Forgiveness Challenge Day 5: What Holds Us Back?

"I would like to share with you two simple truths:  there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one undeserving of forgiveness."  -Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving:  The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. 

The book arrived in the mail yesterday, and I've just started reading it.  I'm only on page 3 of the Introduction and already I am inspired.  How could the people of South Africa have chosen the path of forgiveness in light of the atrocities that had happened to them?

The past two days in the Forgiveness Challenge we have looked at the things that hold us back from forgiveness.  Things like thinking the other person needs to apologize, thinking that people who forgive are weak, thinking that forgiving means condoning or forgetting or letting people off the hook. 

I agree with Bishop Tutu that there is no one undeserving of forgiveness.  I believe it with all my heart.  Every human being is created by God in the image of God and every human being is beloved of God.  If you never hear me say anything else, hear me say that.  What frustrates me is that as deeply as I hold that belief, I still find it difficult to forgive when harm has been done to me.  What I realized today is that most of the people who have harmed me in my life have not done so intentionally.  I have blessedly not been a victim of malicious violence.  Most of the people who have hurt me are broken or sick or simply more interested in getting their needs met than in helping me meet mine.  Or they used methods that might have been helpful to others but were harmful to me because of who I am.

These people are most definitely deserving of forgiveness.  And in this moment sitting by myself in my home, I forgive them.  I do.  They were doing their best at the time.  We all do things that hurt others and I, for one, hope that those I've hurt will forgive me.

Where the problem comes is when I then see or deal with these people again or with new ones who hurt me, and all my loving, forgiving thoughts fly out the window as my stomach tightens into knots and my pulse races and my face gets hot, and I will the ground to open up and swallow me.  Or I have conversations in my head and yell at the people.  Or I stutter and stammer and have no ability to be natural and loving because I'm so angry or scared that I can't look past my own feelings.

I want to learn how to get from thinking I have forgiven to actual forgiveness.  With God's help, I will.

Forgiveness Challenge

When I was in seminary we read Desmond Tutu's book, No Future Without Forgiveness, in one of my theology classes.  It was one of my favorite books from my time in seminary.  Sadly, reading it showed what a poor global citizen I am/was because I knew so little about what had happened during apartheid in South Africa.  It was quite a learning for me.  What caught my attention and changed me, though, was reading about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  My professor told me not to idealize the situation there and explained that all was not sweetness and light in the aftermath of the TRC process.  No process is without flaws.  What astounded me was that it was even tried at all and that some amount of healing came out of it. 

On Saturday as I was preparing to preach about Doubting Thomas, I saw a post on a friend's timeline on FaceBook about a 30-Day Forgiveness Challenge sponsored by Archbishop Tutu and his daughter, Mpho.  Together they have written a book called, The Book of Forgiving: the Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World.  I can't wait to read it.  The Tutus know about forgiveness and they have  wisdom to share.  As I understand it, people who sign up for the challenge will receive an email each of the 30 days with stories, exercises, interviews, etc.  I signed up.

This time when I preached the story from John's gospel about Jesus' appearance to his disciples sans Thomas, I paid close attention to what Jesus said to them.  "As the Father has sent me, so I send you...  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.  If you retain the sins of any, they are retained."  Jesus sent them out to forgive.  That's what he did.  He forgave.  That's what he sent them to do.  That's what he calls his followers to do now. 

I struggle with forgiveness.  I love to talk about it, think about it, hear stories about it.  When I'm faced with actually engaging in it, though, I become uncomfortable, often preferring to nurse my wounds or resentments rather than do the hard work of letting them go.  I also struggle with forgiving too easily, before I've really done the hard work, saying that I've forgiven, but I haven't.  There's a decision to forgive and then there's the actual process of forgiving. 

I am hopeful that I will learn through this 30-day challenge.  I love that it's taking place during the Easter season.  Last year for Lent I chose to do a forgiveness practice in which I wrote down 40 names of people I needed to forgive on slips of paper.  Each morning I drew out a name and prayed for that person, examining my feelings of hurt or resentment and asking myself if I was ready to let them go.  This 30-day challenge seems to be the perfect follow up to the Lenten discipline, and an ideal practice for Easter when we remember that Jesus didn't rise from the dead to condemn the world but to forgive.  What would it be like to have a little less condemnation and judgment in the world and a whole lot more forgiveness?

I want to do my part.  Will you join me?