Forgiveness - Part I

Forgiveness. It’s a homily topic that I hate. Yet, it is totally necessary. We hear it several times a year. Many passages in scripture speak of it and for good reason.

Lack of forgiveness dogged me most of my life. In worldly terms, I would be quite justified in holding onto my anger. That’s what made it even more difficult when I came to realize I had to forgive if I was to live a joyful existence. To forgive is counter-cultural.

I remember when I first started going back to Mass and I had to grit my teeth during the Our Father. I truthfully couldn’t say, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

But when I came back to the Church, I wasn’t going to do it by halves. If I was in then I was all in. The Real Presence, confession to another human, being pro-life in all cases, and believing everything the Church taught regarding sex – that was relatively simple to sort out. I was open, I read some books, I got some advice and OK, I get it. Actually, it was a bit (quite a bit!) more involved than that. But forgiving certain people who had nearly destroyed my life - God, Thy will is hard.

I knew I had to address this but I had no idea how. You don’t just say you forgive because it’s the Christian thing to do. You have to mean it. I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.

Everyone I knew in the church had lived sheltered lives. I thought then and still do, that if people knew my whole story, they would stop being friends with me. Oh, they’d be polite and all. But in their humanness, they would still see me as tainted and even infectious, as if my past sins could be caught like a disease.

I asked a priest about that once and his advice was that some things are proper knowledge to the people in our lives and some things are proper only to God. I get it. It’s too much of a burden for many people to know about the ugliness in life. I’ve had people confess things to me and I wish they hadn’t. Once you hear it you can’t unthink it or unsee it. It takes some very special, highly graced people to help heal others.

Once I figured out that healing and forgiveness go hand in hand, I was ready for it. I was tired of feeling terrible. Then I learned that it takes time. I am not a patient person so this was hard. If God wanted me to heal and God wanted me to forgive then why did I have to wait so long? For me, the best way to learn is not to throw me in the deep end. It’s to take incremental steps. God knew that.

I didn’t know my healing would start with a Divine Mercy conference but it did. Three years later I went to a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat. I had not had an abortion myself. Someone I knew had one and I will just say it had affected me and I could no longer speak to her and it was becoming an issue. It turned out that as much as I was affected by the abortion my real problem was unresolved feelings about my divorce.  They had some pretty astute counsellors at that retreat!

To be continued….