Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 17: Forgive Someone

Okay, I’m back in the saddle. It really is not that I haven’t been doing the daily disciplines through the past week, I just haven’t found (or made) the time to write about them. I still prayed the paper, read Psalm 139, and did some reading about human trafficking.

Today, though, the task is to forgive someone.

I have a lot of questions about this discipline, especially as it relates to doing it this very day. How does one go about forgiving someone? Do they have to know I have forgiven them? Do they have to know they need my forgiveness, or is forgiveness something that rests only with me regardless of their awareness? How will I know the forgiveness ‘worked’? Isn’t forgiveness a process that will probably take more than a day?

When I think about forgiveness, I recall a couple years ago the astonishing and quite public example of forgiveness that an Amish community in Pennsylvania provided. It was so provocative and compelling that if you Google the words ‘amish forgiveness’ the event is still what comes up for the first 2 or 3 pages of the search results. Not a definition, not a description or how-to, but this example and the multiple articles and YouTube videos about the school shooting and the Amish community’s seeming ability to overcome it.

We were captivated by it, all of us.  Sure, some shook their heads and dismissed it as idiotic.  Many of us, however, marveled.  What would it take? To forgive enough to go to the funeral – the celebration of life – for the man who killed your child, what would it take? I don’t know that I have it in me.

Recently, however, I read “Pastrix: the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint” by Nadia Bolz-Weber (the author of the disciplines I am doing through Lent). In it she writes a chapter that centers around forgiveness and she says this, “In the end, if we are not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them. It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected t mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all.  It just keeps us chained.”

There is an Ancient Near Eastern saying that goes, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become like them.” Maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about when he invited us to forgive not 7 times, but 7 times 70. Maybe forgiveness changes a relationship so that the thing that connects two parties is not the harm, but can be something different. Maybe forgiveness is as much setting yourself free as it is about setting the other one free.

So, today I am trying to let go of the chain. I am trying to release myself from a desire (even if it is a small, just-under-the-surface-but-pokes-its-head-up-every-so-often desire) for vengeance and retaliation. Perhaps then it won’t catch me off guard.

God of life, help me not to let past hurts define me. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen