples to tell the world that Godforgives, he also told
them to ask people to repent. Following thislead, St. Peter put the cards on
the table: "Repent so that yoursins can be forgiven."
Why? Why do we have to repent when we want to be forgiven?
I don't believe God wants us to grovel just to give him thepleasure of
watching us sweat.
My own guess is that God asks us to repent, not as a condition he needs,
but as a condition we need. What God wants isnot only that we be forgiven
in his heart and mind, but that weshould also feel forgiven in our heart and
mind. He wants anhonest coming together with his children. Asking for
repentancewas only a way of asking for truthfubiess.
 What about us mortals?
Should we waste our forgiving on someone who does notwant it? Or
admit he needs it? Pearls before swine? Pardon forthe unrepentant? Let's
have another look.
Realism, it seems to me, nudges us toward forgiving peoplewho hurt us
whether or not they repent for doing it.
For one thing, time does not let people stay near us forever.They may
die before they have gotten around to repenting. Butwe need to forgive
them anyway.
And, second, there is a matter of letting others take responsibility for
themselves. We cannot 77mke them repent; we cannotpull them back to us
like a dog on a leash. Let them be responsible for staying away from us. But
why should we let them keepus from healing ourselves?
So we need to forgive the unrepentant for our own sake. Weneed to
forgive people who do not care if only so that we do notdrown in our own
misery. Let the other guy take care of himself.
I love a Jewish sentiment found in an ancient documentcalled the
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: And "if a man sinagainst thee ... if he
repent and confess, forgive him .... But ifhe be shameless, and persisteth in
his wrongdoing even so forgive him from the heart, and leave to God the
avenging."
Leave the avenging to God—that, I think, is the way for us tocope with
people who hurt us and do not seem to care.
The climax of forgiveness takes two, I know. But you canhave the
reality of forgiving without its climax. You do not al-ways need a thing
whole to enjoy it at all. A blossom has realbeauty even if it never becomes a
flower. A climb can be successful though we do not reach the summit.
Forgiving is real even ifit stops at the healing of the forgiver.
Should you sentence yourself to the escalator of hate simplybecause the
person you need to forgive does not want your forgiveness?
Back to fundamentals! Forgiving is a process. One stage is thehealing of
the forgiver's memory. If the people you forgive wantto stay where they are,
let them. You can make a solo flight tofreedom.
CHAPTER 8
Forgiving Ourselves
Do you dare release the person you are today from the shadowof the
wrong you did yesterday?
Do you dare forgive yourself?
To forgive yourself takes high courage. Who are you, after all,to shake
yourself free from the undeniable sins of your privatehistory—as if what
you once did has no bearing on who you arenow?
Where do you get the right—let alone the cheek—to forgiveyourself
when other people would want you to crawl in shame ifthey really knew?
How dare you?
The answer is that you get the right to forgive yourself onlyfrom the
entitlements of love. And you dare forgive yourselfonly with the courage of
love. Love is the ultimate source of bothyour right and your courage to
ignore the indictment you level atyourself. When you live as if yesterday's
wrong is irrelevant tohow you feel about yourself today, you are gambling
on a lovethat frees you even from self-condemnation.
But there must be truthfulness. Without honesty, self-forgive-ness is
psychological hocus-pocus. The rule is: we cannot reallyforgive ourselves
unless we look at the failure in our past and callit by its right name.
We need honest judgment to keep us from self-indulgingcomplacency.
Let me recall the four stages we pass through when we forgive someone
else who hurt us: we hurt, we hate, we heal ourselves, and we come
together again.
Wc all hurt ourselves. Unfairly, too, and sometimes deeply.
God knows the regrets we have for the foolish ways we cheat
ourselves. I smoked cigarettes too long, and while I puffed awayon my
pack-a-day, I feared the time that I would say: you fool,you fool, dying
before your time, and you have no one to blamebut yourself. Then there are
the opportunities spurned, disci-plines rejected, and addictions hooked into
—they all can hauntyou with a guilty sense that you did yourself wrong.
 But the hurt your heart cries hardest to forgive yourself for isthe unfair
harm you did to others.
The memory of a moment when you lied to someone whotrusted you!
The recollection of neglecting a child who dependedon you. The time you
turned away from somebody who calledout to you for help! These are the
memories, and thousands likethem, that pierce us with honest judgment
against ourselves.
We do not have to be bad persons to do bad things. If onlybad people
did bad things to other people we would live in apretty good world. We hurt
people by our bungling as much aswe do by our vices.
And the more decent we are the more acutely we feel ourpain for the
unfair hurts we caused. Our pain becomes our hate.The pain we cause other
people becomes the hate we feel for ourselves.For having done them wrong.
We judge, we convict, and we sentence ourselves. Mostly in secret.
Some of us feel only a passive hatred for ourselves. We merelylack
love's energy to bless ourselves. We cannot look in the looking glass and
say: "What I see makes me glad'to be alive." Ourjoy in being ourselves is
choked by a passive hatred.
Others sink into aggressive hatred of themselves. They cutthemselves to
pieces with a fury of contempt. One part of themholds its nose and shoves
the other part down a black hole ofcontempt. They are their own enemy.
And sometimes, in theultimate tragedy, their self-hatred is acted out in self-
destruction.
Of course, your inner judge may be an unreasonable nag,accusing you
falsely, and flailing you unfairly. On the otherhand, your better self often
sweeps real guilt under a carpet ofcomplacency. You con yourself just to
save yourself the pain ofconfrontation with your shadowy side.
In any case, you shouldn't trust your inner judge too far.
Still, he is your toughest critic, and you have to come to termswith him.
So let us move on to love's daring response.
What happens when you finally do forgive yourself?
When you forgive yourself, you rewrite your script. Whatyou are in
your present scene is not tied down to what you didin an earlier scene. The
bad guy you played in Act One is elimi-nated and you play Act Two as a
good guy.
You release yourself today from yesterday's scenario. Youwalk into
tomorrow, guilt gone.
 Again, the word that fits the case best is "irrelevance." Lookback into
your past, admit the ugly facts, and declare that theyare irrelevant to your
present. Irrelevant and immaterial! Yourvery own past has no bearing on
your case. Or how you feelabout it.
Such release does not come easy. The part of yourself whodid the wrong
walks with you wherever you go. A corner ofyour memory winks at you
and says, "Nice try old chap, but weboth know the scoundrel you really are,
don't we?" It takes amiracle of love to get rid of the unforgiving inquisitor
lurking inthe shadows of your heart.
Perhaps nobody has understood the tortured route to self-forgiveness
better than the Russian genius Dostoevski. In hisnovel Crime and
Punishment, he portrayed the inner struggle ofself-forgiveness in the soul of
a murderer named Ilyon Raskolnikov.
Raskolnikov did something as evil as anyone can do. He brutally
murdered a helpless woman, an old pawnbroker—a miserable woman to be
sure, and miserly, and mean, but innocentstill. His guilt was stupefying.
No soul can bear such guilt alone, not for long. Sooner orlater one must
tell. Raskolnikov found a girl, an angel, Sonia,and he confessed to her. He
told her everything.
She persuaded him to admit everything to the police, and hefinally did.
He was sent to prison in Siberia.
The loving Sonia followed him there and waited for him toforgive
himself so that he could find the freedom to accept herlove.
Raskolnikov could not forgive himself. He tried to excusehimself
instead.
He came to grief, he said, "through some decree of blindfate"; he was
destined to kill the old woman. Besides, when youcome right down to it
was his act really that bad? Did not Napo—
leon do the same sort of thing and do they not build him monuments? In
clever ways like this he excused himself by findingdeep reasons why he
was not to blame.
Raskolnikov did not dare to be guilty.
"'Oh, how happy he would have been/' wrote Dostoevski, "ifhe could
have blamed himself! He could have borne anythingthen, even shame and
disgrace."
Yet, now and then, Raskolnikov did get a glimpse of "thefundamental
falsity in himself." He knew deep inside that hewas lying to himself.
 And finally it happened. How it happened he did not know.He flung
himself at Sonia's feet and accepted her love. "He weptand threw his arms
around her knees." He finally had the powerto love. And his power to love
revealed that the miracle hadreally happened; he had forgiven himself.
He forgave himself? For such a crime as cold blooded mur-der? Yes.
"Everything, even his crime, his sentence and impris-onment seemed to him
now ... an external strange fact withwhich he had no concern."
Release! Release by a discovery that his terrible past was irrelevant to
who he was now and was going to be in the future.He was free from his
own judgment and this was why he wasfree to love.
Raskolnikov stands out in staggering boldness to show usthat even the
worst of us can find the power to set ourselvesfree.
Finally, the climax of self-forgiving; it comes when we feel at onewith
ourselves again. The split is healed. The self inside of you,who condemned
you so fiercely, embraces you now. You arewhole, single; you have come
together.
You are not being smug. You care very much that you oncedid a wrong.
And you do not want to do it again. But you willnot let your former wrong
curse the person you are now. Youtake life in stride. You have let yourself
come home.
It does not happen once and for all. The hate you felt comesback now
and then, and you reject yourself for doing what youdid. But then you come
back to yourself again. And again. Andagain.
To forgive your own self—almost the ultimate miracle of healing!
But how can you pull it off?
The first thing you need is honesty. There is no way to forgiveyourself
without it. Candor—a mind ready to forego fakery andto face facts—this is
the first piece of spiritual equipment youneed.
Without candor you can only be complacent. And complacency is a
counterfeit of forgiveness. Some people are superficial,there is no other
word for it. Drawing on the top layer of theirshallow wits, they pursue the
unexamined life with unquestion-ing contentment, more like grazing cows
than honest human be-ings.
The difference between a complacent person and a personwho forgives
himself is like the difference between a person whois high on cocaine and a
person who has reason for being reallyhappy.
Then you need a clear head to make way for your forgiving heart.
 For instance, you need to see the difference between self-esteem and
self-forgiveness.
You can gain esteem for yourself when you discover that youare
estimable, that you are in fact worth esteeming. To esteemyourself is to feel
in your deepest being that you are a superb giftvery much worth wanting,
God's own art form, and a creature ofmagnificent beauty.
Sometimes you gain self-esteem only after you come to termswith the
bad hand you were dealt in life's game.
I know a man who has what is cruelly called the ElephantMan
syndrome; a tough hand to play, but the only hand he has.He has learned to
see the beautiful person he is beneath histhorny skin, and he esteems
himself—because of what he is. Kim,on the other hand, is a beautiful
adopted child whose birth-mother dealt her a genetic disease. Kim has
chosen to acceptherself as an incredibly splendid gift of God because of
what sheis, and in spite of the tough hand she was dealt.
Blessed are the self-esteemers, for they have seen the beautyof their
own souls.
But self-esteem is not the same as self-forgiveness. You esteemyourself
when you discover your own excellence. You forgiveyourself after you
discover your own faults. You esteem yourselffor the good person you are.
You forgive yourself for the badthings you did.
76 / FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD TO FORGIVE
If you do not see the difference, you may shout a thousandbravos at
yourself and never come to the moment of self-forgiv-ing. So you need a
clear head about w^hat it is you are doing.
You also need courage. Forgiving yourself is love's ultimate daring.
The reason it takes high courage to forgive yourself lies partlywith other
people's attitudes toward self-forgivers. Self-righteouspeople do not want
you to forgive yourself. They want you towalk forever under the black
umbrella of permanent shame.
I understand these people; I am one of them. There is something inside
me that wants a wrongdoer, especially a famouswrongdoer, to keep a low
profile, to take the last place in line, tospeak with a meek voice; I want him
to grovel a little. Maybe alot.
So, when you walk and talk like a person who has sliced yoursinful past
from your present sense of selfhood, you will needcourage to face the self-
righteous crowd.
 Then you need to be concrete.
You drown in the bilge of your own condemnation for lack ofspecificity.
You will almost always fail at self-forgiving when yourefuse to be concrete
about what you are forgiving yourself for.
Many of us try, for instance, to forgive ourselves for being thesorts of
persons we are. We are ugly, or mean, or petty, or givento spouting off; or,
on the other hand, we are too good, a patsy,everybody's compliant sucker,
humble servant to all who wantto get something out of us.
But people who try to forgive themselves for being wholesalefailures
are not humble at all; they are really so proud that theywant to be gods.
John Quincy Adams, not the greatest, but avery good President, could not
forgive himself. "I have donenothing," he wrote in his diary. "My life has
been spent in vainand idle aspirations, and in ceaseless rejected prayers that
something should be the result of my existence beneficial to my
ownspecies." The last words spoken by the great jurist Hugo Groti-us, the
father of modern international law, on his deathbed,were: "I have
accomplished nothing worthwhile in my life."Such people sound humble
with their moans about being failuresin life; but they are really crying
because they had to settle forbeing merely human.
You must call your own bluff: precisely, what is it that youneed
forgiveness for? For being unfaithful to your spouse last
FORGIVING OURSELVES / 77
year? Good, you can work on that. For being an evil sort of per-son?
No, that is too much; you cannot swallow yourself whole.
Most of us can manage no more than one thing at a time.''Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof," said Jesus. When weoverload ourselves
with dilated bags of undifferentiated guilt weare likely to sink into despair.
The only way we can succeed asself-forgivers, free from the tyranny of a
tender conscience, is tobe concrete and to forgive ourselves for one thing at
a time.
Finally, you need to confirm your outrageous act of self-forgivenesswith
a reckless act of love. How can you know for sure that yougambled with
guilt and won unless you gamble your winningson love?
"She loves much because she has been forgiven much"—thiswas Jesus'
explanation for a woman who dared to barge into adinner party uninvited,
plunk herself at Jesus' feet, and pour outa small cascade of love.
 Love is a signal that you have done it, that you have actuallyreleased the
guilt that condemned you. You won't always knowexactly when you have
forgiven yourself. It is like reaching thetop of a long hill on a highway—
you may not be sure when youhave reached level ground, but you can tell
that you have passedthe top when you step on the gas and the car spurts
ahead. Anact of love is like quick acceleration. A free act of love, to
anyoneat all, may signal to you that you do, after all, have the powerthat
comes to anyone who is self-forgiving.
You can buy her a gift! Invite him to dinner! Visit someonewho is sick!
You can put your arms around a friend you nevertouched before! Write a
letter of thanks. Or tell Dad that you lovehim. All ways of confirming that
we performed the miracle offorgiving ourselves.
Yes, love gives you the right to forgive yourself. And it givesyou the
power as well. At least to begin. Healing may comeslowly, but better a
snail's pace than standing still, feet sunk inthe cement of self-accusations.
To forgive yourself is to act out the mystery of one personwho is both
forgiver and forgiven. You judge yourself: this is thedivision within you.
You forgive yourself: this is the healing ofthe split.
That you should dare to heal yourself by this simple act is asignal to the
world that God's love is a power within you.
CHAPTER 9
Forgiving Monsters
There are monsters who do such evils as ordinary people darenot dream
of. They may be towering titans who trample wholepopulations. They may
be crawling worms who seduce little children into prostitution. Whether
giants or punks, they hurtpeople so badly that they may disqualify
themselves foreverfrom forgiveness by a fellow human being.
What makes their evil seem too awful for forgiveness? Sometimes it is
the pointlessness of it—the gang on a drugged joy-ridethat kills a child
playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. Sometimes itis the unimaginable
enormity of it—the Jim Jones who brain-washes a whole community to the
point of mass suicide. Theremay be other reasons why any person could be
too horrible toforgive; these are enough to make us wonder.-
Are some people unforgivable? How can we tell?
There is at least one persuasive reason for leaving terribleevildoers
unforgiven.
If we forgive the monstrous evils of the world, it is feared, wewill
shrink their horror. Forgiveness may reduce them so that atolerant human
society begins to swallow and digest evil while itgets on with business as
usual.
Out of her passion for honesty, novelist Cynthia Ozick saysthat
forgiving monsters ''blurs over suffering and death. Itdrowns the past. It
cultivates sensitivity toward the murderer atthe price of sensitivity toward
the victim."
Cynthia Ozick puts the matter precisely where it belongs: atthe bar of
honesty with those who suffer. But I honestly believethere is another way of
looking at it.
Forgiving does not reduce evil. Forgiving great evil does not
shave a millimeter from its monstrous size. There is no real forgiving
unless there is first relentless exposure and honest judgment. When we
forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it.
We look the evil full in the face, callit what it is, let its horror shock and
stun and enrage us, andonly then do we forgive it.
Besides, the greatness of evil is not simply a matter ofquantity.
