I was talking with a friend the other day about how little time I actually spend connecting with people from my past.
I don’t really talk much to people from high school; I occasionally connect with people from college; they’re a few people from seminary, none from the school of social work, a couple from my doctoral program and very few from churches I’ve served.
It’s not that I don’t care or that there’s something traumatic about those spaces, it’s more that I like to think of myself as a person who looks to tomorrow as I try and navigate today.
It takes real effort for me to look backwards at my life.
If I’m honest, it’s embarrassing to see who I was. The missteps, miscues, and misfires of my youth and young adulthood seem much more real than the accomplishments, accolades, and actualities of who I was.
It has to do with contrast. The person I am today is so much different than the person I was in each of those seminal moments that it’s hard to want to remember. It’s even harder to reconcile the person in the mirror because they feel like foreign fuzzy filtered images.
To tell the truth, it’s hard sometimes to forgive myself for who I was, what I said, and how I acted. And honestly, most of it was ignorance and lack of effort to learn, know, and do better.
And so, I find myself believing I’m happier with who I am today (though still a long way off from who I could be), and I look upon those previous selves as embarrassingly incomplete. And, as much as I want to reconcile these various versions of myself in process, the effort needed to do so seems to outweigh the benefits.
Even as I write those words, I know they are a lie.
There’s a relief we feel when forgiveness happens. It doesn’t really matter if we are one’s on the forgiving or receiving end.
There’s a pressure or tension that gets released a little bit; our shoulders feel lighter, our heads a little clearer, our bodies relax some.
We simply can’t underestimate the impact that a real sense of forgiveness can have on our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual lives. And yet, we often just don’t do it.
Why?
If I only had an answer to that question. I do have some thoughts though…
Culturally, I think we don’t forgive because the start-up costs are too high and there’s no clear return on the investment of time and effort. Plus, we’re motivated by our grudges and perceived slights. If we were to remedy those tensions, then what do we have left to prove?
Physically, forgiveness implies letting go of our rage and anger. Those two emotions are the source of so much of our sense of power in the world. If I’m angry, then people pay attention to me, and that attention is power. Forgiving means letting go of some of that coercive power.
When I hold back my forgiveness, I can control the emotions and mental aspects of an experience. I can contain its power over me by exerting power over the memory. I can also exert power over another by withholding any possibility for their relief.
Spiritually, I’m not sure what we derive from withholding forgiveness. Is it that we become godlike in our capacity to control the world around us? Are we seeking to be the controlling center of the world we inhabit?
Forgiveness requires relationality, which is inherently chaotic and uncontrollable.
Forgiveness begs us to think and act in dialogical ways toward mutual understanding and relationship. It requires us to imagine a world and an experience beyond coercion and power over another.
And, that is really difficult to do.
If I can control the past versions of myself, then I can control their influence and impact on the present (which is bullshit).
Their true impact is felt in relating to them. Allowing myself to see who I was also allows me to be who I am. Yes, there is lament in contrast. There is grief and frustration and anger as well.
But it is only because I can see and experience the difference now that these memories are so vivid. To excise them, cancel them, is to stop growing. It is to arrest change, development, and formation. It is to cease being me.
And, that, I think, is the power of forgiveness. It restores and reconciles an experience, allowing it to be incorporated rather than canceled.
While we can point to the relief we feel through the process of forgiveness, it’s really the restoration that matters. We begin to resurrect a sense of the whole of who we are when we can forgive. Without it, there are just parts.
Compartmentalized,
Fragmented,
Self-contained bubbles of experience
That are never really incorporated into who we are.
As a result, we become fragmented. We worry that if we forgive there won’t be justice. But, isn’t justice about restoration?
Or, do we buy the American way of thinking instead? That justice is only found in punishment and retribution. That forgiveness is weakness because it takes away our power to coerce
Restoration comes at its own price, but it begins with relationships rather than rules. It requires us to remember beyond what we can control and coerce.
Forgiveness is relational, it’s also fundamental to our ability to change and grow. In it we find that our power to affect is derived from our ability to listen and experience with the world rather than control it.
Restoration
Dude, that's seriously good honesty and reflection