THE MOST DIFFICULT FORGIVENESS OF ALL

The first servant expresses genuine remorse and good intentions. He is forgiven his debt by his king. That same servant then refuses to forgive a fellow indebted to him, dispatching him to prison instead. He chose the path of retribution rather than compassion. When the king learned of this deed, he summoned the first servant, scolding him for not showing mercy to others as was offered to him, then sent him off to torture until he could repay his debt. Note the words of Jesus in the last clear, direct, and unequivocal line of this Gospel passage: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

Jesus establishes the link. He reveals the connection between God’s forgiving us and us finding enough mercy in our hearts to forgive those who sin against us. The Lord’s word took on flesh when, as He hung on the Cross, He forgave the thief hanging next to Him, promising instead unending life in the Kingdom of Mercy.  The theologian Jurgen Moltmann, in his book The Crucified God, observes: “The sinless one who bore the weight of all human sin, forgives a sinner, thus revealing the redemptive power of mercy and compassion.”

It is forgiveness and mercy that redeems us, justifies us, and points to a path that consummately rejects retribution, resentment, and vengeance.  His stern promise that unless we forgive our brothers and sisters from our hearts (meaning totally, without reserve) we will suffer the inevitable fate of the heartless – isolation from God, the punishing feeling of abject shame, and the chilling wind of a hell that, sadly, is of our own making.  Such is the power of forgiveness. Yet while we can reasonably understand God’s forgiving us and us forgiving our offending brothers and sisters, there is a forgiveness that is even more challenging, heard about rarely, and for many of us, seems totally out of reach – the forgiveness of ourselves. 

The North American martyr, St. Peter the Aleut, concisely expressed this challenge when he said: “If God does not condemn me because He has forgiven me, then why should I continue to condemn myself for the same sin of which He has forgiven me?  In this sense, refusal to forgive oneself is nothing less than refusal to accept the forgiveness of God.”

No matter to what degree or however serious or slight it may be, why is it so difficult for us to forgive ourselves?  As challenging as forgiving another is for us, why does showing mercy to ourselves present such a mountain to climb?  The answers to these questions are not only oftentimes puzzling for us, they speak to painful realities within us that you and I often find tough to look at, to “get our arms around,” – ultimately, to face and to own.  They are the realities of sin in our hearts, the sting of guilt and perhaps even the spiritual paralysis of shame.  Ultimately, it is the gut feeling of the “unbelievability” of God’s mercy, tenderness and compassion for us. It is as if we are saying “God being compassionate to ME? Impossible! I know what I have done in my life!”

Fr. George Morelli, an Orthodox priest and professional psychologist, points out the following: “Among all God’s actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and end of His dealing with us. May I add this should be the beginning and end of our relationships with all mankind and with ourselves,  in which we are all made in God’s image. Those who have offended most egregiously and performed the most horrific of offenses, and we ourselves who miss the mark and fall into sin, are to be loved the most. In this same spirit we have to be reconciled in love to those whom we have offended and to our offending selves.”

At its heart, to forgive ourselves as God has already forgiven us, is to embrace what might be called a “spirituality of imperfection.”  To deny our imperfection is to disown ourselves, for it is human to be imperfect. We cannot always reach the ideal or realize a personal utopia within us. Our lives won’t always feel perfect, all together, or immune to the lesser angels of our nature.  This is because we share the heritage of the Ancestral sin of our spiritual parents  so familiar to us from the Book of Genesis. The good news is that there is hope for us to move (or crawl!) out of this inability to forgiveness ourselves.

In the Sayings of the Fathers, a compendium of the spiritual teachings of the ascetic holy ones of the Church’s first centuries, we read: “A brother said to Abba Poemen, ‘If I fall into shameful sin, my conscience devours and accuses me saying: ‘Why have you fallen?’ The old monk said to him “At the moment when a man goes astray, if he says “I have sinned.”…..the sin ceases.”  This echoes the teaching of St. Macarius the Great when he says: “The weakness within us that causes us to sin is beneficial, because it assures that we must toil, and struggle, and sweat to cause change in our heart. That struggle is, itself, a great sign of our personal virtue.”

From darkness emerges the light. From our resignation to the feeling that God’s mercy has passed us by, comes hope. From our self-directed hate and guilt because of our own sinfulness or sinful acts, emerges the truth that “the physician has come for the sick, for the well have no need of Him. I have come not to call the righteous but sinners to perfection.” (Mark 2:17)
Our inability to forgive ourselves originates out of our thinking that God simply could never forgive me, that my sin is too ugly and offensive to deserve Divine mercy, and that we are cursed to spend our days strung up between two extremes: being a total reprobate on the one hand, or living a life of total perfection on the other.  We will never find genuine peace of soul in that terrifying place.  As St. Augustine, who himself was certainly no stranger to sin, said: “In media stat virtus.” – in the middlelies the strength.

Believing that we ourselves are forgiven means finding that middle ground. As the old monk told the younger monk, you and I must open our eyes to our sin and own it – without fear, or dread. We must “name” it, in the Hebraic sense, and therefore acquire power and influence over it rather than surrender to it as the controlling force in our lives. We must try with all our might to disentangle our emotional and psychological woundedness from the Christian truth that Christ came precisely because the human person is imperfect, spiritually vulnerable, and ever engaged in an internal unseen warfare that pulls him or her in a myriad of directions.

Christ is the physician we are the patients.  The Holy Mystery of Confession is not a courtroom or judgment seat, it is an experience of healing, it is a therapeutic encounter with Divine Mercy.  All this is to say that God is aware that we are imperfect – yet loves us still.  The challenge for us is not only to forgive others, but to find enough mercy in our hearts to forgive ourselves.  It is only then that we will experience the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. (Read Romans 8:14-23)

Be good and merciful to yourself. Keep in mind that the reason for forgiving yourself for your sins and spiritual foibles, is because your soul, in its deepest place, craves it. St. Nicholas Cabasilas in the 14^th century reminds us: “The soul thirsts for the infinite. The eye searches for light, the ear searches for sounds, everything searches for its end and purpose. The searching of the soul is to thrust itself toward Christ – the All-Merciful One.” May each of you feel that tender mercy every day!

Faithfully in the Merciful Lord,
Fr. Dimitrios