Pain is not measured only by the number of people who sufferit. If there
are two people in a room, and one of them has asplitting headache, you
would not double the amount of headache pain if the other person gets a
headache too.
If you are betrayed, you feel all by yourself the pain that all thebetrayals
of human history bring into the world. We cannot addup the pain of a
hundred betrayals any more than we can divideup the pain between the
people betrayed. Each solitary victimfeels the full measure of the betrayal
even though a millionpeople are also betrayed.
A woman who has been raped does not ask whether a manbad enough
to rape one hundred women is forgivable. She askswhether she can forgive
the man who raped her.
And if evil were measured in numbers, how would we knowwhen a
criminal has crossed the forgiveness zone? By instinct?Would we appoint a
United Nations Commission on the forgivableness of atrocities? Maybe
consult a panel of Harvard philosophers? Not on your life! Better consult
anyone at all, anyone whohas never gone to school, but who has been
deeply hurt andlater healed of unfair pain.
Besides, if we say that monsters are beyond forgiving, wegive them a
power they should never have. Monsters who aretoo evil to be forgiven get
a stranglehold on their victims; theycan sentence their victims to a lifetime
of unhealed pain. If theyare unforgivable monsters, they are given power to
keep theirevil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give
thempower to condemn their victims to live forever with the
hurtingmemory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the lastword.
Another, final, irony is this: when we refuse to forgive monsters we give
them exactly what they want.
Monsters do not want to be forgiven. They want to be left
80 / FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD TO FORGIVE
alone to vindicate themselves in the eyes of the world. Virtuallyevery
Nazi big-wig dreamed—even as he was convicted atNuremburg—that one
day Germans would build a statue in hishonor.
The self-defeating upshot is: if we disqualify giants of evilfrom
forgiveness, we are cruelest to their victims and we give themonsters
exactly what they want.
Consider, from just one more point of view, how we defeatour own
purpose when we say that a monster is too evil to beforgiven.
When we declare an evil person to be beyond the pale offorgiveness, we
create a monster who does not even need to beforgiven—a monster is
excused from judgment by the fact thathe or she is beyond humanity. This
is the paradox of making anyhuman being absolutely evil.
Let us mull it over a little while—to make sure the point getsthrough.
Take Adolph Eichmann, for instance: a master-architect of theholocaust.
Eichmann engineered an evil so horrendously hugethat none of us has yet
felt its full horror. Found guilty of crimesagainst humanity by an Israeli
court, he was hanged in Jerusalem.
Was Eichmann forgivable?
Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmanntrial. She
watched this man, listened to him; researched him,studied him, and then
wrote a book that she called Eichmann inJerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil
Banality? Of this evil? Banality calls up words like stupid,trite, flat,
vapid, empty, and boring. How could she talk this wayof Eichmann and his
monstrosities?
Arendt was not saying that the evil Eichmann did was not allthat bad.
She was trying to say that Eichmann was not superhuman, not even a
superhuman monster; he was a stupid, boring,flat, ordinary man who used
his human freedom to become ahuman tool of the Nazi machinery.
Some people were outraged by Dr. Arendt's words—the "ba-nality of
evil." But I ask whether they fell to another temptation.Did they
superhumanize Eichmann's evil? Did they made Eichmann an evil god?
I think they superhumanized Eichmann's evil. Eichmann was
FORGIVING MONSTERS / 81
made into a concentrated core of undiluted evil, an absolute version of
evil's very essence, equal with the devil himself. Eichmann became an evil
god, his humanness became a mere maskthat covered the kind of pure evil
that only gods can be or do.
By turning Eichmann into an unforgivable monster, we sethim beyond
human accountability, beyond good and evil. Nobodyforgives the devil.
Why not? It is because he is beyond the struggle between good and evil; he
is only pure evil, and therefore weset him outside the possibility of being
forgiven.
The paradox!
So we exterminate Eichmann. We swat him like a deadlymosquito. We
shoot him down like a vicious beast prowlingthrough our village. We do not
judge him as a merely accountable human being, we liquidate him as a
rwnhuman.
The truth of the matter is: very ordinary people do extraordi-nary evil.
We need to judge them, surely, and forgive them, ifwe can, because they are
responsible. And because we need tobe healed.
If forgiving is a remedy for the wounds of a painful past, wecannot deny
any human being the possibility of being forgivenlest we deny the victim
the possibility of being healed throughforgiving.
Love makes forgiving a creative violation of all the rules forkeeping
score.
But what of the victim's ability to forgive? Can the victim ofmonsters
really forgive them? That is another, very differentquestion.
The answer is not blowing in the winds for everyone to hear.It can only
come straight from the heart of the person who, forsome hellish moments or
years, was brutalized by a monster.The answer cannot come from me, nor
from anyone who is nota survivor of the evil that monsters have done. It can
come onlyfrom those who have seen the monsters with their own eyes
andfelt the monsters' evil in their own lives.
Perhaps the answer of power cannot come from the mind.Perhaps it
comes only from the pain-wracked heart. And, finally,from the heart
possessed by hope.
CHAPTER 10
Forgiving God
There is an old, old story about a tailor who leaves his prayersand, on
the way out of the synagogue, meets a rabbi.
"Well, and what have you been doing in the synagogue. LevAshram?"
the rabbi asks.
"I was saying prayers, rabbi."
"Fine, and did you confess your sins?"
"Yes, rabbi, 1 confessed my little sins."
"Your little sins?"
"Yes, I confessed that 1 sometimes cut my cloth on the shortside, that I
cheat on a yard of wool by a couple of inches."
"You said that to God, Lev Ashram?"
"Yes, rabbi, and more. 1 said, 'Lord, I cheat on pieces of cloth;you let
little babies die. But I am going to make you a deal. Youforgive me my little
sins and ITl forgive you your big ones.'"
The Jewish tailor grabbed hold of God and held him to account.
Rabbi Harold Kushner suffered the inexpressible pain ofwatching his
son die of old age before he was fifteen. In his bookWhen Bad Things
Happen to Good People, he opens our heart's dooragain to this question:
Where is God and what is he doing whendecent people are hurt, deeply and
unfairly? Kushner does notbelieve it is God's fault when bad things happen
to us; we can'texpect one God to handle everything. So we can excuse God.
Andyet he challenges us to forgive God anyway:
Are you capable of forgiving . . . God . . . when he has let you downand
disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and crueltyin His
world and permitting some of these things to happen to you?
You may react automatically: God cannot be blamed for anything, so he
cannot be forgiven for anything. The Psalms say,'The Lord is just in all his
ways, and kind in all his doings."Being God is never having to say you are
sorry.
 When it comes to God, our instinctive piety rushes to defendhim against
our own complaints.
Maybe so. But we should not smother the primal screams ofthose who
feel as if God has left them dangling in the winds ofpain. Would it bother
God too much if we found our peace byforgiving him for the wrongs we
suffer? What if we found a wayto forgive him without blaming him? A
special sort of forgivingfor a special sort of relationship. Would he mind?
Let us try; let us talk a little, reverently but honestly, aboutforgiving
God. Recall the four stages of forgiving? The first twoare our hurt and our
hate.
FIRST, THE HURT
Focus on hurts you feel are unfair and deep. Don't try toforgive God for
not having made you smarter or more beautiful.Don't forgive him for not
giving you wealthier parents with star-quality genes. Nobody gets
everything in life.
And it stands to reason that you should not try to forgive Godfor lumps
you give yourself. If you smoke two packs of cigaretsa day for twenty
years, you do not have to forgive God if you getlung cancer.
But sometimes we suffer a lot for no good reason, while folkof smaller
virtue get along fine. One woman prays for ten yearsto have a child and
never gets one; a teenage girl playing aroundwith sex skips off to an
abortion clinic to get rid of what thatwoman wants more than anything else
in life. One man obeys allthe rules of good health and dies of a brain tumor
at thirty-five;his friend smokes and drinks and grows a massive potbelly
andlives to be eighty-five. A little help from God would have comein
handy.
Sometimes God would have to do hardly anything at all.
Harry Angstrom, in John Updike's novel Rabbit Run, left thehouse in a
huff one night; his wife Janice stayed home with thebaby and got a little
drunk. Janice gave the baby a bath. In thebathtub. But the baby's body was
slippery with soap and Janice'smind was not managing her hands. She
grabbed but she had
trouble getting a good hold; she kept grabbing, but she could notfind the
right handles.
A contorted sense of horrible danger seized her confusedmind, and then
she knew "'that the worst thing that has everhappened to any woman in the
world has happened to her."
 Harry came home several hours later and learned the terribletruth.
He went to the bathroom. The water was still in the tub, sohe rolled up
his sleeve and pulled up the stopper by jerking thechain that held it to the
faucet.
Harry groaned: "how easy it was, yet in all his strength Goddid nothing.
Just that little stopper to lift."
You can hear Harry's moan almost everywhere. The stoppersdo not get
pulled sometimes, and when they do not get pulledwe feel naked against the
icy blasts in the wintertime of our soul.
We need to look on the bright side, too, of course. Most ofthe time our
babies do not drown in the bathtub. Our childrenget over the flu, ride their
bikes home through busy traffic,evade the drug pushers, and escape child
molesters. Mostly wedo not get cancer; usually we tuck ourselves into bed
and wakeup in time to risk our lives in the next day's outing.
But when the bricks fall on us, we do not feel like balancingout our
batting average by remembering all the happier days; wewant to know why
something could not have been done to prevent this one horrible hurt.
THEN, WE HATE GOD
It takes a tough soul, maybe somebody slightly mad, to hateGod. Who
is a big enough fool to wish God bad luck? Job did nothave the bravado to
follow his wife's advice: "Curse God, anddie." Nor would I. Curse God?
Not on your life!
But we do hate God sometimes. All of us, I think. On the sly.
If we dare not hate the Giver, we do dare hate his gifts. Wehate his
world. Or we hate ourselves. When we shut our eyes toevery reason we
have for being glad to be alive, when we resentgood things that happen to
our friends, when our hearts stifleevery happy impulse, we are nurturing a
passive hatred of God.
Maybe it takes an atheist to dare hate God head-on. I think ofGraham
Greene's Sarah, the woman in The End of the Affair whobelieved in God
with such a frenzy that she just closed her eyes
and jumped into faith. She loved people the way she believedGod—
with a trust that had no stops. But Sarah died too soon,unreasonably soon
for someone who loved as well as she didand who had lately found a man
who loved her too.
He hated God, her lover did, and he dared to throw his mal-ice straight
in God's face.
 With your great schemes you can ruin our happiness like a
harvesterruins a mouse's nest. 1 hate you, God, I hate you as though you
existed.
True believers are more like the prophet Jeremiah. We do notdare to
hate God, so we hate life instead. When Jeremiah reallyfelt let down by
God, he turned his hatred on himself:
Cursed be the day on which I was born!
The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed.
Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father,
"A son is born to you," making him very glad.
Hating God's most precious gift is a believer's sneaky way tohate God.
You may hate him because you feel as if your most importantfriend has
become your worst enemy. He could have pulled therubber stopper, but he
watched the baby drown. An ancient Jewsaid it a long time ago in the Book
of Lamentations: "The Lordhas become like an enemy, ... he has multiplied
. . . mourningand lamentation."
NEXT, WE DEFEND GOD
We plead his case against our own accusations.
Your believing mind wants to rush to God's defense againstyour
frightening feelings of hate. And any thinking person canfind good reasons
why God does not pull the stopper that couldhave saved us from our
troubles.
You can, if you think hard, look at your pains as flecks on alarge screen
of eternal harmony. God-haters take a cramped viewof things; their pain
blinds them to the large scene. Believers seethings in perspective.
Walk into any large shopping plaza, and you will see themish-mash of
grey and white and black tiles that make up thefloor. They don't seem to be
arranged in any pattern at all. But
get up on a balcony, high above the plaza, and look at the wholefloor.
Now the splendid mosaic comes to view. Your scrambledlittle corner looks
good within the grand design.
You should not judge a Rembrandt painting by one darkishcorner of a
portrait. Step back. See the whole. The shadow onlylets the light seem
brighter.
So too with God's work; the dark shadows only underscoreits shining
glories. We will see—from the high place—that Godmakes all things fit
together. All our pains will make his latermercies seem more tender.
 There is a balm, I am sure, in this philosophical faith. It helpssome
people to believe that even the worst of their deep andunfair pains are really
minor chords within God's great concerto.
But I would not say this to my neighbors across the street,who mourn
for their twelve-year-old son Howard as he dies of acancer that began in his
testicles a few months ago and thenworked up through his intestines where
it intends to kill himsoon. I dare not tell them that Howard's cancer will one
day lookgood on the human canvas, like a shadow on a Rembrandt
painting.
When I think I have found good reasons why we never needto forgive
God, I think of Elie Wiesel. I think of him watching alittle boy hang, almost
but not quite dead, from a gallows atAuschwitz. In his unforgettable true
story. Night, Wiesel tells uswhat he saw:
One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows
rearingup in the assembly place. . . . Three victims in chains—and one of
themthe little servant, the sad-eyed angel. . . .
The three victims (were) mounted together onto chairs.
The three necks were placed at the same moment within thenooses. . . .
At a sign . . . the three chairs tipped over.
Total silence throughout the camp. . . .
Then the march past began. The two adults were no longeralive. . . . But
the third rope was still moving; being so light, the childwas still alive.
For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between lifeand
death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to lookhim full in
the face.
Behind me, 1 heard [a] man asking:
"Where is God now?"
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
"Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows."
What voice did Wiesel hear inside his soul telling him whereGod was?
Was it the voice of the brain? No. It was the voice ofhis heart!
The voice of the heart was the only voice he could listen to atthat
terrible moment. How cold, how cruel, any brain-contriveddefense of God
would have been!
Yet there are some things my mind tells me about God thatseem
reasonable in the face of my doubts. They do not provethat the hurts I feel
all fit into a splendid pattern. But they mayhelp me feel that God is my
friend even when I suffer more thanI deserve.
Let me speak of them.
Afterward, I will let my heart speak.
FIRST, I REALIZE THAT GOD GIVES ME THE KIND OF WORLD I
WANT TO LIVE IN
I really want to be the sort of creature who can get hurt. I donot want to
be an angel. I like being a body with nerve endingsthat give me pleasure
when a woman touches them gently. But ifshe can give me pleasure by her
tender touch, I must take therisk that she could hurt me with a brutal word.
He also made us free spirits in a world of free spirits. I likethis part too.
I would not change it for a world where peoplewere nice to me because
they had to be. But if I want to liveamong free people, I take the risk that
some of them will sometimes do me wrong.
Pain comes with the territory. And I like being here. So whyshould I
forgive God?
THEN, I THINK THAT GOD SUFFERS WITH ME
I do not feel much like forgiving someone for my sufferingwhen he
suffers as much as I do, maybe a lot more. When Icomplain to God: "Where
were you when I needed you?" I thinkhe says, in a still small voice, "I was
there hurting with you."
Jesus wondered where God was when he was dying on thecross: "My
God, My God, why have you let me down?"
But had God forsaken him? In retrospect, we know where
God was while Jesus was hanging on the tree. God was not onleave of
absence. He was in Jesus, suffering the pains of vulnerable love.
When I wonder where God is and what he is doing when Iget hurt, one
answer may be that he is in me and that my painshurt him more than they
hurt me. He is suffering with me,maybe to heal a small corner of his world
through me. Maybe hesuffers with us while he is working to bring about a
new worldwhere justice and peace embrace, and unfair pain is gone forever.
This thought helps when I wonder if I should forgive God.
I BELIEVE THAT GOD FORGIVES
What does God do when bad people hurt innocent people forno good
reason? One answer is: he forgives them.
I think of a conversation between two brothers, Ivan andAlyosha, in
Dostoevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan wasan atheist. Alyosha
was a believer. Ivan had seen some terriblethings in his time; he had seen a
little boy fed to a lord's wilddogs while his father and mother had to look
on, all because theboy had eaten some fruit off the lord's trees. And a lot
more.How can we believe that God could let bad people do such horrible
things to innocent children?
Alyosha had no answer. He could think of only one thing tosay. "There
is one being who can forgive everybody everythingbecause he shed his
innocent blood for everyone and everything."
Did Alyosha really answer his brother? Not directly. But hedid raise
another question more serious than the one Ivan asked:Why should you
forgive God when it is he who must forgive thepeople who are really
responsible for doing the terrible things?
Something in me bends to Alyosha's answer.
These are some things I think about when I wonder whereGod is when
people suffer. They help me feel him as a fellow-suffering friend of
sufferers, not someone I need to forgive.
But they do not solve everything. The heart still wonders.
It helps to know that pain is a necessary shadow in the sunlitworld in
which I want to live. But does it have to hurt so much?It helps to know that
God suffers with us when we suffer unfairly. But could he not heal it a little
faster? It helps to know thatGod is willing to forgive people who hurt us.
But could he not
prevent some of the evil people from doing as much harm as theydo?
I think we may need to forgive God after all. Now and then,but not
often. Not for his sake. For ours!
So let us talk of healing ourselves as we forgive God.
Something happened to Doris and me once that forced me tocome to
terms with forgiving God. I am going to talk about it,though I know that
what happened to us was not nearly as badas a lot that happens to many,
many other people; I mention itonly because it was our own watershed time
for forgiving God.
Doris and I had decided early on that we would have childrenas soon as
I finished studies. But it didn't work. Doris did not getpregnant.
We went to fertility clinics everywhere we lived—in Amsterdam, in
Oxford, in Illinois, in New Jersey, and in Grand Rapids,Michigan. We made
love whenever the thermometer told us thetime was at hand. We played our
parts in the unromantic come-dy of artificial insemination. We prayed in
between.
And Doris finally did get pregnant, a little late in time, butreally and
roundly pregnant. What we wanted most was goingto happen to us. Four
months went by, and then another, andanother. The seventh month began.
One night, getting towards ten, I was fixing crackers andcheese in the
kitchen and Doris was muttering something sleepyfrom the sofa about
getting herself to bed when, with the sentence only half out, she yelled my
name. I knew instinctivelythat something bad was happening. It was. A
dam had brokeninside of Doris and she was flooding the davenport with an
am-niotic downpour.
Call the doctor. I fumbled my trembling index finger into theright holes
of the telephone dial and finally got Ed Postma, ourobstetrician, and heard
from him a message I wanted terribly notto hear.
"Listen carefully. Put Doris in the car and get down to emergency. But I
need to tell you something first so that you can tellDoris before you get
here: the baby is going to be malformed,badly."
I got Doris wrapped in swaddling clothes and nestled her,legs bent high,
into the back seat of our rusted-out red Plymouthsedan.
And I dropped the horrible reality like a horrid lump into herfrightened
mind.
Badly malformed.
Can you live with it? Yes, I think I can. Can you? I don'tknow.
Our doctor was waiting for us in the emergency room.
We got Doris admitted and wheeled into the space forwomen on their
joyous passage to the wonder of life-giving.
After several hours, time enough for us to come to grips withwhat was
happening to us, her intervals of pain signaled that thehour of deliverance
had come. I carried my vacant terror to alittle sitting room where a truck
driver, ten years younger than I,was waiting for his wife to give him a third
perfect offspring."God, I am not ready for this."
A couple of hours later Ed Postma came in, green-smocked,face mask
still hanging over his chin, with a grin on his face thatlooked obscene to me.
But his words were wonderful to hear."The baby is fine," he said. "We were
mistaken. Everythingseems to be OK. A boy. Come on, we'll have a look."
We had a look. Offspring of my loins, soul of my soul, fleshof my flesh,
hair of my hair, he lay, body wrinkled, eyes, nose,mouth pushed into three
inches of crimson face, fingers like weespindlings wrapped into fists the
size of two red marbles, and hescreamed. I was what I wanted to be; the
blood father of a nor-mal man-child.
I drove home in a joyous delirium that comes from a beliefthat the best
thing that could possibly happen to anyone had justhappened to me. I got a
few hours of sleep, woke up and madeplans to call some friends with my
good news.
Before I had a chance to call anybody, however, our pediatri-cian called
me from the hospital. I knew from his inflection thatthe milk of God's
mercy was suddenly turning sour. The babywas not breathing well. I should
come.
I drove back to where I knew there would not be a secondmiracle.
While Doris was still in the hospital I buried the baby. Dorisnever had a
chance to see what he looked like. She brought himalive into the world
while I waited outside and I brought himdead into the ground while she
waited inside.
FORGIVING GOD / 91
Then I began to feel the hurt. The hurt was the loss of whatwe had
waited for, for so long, and wanted more than we want-ed anything else.
But it was also the teasing meanness of thecrazy game that made us dizzy
with pain. Why, after the night ofgetting ready to love a deformed child;
why, after the surprisethat even doctors called a miracle; why, miracle done,
was deaththe punch-line? 1 felt as if 1 were the butt of a cruel divine joke.
Would 1 end up hating God? I knew I would never have thecourage to
bring my hate up front, where God could see it. Iwould turn my hate, as
Jeremiah did, on life.
But we healed ourselves more quickly than we thought wecould. I
wasn't aware of it then, but 1 know now that what wedid for healing was
something like forgiving God.
We leaned on each other for strength; and we soon begantogether to feel
a strange sense of our life's goodness in spite ofthis one rotten thing about it
that had come upon us one cruelnight when we felt we had a right to
something very good. Thefeeling came to us; we did not arrive at it as a
thinker finds hisanswer to an intellectual problem. We just sat there on her
bed,and we cried, wondered, loved, grieved together, and, in ourall-
aloneness, hardly thought straight about anything at all.
 We felt together, never wondering whether it hurt one of usmore than
the other, only sensing that we were together in ourgrief and our emptiness
and our confusion. And that was good.Our life was good in our shared hurt!
In our strange euphoria about life's goodness, I felt God againas the
giver, not the taker of life. As the God I know in thesuffering Jesus, not a
god who pointlessly makes us suffer.
I knew that I could not feel this goodness and also think thatGod took
my child away. I knew my mind would forever say "Idon't know" when my
heart asked why little babies die. I heardmy heart tell me that God was with
us, "dying" a little alongwith our baby.
I understand no more today than I did then about how Godwas involved
within the crazy game Doris and I had to play thatMarch night. But I am
sure that I shall never throw it up to himor remind him of the time he let us
down.
Did I forgive God? In a way I suppose 1 did.
But there is a difference between forgiving God and forgiving
92 / FORGIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE HARD TO FORGIVE
an enemy. When you forgive your enemies, they may stay yourenemies
even after you forgive them. When you forgive God,you just live in the
silence, and grope toward the goodness oflife, and believe that, in spite of
everything, he is your friend.
Part 3
HOW PEOPLE FORGIVE
Forgiving is love's revolution against life's unfairness. When weforgive,
we ignore the normal laws that strap us to the naturallaw of getting even
and, by the alchemy of love, we release ourselves from our own painful
pasts.
We fly over a dues-paying morality in order to create a newfuture out of
the past's unfairness. We free ourselves from thewrong that is locked into
our private histories; we unshackle ourspirits from malice; and, maybe, if
we are lucky, we also restorea relationship that would otherwise be lost
forever.
Forgiving is a miracle, however, that few of us have the mag-ic to
perform easily. Never underestimate the demands that forgiving puts on an
average person's modest power to love. Someskeptics, when they heard
Jesus forgive people, challenged:"Who can forgive sins, but God alone?"
The English novelistCharles Williams remarked that forgiving is really a
game; wecan only play at it, he said, essentially we cannot do it.
Nobody seems to be born with much talent for forgiving. Weall need to
learn from scratch, and the learning almost alwaysruns against the grain.
We talk a good forgiving line as long as somebody else needsto do it,
but few of us have the heart for it while we are danglingfrom one end of a
bond broken by somebody else's cruelty.
Yet, people do forgive—ordinary people, not saints—and theydo heal
themselves of terrible pain.
1 invite you to see how ordinary people work out their ownways of
forgiving. They do not have to be your ways, not indetail, certainly. But it
may help to watch how other people do it.Don't expect gimmicks or
techniques; look for signals and hints.Remember, nobody said it was going
to be easy.
CHAPTER 11
Slowly
It takes time. A lot of time for some. Sometimes you strugglewith it so
long that you cannot remember the moment you finally did it; you just wake
up one day and, on thinking aboutthose you want to forgive, are a little
shocked to realize you havealready begun to forgive them. You know it
because you findyourself wishing them well.
As a boy, C. S. Lewis, the British Christian scholar who
wrotemarvelous children's fantasies, was badly hurt by a bully whomade a
living as a teacher in an English public school. This sadistturned the life of
his boys into a living hell. Lewis could notforgive this teacher, not for most
of his life, and being a failure atforgiving troubled him. But not long before
he died, maybe justa few months, he wrote a letter to an American friend.
Dear Mary,
. . . Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realized suddenly that 1had at
last forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. Td
been trying to do it for years; and like you, each time 1thought Td done it, 1
found, after a week or so it all had to be at-tempted over again. But this
time 1 feel sure it is the real thing. . . .
Yours,
Jack
It was the real thing, no doubt. But maybe, if he had lived,Lewis would
have had to do it a few more times. The hate habitis hard to break, harder
than any, 1 think. And, as we do withother bad habits, we usually break it
many times before we finally get rid of it altogether.
1 joined two old friends recently in a lunch to commemorate
the thirtieth anniversary of a great academic debacle. They werethe
heroes of the piece, professors at the seminary where I hadbeen a student.
We saw them then as young men with a dream,injecting a new vision into a
bone-weary academic body. Otherssaw them as cocky threats to a great
orthodox tradition. So,while the world outside knew little and cared less,
they began abattle for the mind and heart of that school.
 A classic struggle was joined between scholarly vitality andacademic
rigor mortis. Rigor mortis won. My friends were fired.And deeply hurt!
Gallant all the way, but out on the streetnonetheless.
Thirty years later, 1 raised the one question that I thought wasworth
asking my old teachers: ''Have you forgiven the peoplewho got you fired?"
One of them answered, "Come to think of it, I have beenforgiving them
for a long time. I slowly got it through my headthat I needed forgiving as
much as they did. What's more, itgradually dawned on me that the other
men were about equallyas decent and about as sneaky as I was. So about ten
years ago Ifound myself wishing them well. We never became friends, butif
our situations had been different we might have. So, 1 guess 1have forgiven
—and I think I've been forgiven. It took me a longtime, too long, but Tm
glad it's been done."
The worse you've been hurt the longer it takes to forgive.Minor bruises
can be handled quickly. But when you've beensliced and diced inside your
being, you'd better count on alonger process.
Sometimes we do it so slowly that we pass over the line without
realizing we have crossed it, as children pass from childhoodto adulthood
not knowing just when they crossed over.
Sometimes you seem to slide into forgiving, hardly noticingwhen you
began to move or when you arrived. But after a longdry desert of trying,
you gradually get a feeling that somewherealong the way you crossed the
line between hating and forgiving.
At the beginning of the process, it helps to make a firm decision—one
way or the other, fish or cut bait, here and now, andthat's that—just to get
going.
I remember a delicious hate I tasted a year or so ago that I
SLOWLY / 97
would probably still be sucking on if I hadn't made a hard decision to
spit it out. Let me tell you about it.
One warm June day, in midafternoon, a cop in our little townof Sierra
Madre, hot with zeal to keep village pot smoking undercontrol, brutalized
my youngest son, John, in front of my ownhouse. He was large, 250 pounds
or so of vigorous lawman, andhe threw all his violent bulk against my
slender 140 pounderwho, unknown to the officer, had a liver ailment that
made hardphysical contact a hazard to his life. In any case, the
policemanroughed up John excessively and then charged him with resist-
ing an officer.
The charge was quickly dismissed.
But I did not so quickly dismiss my bitterness. I took myanger down to
city hall and tried to persuade the chief to rebukethe officer, just a bawling
out, if you please, to help keep bruteforce in check. I offered signed
statements by witnesses to theassault. But the chief of police in our peaceful
village was notmoved to criticize his own. He said he would look into the
mat-ter, but he never gave me reason to believe that he did. Caseclosed.
I did a secret dance of rage for several days, and the bluenotes of anger
gradually rose to cymbal-clanging hate. I con-trolled myself too well to
knock anybody's block off, but I hated,passively at least; there was not an
ounce of energy in me towish the Sierra Madre police force well.
My hate almost became an instant addiction; I was infectedby its virus,
and I spread it to everyone who got close to me. Tobring my hate to a
spiritual crisis, I had a date coming up topreach a sermon on the grace of
God at a Presbyterian church inBurbank.
Before Sunday came, I confided my feelings to a good friend,expecting
her to add female indignation to my male malice; wewould, I thought, sing
a doleful duet of rage.
But she was on to me.
"Why don't you practice what you preach?"
I was trapped.
I had to decide then and there whether I really wanted to kickmy hate
before it got to be a habit. So I did. I opted out of hate.
But how could I make it work on the spot? I tried a technique
that everything in my temperament resisted. I thought abouthow a priest
gives instant absolution to a penitent, right off thebat, in the confessional
booth. And I decided to give this copabsolution. It wasn't my style. I like to
take my time when I solvemy spiritual crises. But I tried it.
"Officer Milando, in the name of God I hereby forgive you.Absolve te
—go in peace." I said it out loud, at least six times.
Well, it worked enough to get me gel* 15 anyway. I felt myselfpried a
coupie of inches off my hate. And I was on my way.
A beginning. I am not finished with it yet. But I think that aclear-cut
choice for forgiving was what I needed to set me inmotion.
 For some people, one definite decision is enough. For most ofus, it is
only a start on a long forgiving journey.
CHAPTER 12
With a Little Understanding
A little understanding makes forgiving a lot easier. If you understand
everything, of course, you don't have to forgive at all. But ithelps to
understand something when forgiving comes very hard.
When we get hurt we are half-blinded by our pain. There isalways more
going on in an encounter with pain than meets theeye of somebody freshly
hurt; it takes a while to see it. Evenlonger to understand it.
Sometimes, by understanding some of what was really goingon inside
the person who hurt you, you make forgiving a littlebit easier for yourself,
even though you still have to plow byhand through a thick crust of hurt and
hate.
Careful, though; you are not going to understand everything.Those who
hurt you did not really have to do it; they could haveacted differently. To
that extent, you will always be left withmystery; you can never fully
understand evil freely chosen.
But if you can understand what might have influenced them,and
understand a little bit of how they could have hurt you,you'll take a first step
toward forgiving.
The hardest person for me—ever, in my whole life—to forgive was
Mrs. Broutmeier. Mrs. Broutmeier lived in a yellowframe house across the
street from the smallish house my fatherbuilt with his own hands for us to
live in just before 1 was born.This woman was unbelievably cruel to my
mother and her mem-ory has plagued me for years.
My parents shipped off third-class to the United States fromFriesland, a
province up in northernmost Holland, as soon asthey were wed. My father
lived just long enough to see fivechildren born and to get his own house
almost built on Amity
Avenue in Muskegon, Michigan. Then he died, only thirty-threeyears
old and hardly underway. I was the last of the five.
Left alone, with few skills and no money, my mother putbread on our
table and clothes on our bodies by cleaning otherpeople's houses and
washing other people's clothes in a second-hand Maytag that broke down
every other Monday.
On Amity, every house had its own splendid maple at thecurb; too big
around for climbing, they provided fine shade forsitting on the wooden
swing that hung from the ceiling of eachfront porch. Our houses were all
perpendicular to the street,none of your rambling ranches there: living-room
up front and akitchen out back, with a dining room tucked in between
them.You could shoot a rifle from the back stoop of the kitchenstraight
through the front door without hitting anything. Sometimes, if they were set
just right, you could stand at your backdoor and look through your house all
the way through the houseacross the street. The houses looked at each other,
bay windowto bay window, like poker players in a stare-down.
Our own house stood eyeball to eyeball with the Broutmeiers'.
I should explain that the Broutmeiers were our "betters."What made
them "better" was partly that Mr. Broutmeier had asteady job and Mrs.
Broutmeier stayed home and kept her children's noses clean. (You were a
high-class kid in our neighborhood if your mother never let your nose get
snotty.) But their"betterness" came out most plainly in the accent factor;
theyspoke English like real Americans. They were second-
generationpeople; they had been around, they knew how to live, and,
morethan anything, they knew how to talk.
Mrs. Broutmeier, in all her true American betterness, becamea monster.
She had a co-monster next door, too, and the two ofthem set up a
neighborhood CIA to keep an eye on the subver-sive goings-on at our
house. She and her fellow monster drewstraws at dusk every day to see
which of them would report thedelinquencies of her grubby kids to my
mother as she camehome from that day's scrubbing.
Once they both came across Amity to deliver to my motherthe well-
considered counsel of her betters that she should giveher two youngest
children—my brother Wesley and me—awayas orphans, the reason being
that my mother lacked the money
and the savvy to care for us all in a proper manner. 1 remembergetting
word once that Mrs. Broutmeier had decreed that 1should not cross Amity
street to play with her children; 1 wasexiled to the north side of the street on
grounds of a dirty nose.It seemed to us, in fact, that the Broutmeiers had us
staked out,night and day.
 Mrs. Broutmeier and her confederate pressed the advantageof second-
generation Americanism to the moral edge; they woremy mother down with
shame. They got her to feel that it was ashameful thing for a woman with a
brood of little children to lether husband die so young and an immoral thing
to be talking toreal Americans with a foreign accent on her tongue.
But my mother dipped her shame into a cup of heroic wrath.Deep down,
where God's gift of dignity was simmering in hersoul, she raged, she
seethed. She was a goddess with fire in herbosom.
One Saturday night, done in, as if life had tied the terribletiredness of all
six working days in a bundle and given her onefinal blow, the latest
Broutmeier slap at one of her childrenpopped the safety valve on her fury.
We were, all six of us, in the kitchen, waiting for a pot ofbrown beans to
finish baking, when, driven by the furies insideof her, she left the stove and
strode head down, face red, fiststight, through the dining room, the living
room, and out thefront door. With apron strings fluttering behind her, she
stalkedacross Amity and up the Broutmeier front stoop to lay siege onthe
monster. The hosts of heaven never had a chance to stop her.
The five of us huddled around our bay window; we could seeit all from
there.
She pounded on the front door and, when Mrs. Broutmeieropened it a
wedge, she pushed it aside and walked into thedevil's lair. Face aflame, eyes
brimming with tears, finger cockedstraight at the shocked Broutmeier eyes,
the widow Smedeslaunched a frenzied defense of her beloved brood.
Mrs. Broutmeier retreated to the dining room and took up aprotected
position on the other side of a round oak table with itsblue Dutch teapot
holding at the center. My mother used thetable as a pulpit, pounding on it
with her fist as she delivered herfurious, inspired, but unrecorded prophecy
against Broutmeierand on behalf of her own children. Mrs. Broutmeier
sputtered
something about the police, about calling them, and about beingattacked
by a woman gone crazy.
The word '"crazy" seemed to bring my mother to her humiliated senses.
Was she crazy? Maybe she was. She didn't know. Ifshe was crazy, she was
the more to be shamed. Better get out ofthere just in case. She left by the
front door.
She walked, head still down, face white now, back acrossAmity, up our
front porch, into the living room, past her children clustered at the window;
she didn't look at us, didn't sayanything to us, but strode straight ahead,
through the diningroom and kitchen, into the bathroom, and vomited. Then
shewept. I do not remember when she came out or what she said tous when
she did.
What I do remember is that we were sure Mrs. Broutmeierhad done us
all in. Our cup of shame was full. We would neverhave a friend in the
neighborhood again.
I grew up hating Mrs. Broutmeier. I wanted her house toburn down. I
hoped her children would fail in school and getinto a lot of trouble. I
wanted them all to go to hell. My boyhoodcup of aggressive hate was full.
Have I forgiven her?
I am still in the process of forgiving her. I enjoyed my hatetoo long, but
I started to heal a long while ago and I am well onthe way.
But I could never have forgiven her at all if I had not alsotried to
understand her.
I learned something about people who were born Americans,but from
the womb of an immigrant. The Broutmeiers were sec-ond-generation
immigrants with second generation problems;they felt second-class to third-
generation Americans, iheir "betters"—the "real" Americans. I learned how
an ignorant womanwith pride and ambition could think of a family like ours
as apool of inferiors in whose reflection she could see herself as al-most
equal to her own betters. 1 came to understand that our"inferiority" was a
stool she stood on to lift herself to the level ofthe people a rung above her.
In short, I came to see her as aweak, needy, and very silly woman who was
using cruelty as away of coping.
But I do not understand everything. I do not understand howMrs.
Broutmeier could freely choose to be so cruel. She was not
WITH A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING / 103
driven by demons or dispatched by destiny to make my mother'slife
miserable. So even if I understand some of her circumstances, something
about her cruelty is still beyond my grasp.She freely chose to hurt a decent
woman, a neighbor who badlyneeded a friend, and such a choice is never to
be completelyunderstood.
Understanding your enemies helps bring them down to size.When we
first feel the raw smart of an unfair assault, we draw abloated caricature of
that person—twice as large, twice as powerful, and twice as evil. Rotten to
the core.
 It also helps if you can understand yourself a little better, asthe
following story illustrates.
One night, right after Walter Cronkite had signed off, LenaBrusbeck's
husband Ben blurted out that he was in love with awoman half his age, had
been for three years, and wanted tomarry her.
What? For three years? The three years Lena had slept withhim, nursed
him, protected him from his nosey parents, kepttrack of his schedules, got
him to work on time, made him lookgood and smell good, and, in general,
made straight the highway for Ben and his trollop to get together? Those
three years?
Lena's very virtue was her undoing. She trusted; he betrayed.She gave;
he stole. She was true; he was a liar. She was faithful;he was faithless. Her
only fault was the blindness of her purelove. Virtue had made a sucker of
her.
Certain that any fool of a judge would see the rightness of hercase, Lena
hired a lawyer and sued for divorce. But Ben got himself the devil's own
barrister, and he pulled Lena naked acrossthe barbed wire of his inquisition
and twisted her words into atestimony against herself. She began to look
like the sharp-toothed culprit and Ben the guileless victim.
But the worse the lawyer made her look, the purer Lena felt.
She spent the next three years scourging her soul with replays of Ben's
assault on her innocent devotion. She was insecure enough in her
righteousness to risk some counseling with aview to getting psychological
support for her malice. But herhate was undermined instead. As she found
new insight intoherself the bitter pleasure of her hate lost its edge. The long
andshort of it was that Lena began to see herself as a tarnished an-gel.
Ben did not deceive her; she deceived herself. She had reallyknown all
the while; but she did not dare to admit that to herself. The truth hurt too
much, so she denied the plainest evi-dence. She wore the blinders of her
own fear, more coward thanfool. Her first eye-opener—insight into her
dishonesty with herown self.
She also came to see that she had not been the self-givinglover she
thought she had been. She really wanted security morethan she wanted Ben,
and she counted on Ben's commitment togive it to her. She bet everything
on his morality. Ben was thesort of character who would stick with what he
was stuck with.All she needed to do was remind him to be a good boy and
shehad him where she wanted him.
 When she could see herself as she was—some good, somenot so good
—she made an opening for forgiveness to squeezethrough.
Self-understanding reduced the act of forgiving to a minormiracle that
even she could manage. She discovered herselfwishing Ben well, and she
felt free to be a more honest personthe next time around.
With a little time, and a little more insight, we begin to seeboth
ourselves and our enemies in humbler profiles. We are notreally as innocent
as we felt when we were first hurt. And we donot usually have a gigantic
monster to forgive; we have a weak,needy, and somewhat stupid human
being.
When you see your enemy and yourself in the weakness andsilliness of
the humanity you share, you will make the miracle offorgiving a little
easier.
CHAPTER 13
In Confusion
Forgiving is wisdom's high art; most of us who work at it, however, are
muddlers and bunglers. We usually move toward forgiving in the cross-
currents of our confusion.
The confusion is not all our fault. The material we work withis often a
mess. Exactly what happened is often unclear. Whodid what to whom? How
badly?
True, at the kernel of every falling-out, one person hurt another person.
The bad guy does a bad thing and the good guysuffers for it. But tangled
around that simple core of wrongfulpain, we often find a skein of hurts and
hates that is nearly impossible to unravel.
We are also hampered by a bog of emotional slough. To expecttwo
people caught in mutual hate to sort out their pains is likeasking a child to
calculate the national debt. We often have togrope into forgiving through
snarls of feeling as well as clogs ofmisunderstanding.
Just to show how decent people can stumble their way intoforgiving
through the dust of their homemade confusion, let metell you about a sorry
little drama in which I played a leading,but rather ridiculous role.
I had come to a new job in a new city where I had no friends,and I felt
very insecure about my prospects for doing well. 1knew only two people in
town, Ted and Doreen, old acquaint-ances whom I hoped would become
instant friends. I certainlyneeded them to.
Ted and Doreen had a chance to be a lot of help to Doris andme almost
as soon as we arrived. Doris landed in the hospitaljust as I got going at my
work, and the children sometimes
106 / HOW PEOPLE FORGIVE
needed a place to go after school. Doreen came through generously and
warmly. We were on our way to friendship, I thought.
Then, silently but effectively, Doreen closed the door. Afreeze on
friendship! A foreclosure on warmth!
What had I done? How had 1 offended? I went to Ted.
 'Tell me what I did to hurt Doreen."
"Don't ask. Let well enough alone."
1 couldn't let well enough alone. I had to get it all straight-ened out; 1
became a compulsive penitent. I asked again, got thesame silence.
I wrote Doreen a letter, grieving for whatever pain I caused,asking
forgiveness.
No answer. I didn't exist.
Now it was my turn. 1 was hurt, and my hurt quickly turnedto hate. I
was no longer the groveling penitent who had donesomeone wrong. Now 1
was the hurting victim; Doreen was do-ing me wrong. And I admit that sour
resentment tasted better inmy mouth than stale penitence.
But the situation was confused.
Which one of us really had to forgive the other and which ofus needed
to be forgiven? And if we both needed to forgive andbe forgiven, who
needed it most? Could we ever get it straight-ened out?
Out of molehills like this smart people are stupid enough tomake
mountains that only free forgivers can climb.
Forgiveness did come. It came by fits and starts, trickles, drib-lets of it
seeping down the drains of our mutual resentments, butit did come.
Doreen and I moved toward forgiveness as we made three shiftsin our
feelings about our falling-out.
First, we reduced our stakes. In the early stage of our petty falling-out,
we invested massive emotional resources in trivial offenses. We put our
personal self-esteem on the block. We inflated the stakes beyond anything
like their real worth. But time,that unsung colleague of love, gave us a
chance to reduce ourinvestments.
After all, what had Doreen done? And what had I done?Nothing much,
probably; the impact on our feelings simply didnot match the weight of
each other's offenses. So we let each
IN CONFUSION / 107
other's faults melt down to their real size. And our pain meltedwith our
anger as we scaled down our mutual indictments.
Second, we reduced what we expected from forgiveness. As a mat-ter of
fact, Doreen and I no longer really wanted to be closefriends. All we
wanted from each other now was good will anda little respect. Once we
understood that we did not have to beclose friends after we forgave each
other, that we did not have tocome together the way I had wanted it earlier,
our worried resentments receded as a spring flood slips back into the soft
earth.Forgiveness was no longer a threat; we could forgive withoutfeeling
an obligation to embrace each other as good friends do.Being comfortable
with each other in the same room, at the sametable, at the same party was
enough.
Third, we reduced our desire for an even score. We gave up tryingto
keep score of who did what to whom and how badly it hurt.We learned to
leave the loose ends dangling, the scales off balance, to accept a score that
neither of us could make come outeven.
Full forgiving did not come in the twinkling of an eye. It camein bits
and pieces with an unexpected meeting here, a gesturethere, the exchange
of a greeting, and a hint that better feelingswere beginning to flow. We
floundered into forgiving.
Not a triumph of the forgiver's art, I agree. But healing oftencomes on
the wings of trivia. And the end is not always an ecsta-sy. We go to the
same receptions and feel good wishing eachother a Merry Christmas.
Sometimes small mercies are tenderenough.
We don't have to be virtuosos at the forgiving game to makeit work.
CHAPTER 14
With Anger Left Over
Is there anger after forgiving?
Yes, often. It can't be helped.
Some people believe that they should not feel anger in theirhearts once
they forgive.
I do not agree. I think that anger and forgiving can live together in the
same heart. You are not a failure at forgiving justbecause you are still angry
that a painful wrong was done to you.
It is terribly unrealistic to expect a single act of forgiving to getrid of all
angry feelings.
Anger is the executive power of human decency. If you donot get angry
and stay angry when a bad thing happens, youlose a piece of your humanity.
Remember, you cannot erase the past, you can only heal thepain it has
left behind.
When you are wronged, that wrong becomes an indestructi-ble reality of
your life. When you forgive, you heal your hate forthe person who created
that reality. But you do not change thefacts. And you do not undo all of
their consequences. The deadstay dead; the wounded are often crippled still.
The reality of eviland its damage to human beings is not magically undone
and itcan still make us very mad.
A man does not forget that his father abused him as a child. Awoman
does not forget that her boss lied to her about her futurein the company. You
do not forget that a person you loved hastaken cheap advantage of you and
dropped you when the relationship was not paying off. I dare say that Jesus
has not forgotten that a man named Judas betrayed him. And survivors of
theholocaust do not forget the hell of that experience.
WITH ANGER LEFT OVER / 209
And when you do remember what happened, how can youremember
except in anger?
Can you look back on the painful moment—or painful years—without a
passionate, furious, aching longing that what hurtyou so much had never
happened? Some people probably can.But I don't think you should expect
such placid escape from terrible memories. You can be angry still, and you
can have youranger without hate.
Once you start on your forgiving journey, you will begin tolose the
passion of malice. Malice goes while anger lingers on.When forgiving
begins its liberating work, the malice that oncehissed like white flame from
an acetylene torch begins to fizzleout.
A man slowly finds himself wishing his ex-wife well in hernew
marriage. A father is surprised at how desperately he wantshis rebellious
daughter to be happy. We wish a blessing on thefrail humanity of the person
who hurt us, even if we were hurtunfairly and deeply.
What is happening? Malice is gradually fading, just as yourhead
gradually stops pounding after you take three aspirin. Youhave anger
without malice—a sign that your forgiving is real.
Anger minus malice gives hope. Malice, unrelieved, willgradually
choke you. But anger can goad you to prevent thewrong from happening
again. Malice keeps the pain alive andraw inside your feelings, anger
pushes you with hope toward abetter future.
There are three things you can do to drain the poison of mal-ice while
you use the energy of anger. They may be worth try-ing.
First, express your malice. Be specific, nail the object of yourfury down.
It doesn't help to let malice fester as an ugly glob ofundirected misery. And
it doesn't help to throw it at people,either. But you need to express it to
somebody who can help youget rid of it. You can express it secretly to God,
or to someonewho represents God to you.
Then, you can let God handle those people you would like tomanhandle
in your hate. If they need teaching, let God teachthem. If they need rescuing
from their own stupidity, let Godrescue them. If they need saving from their
own crazy wickedness, let God save them. What you need is healing from
the infec—
tion of malice left over from the open wounds they left in yourlife.
Finally, you can even try a prayer for the peace of the personyou hate.
If you do, you may discover another secret of forgiving; youdon't have
to choke your anger, you only have to surrender yourmalice. For your sake.
Malice is misery that needs healing. Angeris energy that needs direction.
After malice, let anger do its re-forming work. Forgiving and anger can be
partners in a goodcause.
CHAPTER 15
A Little at a Time
Wholesale forgiving is too much for anybody.
Not long ago a man named Arthur Fram came to me seekinga way to
forgive his daughter, Becky, a fragile twenty-one-yearold who had been
suffering a fairly serious depression for a cou-ple of years.
Becky stayed in bed until noon every morning. The rest of theday she
lay on the couch in front of the television set watchingsoap operas and
reruns of sitcoms. She got up once in a whileduring commercials, but only
to stuff herself with junk food.
But there was more. Becky was surly and spiteful towardanyone who
got close enough to join her at the television set.When Arthur offered to
help her, or when he gingerly suggestedthat she help herself, she snarled at
him like a cornered leopard.If anyone tactfully suggested psychological
therapy, she shriekedin defiance against a family that accused her of being
crazy.
In this way, Becky wrapped a thick blanket of rage and resentment
around her, enveloping her whole family within it.
She needed help—lots of it, and soon.
But so did Arthur. He was ravaged by Becky's ferocious rejec-tion of his
longsuffering love. Because she spat poison at him asthanks for his fatherly
care, he coiled a serpent of resentmentaround his fatherly heart. He felt
cheated and he couldn't eventhe score.
Why should he have a daughter who had come of age just intime to hate
him with a vicious passion? Why should he have toexplain to his successful
friends, who bragged about their successful kids, why his daughter did
nothing creative with her life?Why should his daughter play such a dirty
trick on him?
112 / HOW PEOPLE FORGIVE
Whose fault was it? Arthur had a hunch that it was his.Somewhere,
somehow, he must have failed to be the kind offather he should have been.
But he suppressed his hunch; hewould not accept responsibility. "I'll be
damned if I'm going tobear the guilt," he growled to himself—and growled
it thirtytimes a day.
But bear it he did. And he was doubly angry at Becky forbeing the
reason he had to feel such guilt when in another partof his mind he knew
himself to be innocent.
Then he heard me talk about forgiving as a road to healing.He wondered
whether he might have stumbled onto a quick curefor his aching heart.
He wanted to know how to forgive Becky.
"What do you want to forgive her for?" I asked. "Do youwant to forgive
her for suffering so much? Do you want to forgive her for hating herself?
For condemning herself day andnight because of the pain she knows she's
causing you? Do youwant to forgive her for being a person subject to
depression?
"Must Becky be forgiven for letting you down by not beingthe classy
young woman you need to impress your successfulfriends?"
Arthur was stunned. It was as though he had gone to a doc-tor for help
and the doctor had assaulted him. But I was on tohim; I recognized too
much of myself in Arthur to let him pull afast one on me.
Arthur was trying to use forgiveness as a quick and cheapnostrum for
pains that forgiveness cannot cure. It cannot healour narcissistic
resentments toward people for not being all thatwe expect them to be.
Nobody can really forgive people for beingwhat they are. Forgiveness
wasn't invented for such unfairmaneuvering.
Arthur may be able to forgive Becky for cursing him when heoffered to
take her to a therapist. He can probably forgive her fortelling him she hated
him at dinner the other night. In fact, hemay have the power to forgive her
for any of the specific thingsshe did to help make his life miserable.
But he cannot forgive Becky for being a depressed person.
We overload the circuits of forgiveness when we try to forgive people
for being burdens to our existence, or for not beingthe sort of people we
want them to be. There are other means for
A LITTLE AT A TIME / 113
coping with the threads of tragedy that are woven into the fabricof our
lives. They go by such names as courage, empathy, patience, and hope. And
God knows they come hard.
But Tm sure that I wouldn't have helped Arthur at all if I hadencouraged
him to think that he should—or even could—forgivehis daughter for being
the person she is, even though she hasbecome the sad and needy center of
his real, if self-centered,tragedy.
I believe that there is a natural law of forgiveness which requires a price
from us when we try to forgive people for beingwhat they are: Those who
forgive people for being what they are onlyincrease their own pain.
Pain compounds itself when we indulge ourselves with gran-diose
forgiving. The reason is simple to see. When we try—andfail, as we are
bound to—to forgive someone for being what heis, resentment is added to
resentment. We blame hhn for ourfailure to forgive him, as well as for
wronging us.
We also end up feeling sorrier for ourselves than we did be-fore, and
guiltier too, because now, besides everything else, weare ashamed of
ourselves for not being able to forgive. Our painfeeds on itself. It grows like
an invisible carcinoma.
The long and short of what I've been saying is that the forgiving that
heals focuses on what people do, not on what people are.The healing art of
forgiving has to be practiced a little at a time—for most people anyway.
Ordinary people forgive best if they go at it in bits and pieces,and for
specific acts. They bog down if they try to forgive peoplein the grand
manner, because wholesale forgiving is almost al-ways fake. Forgiving
anything at all is a minor miracle; forgivingcarte blanche is silly. Nobody
can do it. Except God.
And the first rule for mere human beings in the forgivinggame is to
remember that we are not God.
CHAPTER 16
Freely, or Not at All
We are never so free as when we reach back into our past andforgive a
person who caused us pain.
No one can be forced to forgive. No one forgives by blindinstinct. Nor
can anyone truly forgive out of duty. We stretchourselves beyond the call of
duty and the push of instinct intothe lively sport of personal freedom when
we genuinely forgivea person who did us wrong.
How silly, then, for a parent to nag at a daughter to forgiveher brother
for reading her diary and tattling about the secrets hefound there. How
futile, too, for a preacher to wheedle his congregation into forgiving their
enemies by threats of judgmentagainst unforgiving spirits.
The parent who nags and the preacher who wheedles areusing a tactic
that cannot work. We forgive freely or we do notreally forgive at all.
We are not forgiving freely when we are driven to forgive bysome inner
need to control the person we forgive. Manipulatingthrough forgiving only
makes matters worse. But a lot of peopletry it.
There are three kinds of manipulative forgivers.
Trigger-happy forgivers fire off forgiveness at a moment's no-tice.
Every time someone causes them some puny inconven-ience, they clobber
that person with punishing magnanimity.
If you are half an hour late for an appointment with Joe, heforgives you
before you can explain that a long distance phonecall came just as you were
leaving home. If you do not rememberFran's birthday, she forgives you with
the gravity of a judge issu—
FREELY, OR NOT AT ALL / 115
ing a death sentence. If Teresa's son does not have his roomcleaned, she
forgives him without asking for an explanation.
The trigger-happy forgiver forgives the way an old boxershoots out a
left when he sees a twitch in his opponent's eye.
Stung by such indiscriminate forgiving, you may want to say:"But I do
not need to be forgiven for this; I did not do anythingbad enough to deserve
your guilt-loaded forgiving." But you aretrapped. The trigger-happy
forgiver needs to be in control, so heintimidates through forgiveness.
Then there is the stalking forgiver, who sniffs out guilt andtracks it
down, stalking it, like a hound dog on the trail of arabbit. These forgiving
sleuths want to find the culprits, tag themas wrongdoers, and then slap them
with forgiveness.
Stan Hackley is a stalking forgiver. Stan is in charge of anoffice where
keeping accurate records is of the essence. He walksin the valley of the
shadow of fear, lest someone upstairs catchhis office in a computer error.
But there are ten people in hisoffice who feed the computer at least once a
day. He cannotcontrol the diet, and the law of human fallibility decrees
that,now and then, one of the ten will offer the wrong menu. Whenthat
happens, Stan the manager becomes Stan the stalker. Hegoes on a furtive
hunt, poking for clues,uncloaking the culprit.
Stan wants tension, tears, grinding teeth.
Of course he always forgives. But his forgiving leaves judgment and
shame in its backwash. He forgives and runs, leavingresentment circling
through the office like summer heat blownaround by a ceiling fan.
We also have the entrappers, who set people up to do the verything they
need to be forgiven for. Entrappers trap, forgive, andthen drive their victims
back to do the same thing again—so thatthey can be forgiven again.
Irma Walcort is an entrapper. She has forgiven her husbandClint at least
a thousand times. But each time she forgives, shedigs Clint's hole a foot
deeper, and shoves him into it again.
Clint is a drunk. He does most of his drinking in the lateafternoon, out
of Irma's sight. Then he comes home, grunts,flops on the sofa, and sleeps
the long evening away.
But on weekends he drinks early, and, by five o'clock Saturday
afternoon, at the crescendo of a yelling brawl, he takes a few
swats at Irma. He never remembers on Sunday morning. ButIrma
always remembers.
Like a burned-out priest reciting a Sunday morning liturgy,she snarls
back to him all the rotten things he had said the daybefore, shows him a
bruise or two, assures him that, beyond alldoubt, he is considerably less
than a worm, and then, with theinevitability of a closing commercial, she
forgives him. She al-ways forgives. She '"forgives" the way a typist slams
the carriageback at the end of a line.
 Each time Irma forgives him, Clint is reminded that he is theworst louse
ever to crawl through the crevices of humanity. Theleast he can do in
response is to punish himself.
How does a lush smite himself? Why he gets drunk, ofcourse. So that he
can be thumped and smitten by Irma again,just as he deserves. And be
forgiven again.
Loaded with contempt, Irma's forgiving is a cage in whichshe keeps her
tippling husband where she wants him. It is theway of the manipulating
forgiver.
To set anyone free, forgiving must be freely given—an act offree love,
not a devious power play. Forced forgiving makes matters worse for
everybody.
A major ingredient in free forgiving is respect for the personbeing
forgiven. This person is a magnificent creature. You do notforgive your pet
dog; you do not forgive your personal computer; you forgive only a superb
being called a person. In practice,respect means that you let a person do
whatever he or she wantsto do with your forgiving.
You forgive in freedom only when you give other people freedom—to
do what you don't want them to do at all, if they sochoose. Anything less
than the gift of freedom is control throughforgiving manipulation.
If you try to manipulate people into your contrived version ofa happy
ending, you are not forgiving freely. And you are notreally forgiving at all.
Only if you respect them enough to let them be responsiblefor what they
do with your forgiveness will your forgiving begenuine. It is the risk one
always takes in the forgiving game.
A free act is always a risk, one way or the other. Forgiving,above all, is
one of freedom's biggest risks. But there is no genuine forgiving any other
way.
CHAPTER 17
With a Fundamental Feeling
Ruth has been trying to forgive her mother for years. God knowsit is
hard to do. She knew early on that her mother never wantedher. She cannot
remember ever being held in her mother's arms;as far as she knows, she was
never cuddled, never tucked inbed, never kissed. What she does remember
is being handed alot of very expensive toys at a stiff arm's length.
When she was eight, her parents' marriage fell apart; hermother wanted
a divorce. But there was Ruth, what wouldbecome of little Ruth? So, for the
sake of a child she did notwant, she hung on with a man she did not love.
But she onlyresented Ruth more for burdening her twice—first with
herselfand then with her father.
Ruth, in her turn, hates her mother, who locked her out offamily love as
if she were an enemy alien. She has hated hermother so terribly long. All
these years—the hound of her hatealways growling in the bottom of her
heart! She wishes hermother would die and let her forget, but she knows
that her hatewill outlive her mother.
Ruth's hate for her mother doesn't stop there—it has a hookin it that
catches Ruth herself. In her heart of hearts she feels asif her mother was
right about her from the start, that she probably was never worth loving. So
she hates herself as much as shehates her mother.
How can Ruth break through the matted tangle of hate thatboth binds
her to and alienates her from her mother?
1 do not think that Ruth will ever forgive her mother or herself until she
feels forgiven herself. Coming to terms with thepain of her mother's guilt
must follow the pain of coming to
terms with her own. When she finally feels forgiven, fully
andunconditionally forgiven, she will be free to forgive herself. Andin
forgiving herself, she will find freedom to forgive her mother.
What is it like to feel forgiven?
Forgiveness is fundamental to every other good feeling.
 Try other sorts of delightful feelings and compare them withthe feeling
of being forgiven. Think of the feeling you have whenyou finally manage to
do what you have been trying to do forever: "I did it! I did it!" The feeling
is triumphant. Think of thefeeling of making love with someone you really
love. Or eventhe feeling of relief at seeing a familiar landmark after
you'vebeen lost and almost out of gas. These are all jubilant feelings,but
none of them is fundamental. They do not make or break ourjoy.
But the fundamental feeling makes a difference to everything.
You feel forgiven at the ground floor of your being, whereeverything
else rests. It is a feeling of total acceptance, a feelinglodged in your deepest
self, a feeling that no bad thing you docan take away. You feel totally
affirmed, totally loved, totallyreceived. Your entire being is rested because
you feel that nothing can separate you from the source of love, even though
youcannot do enough good things to earn your right to be there.You know
that nothing can really hurt you now.
This fundamental feeling happens to you. It comes as you areopen to it.
You cannot create it; you can only Be receptive to it.
But you can close yourself to it. How?
One sure way of missing out on the fundamental feeling is toworry too
much about being a spiritual success.
We all want badly to have a place in the sun, nestled securelyalongside
the lucky people who have made it and who thinkvery well of themselves
for succeeding so well. We want to walkstraight, heads high, in the well-
earned sense of our own con-spicuous worth. Of course, why not?
But sometimes we need to look at ourselves more honestly.
We do well sometimes to follow our feelings into the darkerregions of
our lives where we are neither very pretty nor verypure. We are a mixed
breed, shadow and light, weak and strong,foul and clean, hate and love, all
at the same time. Our middlename is ambiguity. Admitting this fundamental
ambiguity opensus to the fundamental feeling of being forgiven.
Obsession with spiritual success can take you on idiotic detours around
the fundamental feeling. I know a man who needsto be good so badly that
he cannot face up to the puniest fault.He often groans about being a poor,
poor sinner—always in gorgeous generalities, and always as a trick to get
people to reassurehim of his unusual virtue. But when his wife complains
that heforgot to take out the garbage, he is ready to hire a criminallawyer to
defend himself against her indictment.
 Why? The reason is simple: his passion to be a spiritual success will not
let him fail at anything at all. He needs to be terriblygood because he is
scared to death of being the least bit bad. Andhe loses his chances at the
fundamental feeling of being forgiven.
Let me speak for myself. When I am most anxious about mypersonal
worth I become an armed guard of my ego's imperialhighness. If someone
assaults my self-esteem, I call up all myreserves to defend myself. I get
rigid, grim, frightened; I ampoised for attack.
I cannot allow myself to accept the feeling of being forgiven.
But in some awful hours of emptiness, when I knew that Icould not win
my case by defending my virtue, I have emergedfeeling forgiven—and free
and joyful and hopeful as well. I wasfree to forgive. Liberated by the
fundamental freedom of beingforgiven.
My favorite story of the freedom to forgive is the one CorrieTen Boom
tells about herself. Corrie was liberated from a Naziconcentration camp a
few days after the Allies conquered Germany. It took longer to be liberated
from her simmering hate. Butshe set out on the forgiving journey through
her rememberedpain and kept traveling until she arrived at the place where
sheforgave even the Nazis who had dehumanized her life in thecamps.
In forgiving, she believed she had discovered the only powerthat could
heal the history of hurt and hate for the people ofEurope. So she preached
the possibilities of forgiveness. Shepreached it in Holland, in France, and
then in Germany, too. InMunich one Sunday she preached forgiving,
preached it to allthose German people who were so eager to be forgiven.
Outside, after the service was over, a major drama of thehuman spirit
unfolded. A man walked over to her; he reachedout his hand to her,
expecting her to take it. "Ja, Fraulein Ten
120 / HOW PEOPLE FORGIVE
Boom, I am so glad that Jesus forgives us all of our sin, just asyou say."
Corrie knew him. She remembered how she was forced totake showers,
with other women prisoners, while this beastlooked on, a leering, mocking
"superman," guarding helplessnaked woman. Corrie remembered. He put
his hand close toher. Her own hand froze at her side.
She could not forgive. She was stunned and terrified by herown
weakness. What could she do, she who had been so surethat she had
overcome the deep hurt and the desperate hate andhad arrived at forgiving,
what could she do now that she wasconfronted by a man she could not
forgive?
She prayed. "Jesus, 1 can't forgive this man. Forgive me." Atonce, in
some wonderful way that she was not prepared for, shefelt forgiven.
Forgiven for not forgiving.
At that moment—in the power of the fundamental feeling—her hand
went up, took the hand of her enemy, and releasedhim. In her heart she
freed him from his terrible past. And shefreed herself from hers.
The linkage between feeling forgiven and the power to forgive is the
key to everything else.
Let me get back to my friend Ruth, the gifted woman whohas suffered
so long because she cannot forgive her mother.Ruth cannot forgive her
mother because she does not feel forgiven herself.
Her freedom to forgive must come from a fundamental feeling of
personal freedom from any and all condemnation, herown or God's or
anyone else's. The fundamental feeling has nosoil for hate to grow in, no
nourishment for hate to feed on;when we experience the fundamental
feeling, hate dies a naturaldeath, and when hate dies we are free to forgive.
Do you remember Roger Sewall? Roger was the young manwho was
killed so cruelly by a hit-and-run driver.
Roger's mother, Phyllis, poured some of her pain into a di-ary, to help
herself get through her terrible tangle of anger whileshe awaited the trial of
the man who killed her son. She let meread her diary and allowed me to
share what she wrote in it.
First, she reveals her hurt, and her hate.
"I don't know how I feel. Tm still mad. I'm mad at [Charid]for being on
drugs ... I want him to hurt. I want him to suffer
WITH A FUNDAMENTAL FEELING / 121
for his guilt and feel our pain. I want him to have years of tortured
dreams and sleepless nights. . . . God, 1 don't want to forgive him. . . ."
But Phyllis is a deeply spiritual person, and she could not feelher hate
without feeling a need within herself. Moved by herown need, she
approaches the edge of the fundamental feeling.
"What foolish children we are. . . . We keep turning away . . .yet you
reach out . . . and you say—I forgive you."
Now she claims it.
 "1 . . . receive . . . receive the forgiveness you have held outfor us since
the day your son died."
But she struggles a while longer.
"Can I forgive like that? No, I can't. . . . Help me God. Helpme ... to say
. . ."
She couldn't finish the sentence; she couldn't write, "I forgive."
A few months later. Tears and anger later. In the power thatcomes from
life's fundamental feeling, she finished the struggle.
"I forgive Sid Charid."
And she really did.
I don't know whether Phyllis's act ever touched the life of theman she
forgave. I don't know whether he will ever forgive himself. What I do know
is that when she forgave the man whokilled her son, Phyllis began her own
journey into healing.Maybe she has had to begin again, many times, but she
is on theway.
, • 'JS '

I
•r
i* f
I
■■ *(■.

V
I
k
1/ ■
r't^
I
Part 4
WHY FORGIVE
There is a lot to be said for not forgiving people who have doneus
wrong. Why should people cut and thrust their way throughour lives,
leaving us bleeding in their wake, and then expect usto forgive everything
and act as if nothing went wrong?
Forgiving is an outrage against straight-line dues-paying morality. "A
beggar's refuge," George Bernard Shaw called it. Andanyone who preaches
the beauty of forgiveness should get itthrough his head that what he urges
us to do goes against thegrain of any decent person's yen for a fair deal.
We must face up to the skeptic's suspicion that forgiving isreally a
religious trick to seduce hurting people into putting upwith wrongs they do
not deserve.
Remember that we are talking about forgiving things that wefeel are
insufferable. We are not talking about the petty pains inthe neck that we
inevitably suffer in the human crush.
We are talking about forgiving people who have wronged us,hurt us,
deeply and unfairly, and left us feeling lower than anyhuman being in God's
image should ever feel.
We must listen to the voices that cry out against forgivingsuch people
indiscriminately.
If we hear these voices clearly, we will recognize in them anecho
coming from our own hearts.
For the honest heart is outraged by cheap nostrums for unfairhurts; it
does not want to forgive at all, if forgiving leaves thevictim exposed and
encourages the wrongdoer to hurt again.
So we shall ask: Why forgive?
And we shall answer: because forgiving is the only way wehave to a
better fairness in our unfair world; it is love's unexpected revolution against
unfair pain and it alone offers strong hopefor healing the hurts we so
unfairly feel.
 Let us go on, then, so that you can test the fairness of forgiving on the
touchstone of your own heart.
CHAPTER 18
Forgiving Makes Life Fairer
Did Shylock have a case? He is, as all villain haters know, theclassic
unforgiver. But who looks at the business from Shylock'spoint of view?
We find Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; he hadbeen
kicked around, badly, and for no good reason. Listen to hiscomplaint.
"Antonio," he said,
hath disgraced me . . .
Laughed at my losses.
Mocked my gains.
Scorned my nation,
Thwarted my bargains.
Cooled my friends.
Heated mine enemies.
And for what? Why did Antonio rub Shylock's face in the muck?Had
Shylock done him wrong? Were there scores to settle? No,Antonio was
spurred only by the evil spirit of anti-Semitism.Shylock was brutalized only
because he was a jew.
Why, then, should Shylock forgive Antonio as if nothing hadhappened
between them? He asked for no more than he hadcoming. Antonio had
made a bargain. Let the wrongdoer pay hisdues. One pound of flesh please!
As promised.
Shylock's simple-minded sense of fairness dimmed his wits.It did not
take a genius to turn the tables on him: let him haveone pound, not an ounce
more, and only flesh, not a drop ofblood. The Gentiles won the game. But
our question is notwhether Shylock was smart; it is whether his case was
just.
I bring up Shylock only to raise the question of fairness inforgiving.
Simon Wiesenthal tells another sort of story we must hear atall costs;
this story of his own terrible crisis of forgiveness in aconcentration camp
forces us to tremble a little as he asks againwhether forgiving is really fair.
Wiesenthal was the very oppositeof a vengeful Shylock smacking his lips
over the pound of fleshthat was coming to him. He was a decent person, an
architect byprofession, caught in the Nazi claws, hoping for no more than
tosurvive the holocaust, and hardly daring to hope for that much.
We find him one afternoon in a Polish concentration camp.Wiesenthal
had been assigned that day to clean rubbish out of ahospital that the
Germans had improvised for wounded soldierscarried in from the Eastern
Front. A nurse walked over to him,out of nowhere, took his arm, ordered
him to come with her,and led him upstairs, along a row of stinking
wounded, to theside of a bed where a young soldier, his head wrapped in
yellow,pus-stained bandages, was dying. He was maybe twenty-two,an SS
Trooper.
The soldier, whose name was Karl, reached out and
grabbedWiesenthal's hand, clamped it as if he feared Wiesenthal wouldrun
away. He told Wiesenthal that he had to speak to a Jew. Hehad to confess
the terrible things he had done so that he could beforgiven. Or he could not
die in peace.
What had he done? He was fighting in^a Russian villagewhere a few
hundred Jewish people had been rounded up. Hisgroup was ordered to plant
full cans of gasoline in a certainhouse. Then they marched about two
hundred people into thehouse, crammed them in until they could hardly
move. Nextthey threw grenades through the windows to set the house
onfire. The soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone who tried tojump out of a
window.
The young soldier recalled, "'Behind the window of the sec-ond floor, I
saw a man with a small child in his arms. His cloth-ing was alight. By his
side stood a woman, doubtless the motherof the child. With his free hand
the man covered the child's eyes—then he jumped into the street. Seconds
later the mother followed. We shot. . . Oh, God ... 1 shall never forget it—it
hauntsme."
The young man paused and then said, "I know that what I
have told you is terrible. I have longed to talk about it to a Jewand beg
forgiveness from him. I know that what I am asking isalmost too much, but
without your answer I cannot die inpeace."
Silence! The sun was high in heaven. God was somewhere.But here,
two strangers were all by themselves, caught in thecrisis of forgiveness. A
member of the super race begged to beforgiven by a member of the
condemned race.
 Wiesenthal tells us what he did. "I stood up and looked in hisdirection,
at his folded hands. At last I made up my mind andwithout a word I left the
room." The German went to God unforgiven by man.
Wiesenthal survived the concentration camp. But he couldnot forget the
SS trooper. He wondered, troubled, for a longtime whether he should have
forgiven the soldier. He told thestory in his book The Sunflower, and ended
it with an awful question for every reader: "What would you have done?"
I do not know what I would have done. I can never be surehow I would
act in someone else's crisis. I only want to let hisstory compel us to consider
well the outrageous thing we dowhen we urge anyone, including ourselves,
to forgive someone.
Would it have been right for Wiesenthal to forgive? Or wouldit have
been wrong?
Thirty-two distinguished people wrote their answers to Wiesenthal.
Most of them echoed Josek, a fellow prisoner, who saidto Wiesenthal:
You would have had no right to forgive him in the name of people
whohad not authorized you to do so. What people have done to you,
yourself, you can, if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own
affair.But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience
withother people's suffering.
A terrible sin to forgive! Why? Because no one may free a criminal's
conscience unless he has been the criminal's victim.
But we must not let Wiesenthal's fairness to other victimskeep us from
asking the question of fairness to the SS trooperand to Wiesenthal himself.
A few writers came out with it: the SS trooper did not
deserveforgiveness. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse said what one suspects
was on the minds of most people.
One cannot, and should not go around happily killing and torturingand
then, when the moment has come, simply ask, and receive forgiveness.
But no one else put the case against forgiving with the passion
ofnovelist Cynthia Ozick:
Often we are asked to think this way: vengeance brutalizes,
forgivenessrefines. But the opposite can be true. The rabbis said, ''Whoever
ismerciful to the cruel will end by being indifferent to the
innocent."Forgiveness can brutalize. . . . The face of forgiveness is mild, but
howstony to the slaughtered. . . . Let the SS man die unshriven. Let him
goto hell.
 Why should he die in peace? Why should he be released fromhis sin by
a Jew's word? Why should anyone anywhere forgivethis murderer and thus
let him go free as if he had never pulleda trigger? Did he not deserve to die
unforgiven?
Would it have been fair to Wiesenthal himself? He, too, hadbeen
awesomely wronged. Here he was, a hugely moral person,locked in a
concentration camp, doomed to die with all the oth-ers. The Nazis left him
with almost nothing; eighty-nine of hisrelatives were killed. Now, in one
unexpected moment, he hadthe fate of a Nazi in his hands. Why should he
not slice thesuper-race with the cutting edge of his silent contempt?
Wouldhe not have done hhitself a terrible injustice if he had spokengentle
words of forgiveness to the German?
Some people do not need a story like WiesenthaTs to tellthem forgiving
is unfair. They have felt the unfairness insidethemselves, in the smaller fires
of their own soul's furnace.
Take Jane Graafschap, for example. Jane and her husband,Ralph, had
finally brought their three children through the crazymaze of adolescence,
and gently pushed them out of the house.Jane was glad they had flown the
coop; finally she was going tohave a life of her own, get back on her own
track and makesomething of herself.
But a family tragedy stopped her. Ralph's younger brotherand his wife
were killed in a car crash, and left three children,ages eight, ten and twelve,
all by themselves. Ralph had a strongsense of duty; he knew that it was his
sacred calling to take hisbrother's orphaned children in. Jane was too
compassionate ortoo tired to disagree, she never did know which. She took
themin, not for a month, but for the duration. As for Ralph, he was
gone a lot, a traveling man, on the road, making deals. Nineyears groan
by. Two of the kids are gone; the only one still homeis seventeen, his mind
bent slightly out of shape but functional.In a few years Jane and Ralph
would be home free.
Not quite. Jane's body had gotten a little lumpy by this time,while
Ralph's secretary. Sue, was a dazzler; besides. Sue reallyunderstood his
large male needs. How could he help falling inlove? He and Sue knew that
their love was too true to be deniedand too powerful to be resisted. So,
Ralph divorced Jane and hemarried Sue.
Ralph and Sue were very happy, and they dunked their happiness in a
warm religious froth; their convivial, acceptingchurch celebrated their new-
found joy with them. They werekept afloat in togetherness by their
affirming Christian community. But Ralph needed one more stroke of
acceptance. So hecalled Jane to ask her to forgive him, and be glad with
him thathe was finally a happy man. "1 want you to bless me," he said.
"1 want you to go to hell," she replied. What? Forgive?Throw away the
only power she had—the strength of her hate,the energy of her contempt?
Her contempt was her power, herdignity, her self-esteem. It was unfair to
ask her to forgive. Theleast the louse deserved was a steady stream of her
scorn.
When we urge people to forgive, are we asking them to suffertwice?
First they suffer the wrong of another person's assault.They were ripped off.
Betrayed. Left out in the cold. Now mustthey suffer a second injury and
swallow an insult to boot? Theyare stuck with the hurt—must they also
bless the person whohurt them?
We must not preach the sublime duty of forgiving to the Si-mon
Wiesenthals or to the Jane Graafschaps until we havechewed the cud of
fairness a while. We can "believe in forgiveness only if justice is maintained
and guilt is confirmed." PaulTillich was right. When we say "forgive" we
may be askingsomeone to commit an outrage against humankind's
universalinstinct for fair play.
Let us see if we can make a case for a fair forgiving. I suggestthat we
look at it from two points of view.
FORGIVING OPENS THE WAY TO A BETTER FAIRNESS
Forgiving is fair to the facts, to begin with.
Forgiving does not try to change the facts in our past. Tam—
pering with the facts of history is faker's fancy; history is impla-cable.
We can begin to forgive only when we refuse the soft-soaped temptation of
toning down the wrong of what happenedto us.
Someone has been hurt. If we are too proud to admit that aworm like
our husband or our former partner could hurt us, wemay avoid the crisis for
a little while. If we are too afraid of ourown pain to permit ourselves to feel
it fully, we may skirt theissue of forgiveness. What shoves us into crisis is
our respect forthe fact that we have been treated unfairly by somebody who
didnot have to do it. Forgiving is only for people who are fair to
thewretched fact of unfair pain.
Forgiving is also fair, in a paradoxical way, to the dignity ofthe
wrongdoer. If you believe that everything we do is determined for us ahead
of time by forces beyond our control, youwill never enter the forgiveness
circle. If you agree that the idiotswho hurt you were only victims of the
fates, that they were stuckin the groove their neurotic parents set them in,
that they couldnot help themselves, you do not need to forgive them. Pity
themmaybe. Retune them if possible. But do not forgive them.
You will forgive only when you dare look at people eyeball toeyeball
and tell them that they are responsible for what they did.Forgiving is fair to
wrongdoers because it holds them to the in-criminating touchstone of their
own free humanity.
But back to the heart of the matter. Is forgiving an honorableway to
come to terms with the pain you feel when a responsibleperson stings you
deeply and unfairly?
Well, what is the alternative to forgiving?
Must you freeze yourself in the unfairness of a cruel momentin the past?
Do you want your private world to stand still at thatwretched incident in
your irreversible history? Or are you readyto find a better way? Better than
what? Better than the pain of amemory glued forever to the unfair past.
But suppose you do refuse to settle for the past and you alsorefuse to
forgive. Is there another option? Maybe revenge?
Vengeance is a passion to get even. It is a hot desire to giveback as
much pain as someone gave you. An eye for an eye!Fairness!
The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants;it never
evens the score. Fairness never comes. The chain reac-tion set off by every
act of vengeance always takes its unhindered course. It ties both the injured
and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as
long as parity isdemanded, and the escalator never stops, never lets anyone
off.
Why do family feuds go on and on until everyone is dead—orgets too
old and too tired to fight?
The reason is simple: no two people, no two families, everweigh pain
on the same scale. The pain a person causes me al-ways feels heavier to me
than it feels to the person who causedit. The pain I inflict on you always
feels worse to you than itseems to me. Pains given and pains received never
balance out.The difference between pain given and pain suffered is like
thedifference between climbing a hill and scampering down, it nev-er feels
the same in both directions.
 If you hurt me and I retaliate in kind, I may think that I havegiven you
only what you deserve, no more. But you will feel it asa hurt that is too
great for you to accept. Your passion for fairness will force you to retaliate
against me, harder this time. Thenit will be my turn. And will it ever stop?
An eye for an eye becomes a leg for a leg and, eventually, alife for a
life. No matter what our weapons are—words, clubs,arrows, guns, bombs,
nuclear missiles—revenge locks us into anescalation of violence. Ghandi
was right: if we all live by "an eyefor an eye" the whole world will be blind.
The only way out isforgiveness.
Forgiveness is not the alternative to revenge because it is softand gentle;
it is a viable alternative because it is the only creative routeto less
unfairness.
Forgiveness has creative power to move us away from a pastmoment of
pain, to unshackle us from our endless chain of reac-tions, and to create a
new situation in which both the wrongdoerand the wronged can begin a
new way.
Forgiveness offers a chance at reconciliation; it is an opportunity for a
life together instead of death together. Forgiveness is amiracle of the will
that moves away the heavy hindrance to fellowship, a miracle that will be
fulfilled when the two estrangedpeople come together in as fair a new
relationship as is possibleat that time and under those circumstances.
The alternative to reconciliation is, in the end, a ceaseless process of
self-destruction. The brilliant American theologian Rein—
132 / WHY FORGIVE?
hold Niebuhr saw this after World War II and said: ''We mustfinally be
reconciled with our foe, lest we both perish in the vicious circle of hatred."
There must be a release from the past orwe are forever grounded on its
unfair pain.
Vengeance never wholly satisfies. For one thing, we are notalways able
to fight back. Maybe the person who hurt us is dead.Maybe we are old and
weak. What is left to us then but ourprivate truculence? We simmer in our
spite, impotent to retaliateand powerless to forgive. Frustrated!
Immobilized! This is notthe way to make things fairer.
Vengeance mires people in a painful and unjust past. Theyought to
move toward a new future of fairer relationships, butthe inner lust for
revenge pushes them deeper into endless repetition of the old unfairness.
All in the name, mind you, of fairplay.
 Forgiveness begins midstream in the flow of unfairness, andstarts a new
movement toward another fairness, imperfect fairness, to be sure, but better
at least than endless perpetuation ofthe old unfairness. It breaks the grip that
past wrong and pastpain have on our minds and frees us for whatever fairer
futurelies amid the unknown potentialities of our tomorrows.
There is no guarantee. But forgiving is the only open door topossibility.
FORGIVING IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE FAIR TO OURSELVES^
When you suspect that forgiving is not fair, you worry thatthe people
who hurt you are not getting what is coming to them.But you worry, too,
that you are getting a bad deal; you get hurtand do not get even. Forgiving
may not seem fair to the peoplewho must do the forgiving.
But you are not thinking clearly when you refuse to forgiveon grounds
that you would not be fair to yourself. Forgiving isthe only way to be fair to
yourself. Getting even is a loser's game.It is the ultimate frustration because
it leaves you with more painthan you got in the first place.
Recall the pain of being wronged, the hurt of being stung,cheated,
demeaned. Doesn't the memory of it fuel the fire of furyagain, reheat the
pain again, make it hurt again? Suppose younever forgive, suppose you feel
the hurt each time your memor}^lights on the people who did you wrong.
And suppose you have
FORGIVING MAKES LIFE FAIRER / 133
a compulsion to think of them constantly. You have become aprisoner of
your past pain; you are locked into a torture chamberof your own making.
Time should have left your pain behind;but you keep it alive to let it flay
you over and over.
Your own memory is a replay of your hurt—a videotape with-in your
soul that plays unending reruns of your old rendezvouswith pain. You
cannot switch it off. You are hooked into it like apain junkie; you become
addicted to your remembrance of painpast. You are lashed again each time
your memory spins thetape. Is this fair to yourself—this wretched justice of
not forgiving?You could not be more unfair to yourself.
The only way to heal the pain that will not heal itself is toforgive the
person who hurt you. Forgiving stops the reruns ofpain. Forgiving heals
your memory as you change your memo-ry's vision.
When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut amalignant
tumor out of your inner life.
 You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was
yourself.
CHAPTER 1 9
Forgiving Is a Better Risk
Forgiving could be dangerous to your childrens' health. A littleprivate
forgiving now and then, for the small things, done dis-creetly and without a
lot of fuss, will not threaten the future ofhuman society. But if you forgive
big wrongs, and forgive themindiscriminately and openly, you may doom
the lives of tomorrow's innocent children.
Forgiving, then, is a serious risk.
Forgiveness, cheaply given, is dangerous, let us face it. If weforgive, we
are likely to forget; and if we forget the horrors of thepast we are likely to
let them happen again in the future.
Every act of forgiving can be a nail in somebody else's coffin.If you
forgive a man who rapes your sister, you may mute society's scream of
outrage against rapists. If you forgive a pusherwho sells your daughter
cocaine, you may make it a little easierfor him to get to your neighbor's
daughter too. If you forgive tooeasily and forget too quickly, you may be
turning innocentpeople over to predators who give not a damn about your
forgiveness.
If you forgive the Nazi, it is argued, you will eventually forgetthe
holocaust. If the Armenians forgive the Turks, their childrenwill forget the
massacres. If Ukranian kulaks forgive Stalin, theirchildren will forget how
he starved their parents. If Cambodiansforgive Pol Pot, their children will
forget his massive atrocitiesagainst millions of innocent Cambodian people.
The risks of forgetting are both personal and global. Once weforgive
and learn to swallow history's stinking garbage withoutthrowing up, we
condition ourselves to digest the worst the
monsters of the future can force down our throats. When forgiving cures
our nausea it encourages us to forget that the evil thinghappened and can
happen again. If we open the dike a crack, wemay be in for a deluge.
After you have forgiven people, it is feared, you will begin todiscover
all sorts of good things about them. Concentration campcommanders were
fine family men. They saw to the slaughter oflittle children from nine to
five and went home to make soothinglove to their wives in warm beds of
teutonic fidelity. Mafia mob-sters gun down their competition in cold blood
at noon and byfive are home with their children in their old-fashioned
familyways. Look at both sides. Maybe the monsters of our historywere not
as bad as their victims thought.
Ordinary people, it is said, cannot be trusted with forgiveness. Maybe
God can forgive sinners without losing his outrageat their sin. Maybe God
does not bamboozle himself, maybe heknows that forgiven sinners still
have enough rot in their guts tosin again. But most ordinary people let their
forgiving wash outthe memory and rinse away its bitter taste. They are like
drunkswho hate booze only as long as their hangover lasts.
As their memories dim, they turn soft. And they make theirsoftness
sound like sophisticated insight. They are all too ready,once they forgive, to
plead extenuating circumstances—the burdens of history, the hard times,
the poverty-drained culture, thepathological family life, the weak genes.
They say it was destiny.
Beware the muddle-headed softness of the easy forgiver!
Could I put the case against forgiving any more strongly?
One way to reduce the risk is simply to determine not to letthe future
generations forget. We can tell our children the storiesof the past's terrible
wrongs. We can build museums to geno-cide, design artistic monuments to
slaughter. We can vow thatour children and our children's children will
never be allowednot to know. We can tell it on the mountains in every
generation.
We must know, however, that remembering has problems ofits own. If
forgetting invites repetition, remembering incites perpetuation. Memory can
nurse a flame that brings hate to its boil-ing point, creating a pressure inside
that only getting even canrelieve. But you cannot get even, not ever, not if
you try for amillion years. So remembering takes its worst toll on the
spiritsof the people who suffered most.
136 / WHY FORGIVE?
Is there a narrows to be navigated between the rock of riskyforgetting
and the hard place of futile remembering?
There is a redemptive remembering. There is a healing way toremember
the wrongs of our irreversible past, a way that canbring hope for the future
along with our sorrow for the past.Redemptive remembering keeps a clear
picture of the past, but itadds a new setting and shifts its focus.
 No people can tell us about redemptive remembering the waythe old
Hebrews can. Remembering was their lifestyle. Theirmemories told them
who they were, how they fit into the humanpicture, and what they were
expected to do with themselves.Their future was born yesterday, and by
remembering yesterdaywell they discovered the meaning of their today and
the goal oftheir tomorrow.
Moses posted notice early on that the Hebrews' terrible yesterday had to
be kept alive forever so people would know themeaning of what was, what
is and what shall be. "Only takeheed, and keep your soul diligently, lest you
forget the thingsyour eyes have seen and lest they depart from your heart all
thedays of your life; make them known to your children and yourchildren's
children."
No forgetting, ever. If you lose your memory, you lose yourown
identity. And you lose your personal stake in your people'sfuture.
But take a closer look at what the Jews were supposed toremember. It
was not the horror of their four hundred years ofslavery. Though slavery
was their past. Not the titanic injusticeof the Pharaoh in Egypt. Though
injustice was their past. Theywere not ordered to memorialize the evil. An
astonishing featureof the post-slavery memorials is that the people are not
urged toremember their misery.
What had to be remembered was the miracle of survival andrenewal.
What had to be remembered were not the days whenGod was on a leave of
absence, but the day when God came backto bring them out of slavery and
out of suffering.
The Passover feast was their memory day.
This day shall be a memorial day . . . and when your children shall sayto
you, ''what do you mean by this sacrifice?" you shall say, "It is thesacrifice
of the Lord's passover, for he passed over the houses of Israelin Egypt when
he slew the Egyptians but spared our houses."
FORGIVING IS A BETTER RISK / 137
Release, liberation, redemption from the pain, were memorialized—not
the bondage, not the wrong by itself. The monumentwas to the possibilities
for the future, not to the horror of thepast.
Redemptive remembering drives us to a better future, it doesnot nail us
to a worse past.
When Israel remembered its own past bondage, the memoryincited
them to seek justice in the present. You were oncestrangers in a strange
land; remember now to be hospitable tothe stranger in your land. You were
exploited by unjust masters;remember not to exploit your own poor people.
You were slavesonce; remember to set your own slaves free. Good hopes
for abetter life were filaments in the light ignited by the redemptivememory
of Jewish suffering.
The Christian community, too, was told from the beginningnot to forget
the sufferings of its founder. Remember the terribledeath of Jesus until he
comes again at the end of time—so earlybelievers were commanded to do.
But this remembrance is notmeant to stoke the fire of resentment against the
unfairness ofhis dying; just the opposite.
The point of remembering is to be renewed again and againby the life
that rises from the aftershocks of his unfair death.
Redemptive memory is focused on love emerging from ashes,light that
sheds darkness, hope that survives remembered evil.
I do not mean to underrate the chance that we will forget andthat people
will take advantage of our forgetting. Grace is a gam-ble, always. God
knows. He knows what it is like to forgive andhave it thrown back at him as
a dare to forgive again. "Sin thatgrace may abound!" Why not? If forgiving
is your game, and youlike the exercise, we'll give you double the pleasure.
But God does take the risk, and so does anyone who everforgives
another human being.
The question is not whether forgiving is dangerous, but onlywhether it
is a safer bet. It almost always comes down to wherewe get the best odds.
Forgiving is risky, but there are ways to improve the odds.One of them
is to turn your remembered terrors into redemptivememories.
The risk, I believe, is worth taking.
CHAPTER 20
Forgiving Is Stronger
Passionate people are often sure that power comes only fromhate and
violence. We must listen to what they tell us.
Nobody in modern times has persuaded more people thatviolent hate is
the power of the future than has Franz Fanon, thefervent Algerian
psychiatrist who, in the 1960s, was the inspiration of many future black
leaders. He set down his passionatephilosophy in a book called The
Wretched of the Earth—meaningall the people who live in the unfair pain
of oppression and poverty. Their salvation, he believed, lies in hate's
violence.
"Violence," he said, "is a cleansing force. It frees [the personwho suffers
unfair hurt] from his inferiority complex and fromhis despair and inaction;
it makes him fearless and restores hisself-respect."
I do not think I could find a more compelling challenge to mypassion
for forgiving than I find in Fanon's passion for violence.
Hate does have a feel of power to it, I admit. To a personenergized by
hate, forgiving feels flaccid, sapless, impotent. Wefeel stronger when we
nourish our contempt and plot to geteven. We dream up brilliant schemes
for putting our enemies intheir place, we pin them down in public, we make
them grovel—and our vengeful dreams make us feel very strong. "The
hellwith you" feels a lot more macho than "I forgive you."
Hate does generate real energy. People who have been hurtand hate the
villain who hurt them experience a surge of powerinside. American
prisoners, survivers of Bataan, forced on theirterrible death march, prodded
by the enemies' bayonets, fed rot-ten food, given no reason to hope for
escape or survival, tell us
that it was their hate that gave them the power to make it outalive.
But we must bring the matter down to where ordinary peoplelive. Take
Marcie Rozen, for instance. Marcie was deserted byher husband, left
without money, without skills for the marketplace, without self-esteem,
feeling unloved and unlovable. Askher what helped her most to get out of
the sinking sand of herdespair, into school to train for a job, into the
marketplace to findone, and, from there, into success at the job she found.
Marciewill tell you: wanted to show the louse he couldn't hurt me.Hate gave
me strength."
What does a forgiver have to say to Marcie's testimony?
This: hate gives instant energy, but it runs dry after the suffering stops.
Hate can keep us going while we feel battered, butthe drive dies down as
time goes on after the ordeal is over. Andthen hate turns its power against
the hater. It saps the energy ofthe soul, leaving it weaker than before, too
weak to create a bet-ter life beyond the pain.
Hate is for emergencies, like a fast battery charge; it is a quickfix like
heroin. As a long-term energizer, it is unreliable. And inthe end it kills.
Hate-power is especially superficial when it is generated byour fear of
weakness. Let me share a typical little story to showwhat I mean.
Mark Zwaak thinks of his wife, Karen, as an efficient, aggressive,
domineering woman, while he sees himself as an ineffective, timid,
submissive man. Karen goads Mark a lot; shewants him to take charge of
the children, make decisions, faceup to the mechanic who rips him off, get
ahead in his job, andgenerally stop letting people push him around. Mark is
miserable; he hates himself for being the weak member of the partner-ship.
One night, at a party with friends, overextended on Chablis,Karen
laughingly said that she despised Mark for being amama's boy who had
never grown up. The icy meanness of Kar-en's jibe froze Mark's feelings
into a hard block of hate. His wilt-ed shame became an erection of rage.
When they got home Markstepped on the throttle of his humiliated ego and
screamed: "Forthis, I will never forgive you, never!"
And he did not forgive. His hate became his secret pet; hesuccored it,
nourished it, fondled it, and let it roam the ranges ofhis soul. His hate felt to
him like a generator of inner power.
But his hate was only surface strength. Beneath his hate, hestill
suspected that Karen had him sized up right; he really wasweak, impotent,
ineffective. His hate was a cover for the weakness he dared not face.
Karen wasn't fooled; she understood that Mark's powerfulhate was only
a mask for his weakness, the only disguise hecould find. She knew Mark.
But she hardly knew herself at all. She closed her eyes to thefact that
her own cocky toughness was a well-tuned instrumentfor keeping her own
weakness under control. Karen was scaredof a legion of secret demons
flitting inside of her soul, and sheneeded strength from Mark so that he
could be her crutch. ButMark was not strong enough, so she played the
tiresome gameof being stronger than he was in order to hide her weakness.
But Karen learned. It took a near nervous collapse to teachher that we
never win the game of being only strong and neverweak. Through counsel
and through pain, she came to termswith being weak, with being afraid,
with being needy. So shethrew away the mark of her jaunty self-confidence.
When she finally came to terms with being needy she founda truer
strength. For instance, she found the courage to tell Markhow weak and
how afraid she really was, and how cruel she hadbeen when she demanded
that Mark never be weak. She knewnow that strength comes only in
weakness. Why not be weaktogether?
The happy ending began when Mark agreed to join Karen ina
counseling program that aimed, not at getting strong, but athelping them to
accept their fragile, weak, human selves. It tooktears, a river of tears, to
wash away the crazy conviction that inorder to be strong he was not
allowed to be weak. But he shedthe tears, and they washed away his
illusion.
As he learned that strength is given to us only in a package ofweakness,
Mark became strong enough to drop his mask ofmanly hate. Why not? A
person who is not ashamed of beingweak does not need the disguise.
The notion that hate is strong and forgiving is weak is a falla-cy
fabricated of a phony notion of strength. It pits strength
against weakness as if we have to be one or the other, eitherstrong or
weak. And so, like a bad movie, it presents life inblacks and whites the way
life seldom is. We are never eitherstrong or weak; we are always both
strong and weak. And in thatcombination we find our humanness.
Forgiving is a creative way to be weak and, therewith, a mosthuman
way to be strong.
Let us go on to name some of its strengths.
FORGIVING IS REALISM
Forgiving comes equipped with the toughness of realism. Tobe able to
forgive we must have the guts to look hard at thewrongness, the horridness,
the sheer wickedness of what somebody did to us. We cannot camouflage;
we cannot excuse; wecannot ignore. We eye the evil face to face and we
call it what itis. Only realists can be forgivers.
 One prime reason why some people cannot forgive is theirfear of reality.
Parents miss chances to forgive their children because they are afraid to
face the facts. A mother has a sixth sensethat her son is stealing money
from her. He needs money to buydrugs for himself and gas for his van; but
he has lost his job. Sohe pilfers at home. She misses a ten dollar bill here, a
twentythere, out of her purse and out of her dresser drawer. He leaveshints
behind, clear enough to give himself away. She knows; butshe refuses to
acknowledge what she knows. She stuffs herknowledge safely into her
subconscious bag of unpleasant facts.She closes her eyes and she avoids the
crisis of forgiving.
Self-deception is a lot easier than forgiving. But it has no pay-off in
healing.
Forgiving begins with the power to shake off deception anddeal with
reality.
FORGIVING IS CONFRONTATION
The strength of forgiving is seen most clearly whenever it isborn of
confrontation. We cannot completely forgive anyonewhom we do not—one
way or the other—face up to and say:"'You did me wrong and I hate you for
it."
Liz Bentley is an assistant professor of biology at a university
in California. She is not a scholar, but she is a good teacher. Shewas up
for promotion and the chairman of her departmentpromised that he would
persuade the dean to promote her onthe basis of her work in the classroom.
Liz counted on him.
As it turned out the dean called her in and told her that shewas not going
to get a promotion. And he advised her to beginapplying for other jobs.
She felt like a hopeless failure at first, and was just beginningto climb
out of her slough when a gossipy colleague let it slipthat her chairman had
not recommended her at all, had in factpooh-poohed her performance as a
teacher.
Liz was betrayed by the man who promised to be her advo-cate. She
had been bitten from behind by an academic jackal. Shehated him.
She also needed a recommendation from him. So, for a while,she played
games, acting as if she believed him when he told herhow sorry he was that
not even his strong support for her couldconvince the dean. And she went
home each night and vomited.
 But Liz could not keep her dialogue of duplicity going forlong. She had
to stop lying to the chairman and force him to stoplying to her. She would
confront him, and if she had to shewould flush his recommendation down
the toilet. She met him atthe coffee urn, drew him aside, looked him in the
eye, and said:''Jack, I know you threw me down the shaft and I hate you
forit." The chairman lied again and walked away.
Liz now began to feel the power she needed to forgive theman. She
knew it would not be easy; she was not sure whethershe could do it at all.
But having risen in power, she felt strongenough to be weak enough to
forgive. So, in her mind, shestripped his jackal's hide and saw him as the
poor, weak personhe was beneath it.
And in her decision to forgive she was set free. She went tobed without
vomiting; she put away the Valium. Now she knewthat whatever academic
road she walked, she would walk it as afree woman.
FORGIVING IS FREEDOM
Nobody can make you forgive.
Only a free person can choose to live with an uneven score.Only free
people can choose to start over with someone who has
hurt them. Only a free person can live with accounts unsettled.Only a
free person can heal the memory of hurt and hate.
When you forgive another person you are surprised at yourown freedom
to do what you did. All the king's armies could nothave forced you to do it.
You forgive in freedom and then moveon to greater freedom. Freedom is
strength; you know you haveit when you have the power to forgive.
FORGIVING IS LOVE'S ULTIMATE POWER
Love is the power behind forgiveness.
But it does not work the way a lot of people suppose.
Love is not a soft and fuzzy sentiment that lets people getaway with
almost everything, no matter what they do to us.Love does not make us
pushovers for people who hurt us unfairly—
Love forgives, but only because love is powerful.
Love has two ingredients that make it strong. One ingredientis respect.
The other is commitment.
On the one hand, these two qualities make us vulnerableenough to need
to forgive. On the other hand, they give uspower to do the forgiving we
need to do.
First, consider love's power to give you respect for yourself.
 If you love yourself truly, you will respect yourself truly. Andit is
precisely your self-respect that gets you into situationswhere you are
challenged to forgive.
When you respect yourself, you set limits to the abuse thatyou can
accept from thoughtless or cruel people, even if you lovethem. Some pain
will be unacceptable to you for the simple rea-son that you have too much
dignity to deserve it. You will notaccept disloyalty from friends you trust, or
betrayals fromspouses you love, or abuse from children you care for.
Suchhurts go beyond the limits that a self-respecting person allows.
Love is too powerful to let you lump all the blame for yourpain on
yourself, as if it must always be your fault when yourfather deprives you of
love, or your spouse has an affair, or yourchildren throw away your values.
Love does not let you blameyourself falsely for long. Sometimes it reaches
down into thereservoir of your nobility and says: "No more, I have too
muchself-respect to put up with any more."
When love gives you back your self-respect, and you refuse
to take it anymore, you will have to make a decision about forgiveness.
Will you glue yourself to the painful memory of the hurt youdidn't
deserve? Will you roll it around your memories, savor itsbitter taste,
squeeze the last ounce of crazy-making pleasure youcan get out of your
pain? Or will you, in self-respect, forgive andset yourself free?
The same self-respecting love that gets you into the crisis offorgiving
has the power to move you into the place of self-healing.
Love will not let you lock yourself in the prison cell of yourbitter
memories. It will not permit you the demeaning misery ofwallowing in
yesterday's pain. Your love for yourself will generate enough energy,
finally, to say: "I have had enough; I am notgoing to put myself down by
letting somebody's low blow keephurting me forever." And so you begin
forgiving.
Now you can reverse your focus and point your love towardthe people
who hurt you. Love enables you to respect them too,no matter how mean,
cruel, or terribly unfair they were.
The highest respect you can show people is to let them
takeresponsibility for their own actions. Love has this power, thepower to
let people be responsible for hurting us.
Love does not forever cover up for people, it does not foreverfind
excuses for them, or protect them. I know a man whose wifeis an alcoholic,
and who, when she drinks, is abusive and cutting. She hurts him very
deeply. But he does not dare tell her toget help for herself, nor does he dare
leave her on her own todecide whether she wants to get help, and he
certainly will notget out of the house to protect himself. He says he loves
her toomuch. But he does not love her with the powerful love of respect; he
does not give her the simplest respect of letting her takeresponsibility for
herself.
When we really love people with respect, we let them be accountable
for what they do to us. And then we face the crisis offorgiving.
But now comes the marvelous turnabout. Again, just as lovegets us into
the crisis, love gives us the power to get out of it.
Love respects people as genuine human beings, even afterthey have
treated you like dirt. People who hurt you so badly arenot just lumps of
degenerate corruption; they are complexpeople with more to them than
meanness and craziness. They
FORGIVING IS STRONGER / 145
have the potential to become better people, truer people, thanthey were
when they stung you. Respect for them will help youto see the person
behind the rat. And this respect can stimulateyou to move in the direction of
forgiveness.
So much, then, for love's power to respect yourself and theperson who
hurt you.
Now let us go on to the second ingredient in the power oflove, love's
power to risk a commitment.
True love dares to commit itself to someone, and therein liesboth its
vulnerability and its power.
When you commit yourself you reach out into a future youcannot
control and you make an appointment to be there withsomeone you love.
You pledge yourself to be there with them nomatter what the circumstances
are. And in committing yourselfto people, you expect them to commit
themselves to you.
But what a risk it is to trust anyone's commitment, not leastyour own. I
am not surprised that people break their commitments; what amazes me is
that we have the courage to makethem in the first place. Commitments
make us very vulnerable.
If you do not dare to risk forgiving, all you have to do is
avoidcommitments. You can keep your options open, your bagspacked, so
you can slip out into greener pastures whenever youare not getting a good
pay-off on your relationship. You can runaway from pain, run quickly and
leave others to pick up thepieces for you. Or you can become an urban
hermit and neverallow yourself to get involved with anyone beyond what it
takesto get along on the job. If you can avoid any of love's commitments,
you can live a long time without ever having to forgive.
But anyone whose love dares to commit him is a candidatefor forgiving.
For when love commits you, it opens you up tohurts from people who go
back on their commitments. Andwhen you get hurt, as most of us do, you
either walk onstage todance to the music of forgiveness or stew backstage
in your owndepressing pain.
But now comes the turnabout again. The very love that daresto be
vulnerable by making a commitment has power to heal youof the pain that
commitments bring.
Committed love does not say "finish" before the last act isplayed out. It
gives us the strength to tough out bad times in thehope of better times.
Committed love does not throw in the towel before the fight is really over.
It holds on. And while it holds,it energizes, it gives you strength to keep the
door open for theday when a new beginning may be possible.
I have been saying that, over the long run, love's power toforgive is
stronger than hate's power to get even. I admit thathate gives a temporary
power for surviving today's brutality andit has a short-term power to move
us into tough action for tomorrow. But hate lacks staying power to create a
fairer futurebeyond revenge.
It is forgiveness that supplies the healing stream of the long-term
tomorrows. For long distance, forgiving is stronger thanhate.
Forgiving Fits Faulty People
There is a good guy and a bad guy in every forgiving crisis.Someone
has hurt someone else, wrongly and deeply; one per-son needs to forgive
and another needs to be forgiven.
But when we look at the zvhole picture, we always discoverthat those
who get hurt probably need to be forgiven, too, bysomebody. And if they
need forgiveness, they have extra reasonto forgive those who hurt them.
We always feel like innocent lambs when someone hurts usunfairly. But
we are never as pure as we feel. 1 may have beenbetrayed, cheated,
maligned, and in several other ways badlyabused, and feel as if 1 am as
benign as a shorn sheep. But beingabused does not make me a good person.
As Reinhold Neibuhrkept telling us years ago: 'There is a labyrinth of
motives inevery heart; and every action, both good and evil, is the
consequence of a complicated debate and tension within the soul." Weare
all too complex to be pure.
Moreover, we are seldom merely sinned against. We oftencontribute to
our own vulnerability. We set ourselves up forhurt. Sometimes we invite
pain, not because we love somebodytoo much, but because we are too
stupid. Maybe we contributeto our being ripped-off because we are too lazy
to look hardbefore we leap into a deal. Maybe we contribute to our
spouse'sinfidelity by our unfeeling ignorance of their needs and
desires.Maybe we contribute to our children's rebellion by our cold judg-
ments and hot tempers. Surely, we know at least this much, thateven if we
are the hurt party, we are seldom a completely innocent party.
Our virtue is always compromised; we are never as innocent
as we feel when we taste our early hate for a person who hurtus.
Our own faults, therefore, reduce the gap between us andwhoever did us
wrong. We do not toss our forgiving down fromthe peak of a holy
mountain; we are in the valley with those whohurt us.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the novelist who was kicked out ofRussia
because he could not keep his mouth shut about thetruth, and now lives and
works in the United States, tells, in TheGulag Archipelago, about his
friendship with an army officer dur-ing World War II. He felt then that he
and his friend were almostcompletely alike; they had the same convictions,
the same hopes,and the same feelings about everything.
But after the war, their destinies took them in opposite directions.
Solzhenitsyn was thrown into prison with uncounted otherinnocent
Russians, gobbled into the unfathomable Soviet gulagmachinery. He
survived on a daily regimen of courage.
But what happened to his friend? He became one of the interrogators
who forced confessions out of innocent people by methods so vicious that
one cringes to read of them.
So we have two friends who loved each other, who felt as ifthey came
out of the same mold, and who were sure that theywould live out their lives
in the same useful way. But onebecomes his generation's eloquent example
of human courage.The other becomes a willing agent in an insane network
of hu-man brutality.
 Solzhenitsyn wondered how he and his friend could haveturned out so
differently from each other. But one thing hewould not believe. He would
not believe that he was a totallygood person and his friend was a totally evil
person. Solzhenitsyn knew himself too well.
So we find him saying that, if he had been in the wrong place,under the
wrong teachers, in the wrong circumstance, he couldhave ended up exactly
as his friend did.
Consider what he says while he wonders about the differencebetween
him and his former friend:
If only there were vile people . . . committing evil deeds, and it
wereonly necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
everyhuman being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it
is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shiftsto allow
enough space for good to flourish. One and the same humanbeing is, at
various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.
At times he is close to being a devil, at times tosainthood. But his name
doesn't change, and to that name we ascribethe whole lot, good and evil.
These, mind you, are the words of a man whose own character has
come, in our time, to incarnate simple human courageand uncorrupted
integrity.
I have a troubling habit of putting myself in the shoes ofpeople who do
wrong. When I read a true story about a villainwho does great harm to
people, 1 wonder what 1 might havedone had 1 been subject to the same
influences as he was. Takeslaveholders for instance, including those who
were cruelest totheir slaves. What if 1 had been a Georgia plantation
owner?Would 1 have had the moral sense to see how evil slavery was?
Idon't know for sure, but 1 suspect 1 would have done what mostother
white people did then.
When 1 am counseling a man who admits to having hurtsomeone he
loved, 1 put myself in his place and wonder whetherI would have done all
that much better than he did. And 1 knowin my heart that 1 may well have
done no better.
1 do not think 1 am being morbid. 1 think that 1 am remindingmyself
that much of my apparent virtue is nothing but good luckand the grace of
God. Put me in other circumstances, where tobe honest or courageous
requires a very high price, and 1 couldnot guarantee anyone that 1 would be
a hero.
We are all a mixed breed. We have both Jezebel and the Vir-gin Mary
inside our souls—all of us—and they are never farapart. So who are we to
believe that we are too innocent to forgive the person who is guilty of
hurting us?
Forgiving fits faulty folk. And we are all faulty. The best of usbelong to
that catholic club where nobody dares throw the firststone. For us to forgive
others, then, has a certain congruityabout it, a kind of fittingness, for the
mixed bag of vice andvirtue that we all are.
All this explains why Jesus was so tough on sinners who
150 / WHY FORGIVE?
refused to forgive other sinners. He saw the laughable incongruity of
people who need to be forgiven a lot turning their backs onpeople who need
a little forgiving from them.
He tells a story about a palace servant who was forgiven alarge debt; his
king forgave him a debt of ten thousand talents, asum it would take fifteen
years to pay off in labor. After he wasforgiven this enormous debt, the
servant met a man who owedhim a mere hundred denarii, a sum that could
be worked off ina day; the king's servant demanded every denarius. When
theking heard, he summoned the servant, took back his forgiveness, and
slapped him into servitude to work off the ten thousand talents to the last
denarius.
The story is about God and us. If we act like the unforgivingservant,
God will act like the king.
Jesus grabs the hardest trick in the bag—forgiving—and sayswe have to
perform it or we are out in the cold, way out, in theboondocks of the
unforgiven. He makes us feel like the miller'sdaughter who was told that if
she didn't spin gold out of a pile ofstraw before morning, she would lose her
head. And no Rum-plestiltskin is going to come and spin forgiving out of
our strawhearts. But why is Jesus so tough on us?
He is tough because the incongruity of sinners refusing toforgive sinners
boggles God's mind. He cannot cope with it;there is no honest way to put
up with it. ’
So he says: if you want forgiving from God and you cannotforgive
someone who needs a little forgiving from you, forgetabout the forgiveness
you want. Take away the eloquence ofKing James English and you get
Jesus saying something like this:if you refuse to forgive other people when
you expect to be forgiven, you can go to hell.
The gift of being forgiven and love's power to forgive are likeyin and
yang. Each needs the other to exist. To receive the giftwithout using the
power is absurd; it is like exhaling withoutinhaling or like walking without
moving your legs.
It is really a question of style. How do you usually respond topeople
who hurt you? Do you always go for the jugular? Do youplan revenge every
time someone treats you badly? Is gettingeven a way of life? If you never
even want to forgive, never eventry to remove a hateful memory and restore
a loving relationship,you are in a lot of trouble.
FORGIVING FITS FAULTY PEOPLE / 152
If you are trying to forgive; even if you manage forgiving infits and
starts, if you forgive today, hate again tomorrow, andhave to forgive again
the day after, you are a forgiver. Most of usare amateurs, bungling duffers
sometimes. So what? In thisgame nobody is an expert. We are all beginners.
Postlude
We have seen the unpredictable, outrageous, and creative thingwe do
when we forgive another human being.
We reverse the flow of seemingly irreversible history ... ofour own
history ... of our private painful history. We reversethe flow of pain that
began in the past when someone hurt us, aflow that filters into our present
to wound our memory and poi-son our future. We heal ourselves.
It is utterly unpredictable; no one could suspect, in the natureof things,
in the natural cause and effect of things, that anyoneshould ever forgive.
We perform a miracle that hardly anyone notices.
We do it alone; other people can help us, but when we finallydo it, we
perform the miracle in the private place of our innerselves.
We do it silently, no one can record our miracle on tape.
We do it invisibly, no one can record our mjracle on film.
We do it freely, no one can ever trick us into forgiving someone.
It is outrageous. When we do it we commit an outrage againstthe strict
morality that will not rest with anything short of aneven score.
It is creative: when we forgive we come as close as any humanbeing can
to the essentially divine act of creation. For we create anew beginning out
of past pain that never had a right to exist inthe first place. We create
healing for the future by changing apast that had no possibility in it for
anything by sickness anddeath.
When we forgive we ride the crest of love's cosmic wave; wewalk in
stride with God.
And we heal the hurt we never deserved.

lli

;
.
I
N

w ■ tJi •
I Ilk.
r

I
1
J
i
'I
v'Ji

'f :
j;
*
f
 V
t
«.
-•h
m
ij
I
i
r
ii
I
I
i
i
<
%
1
i
i
c
i
i
1
(continued from front flap)
your soul," Smedes explains. The rewards, he goeson, are profound: "It
is forgiveness that suppliesthe healing stream of the long-term tomorrows.
Ina world where life can be unbearably unfair, theonly power we have for
making it fairer is love'spower to heal our memory of the past and thenget
on with making things better for the lifeahead."
There has never been a book quite like FORGIVE& FORGET; your life
will be richer and more fulfilledonce you have read it and applied its easy-
to-understand, yet life-transforming principles, healing the suffering of a
short time or a lifetime andrealizing your own goals of peace and happiness.
Lewis B. Smedes is Professor of Theology and Ethicsat Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is the award-winning
author of ninepopular books, including How Can It Be All RightWhen
Everything Is All Wrong? and Mere Morality.Much in demand as a lecturer.
Dr. Smedes makeshis home in Sierra Madre, California, with his wifeand
three children.
Jacket design by Tony AgpoonJacket art by Craig Marshall
Photo ©1984 by John William Lund
Award-winning author Lewis B. Smedes shows howyou can achieve
peace of mind by learning thelessons of forgiveness. And, for the first time,
he introduces the four stages in the process of forgiveness—a process
everyone can apply to move fromhurting and hating to healing and
reconciliation.
HARPER &
 Table of Contents
Forgive and forget : healing the hurts we don't deserve
Table of Contents