What if I Cannot Forgive?

“Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.” 

This quotation (which has been attributed to various people including Confucius, George Herbert and Thomas Fuller) always makes me wonder about the different groups of people who feel unable to forgive.

Firstly, obviously, are people who have been victims of horrific abuse.  Perhaps you are deeply traumatised by having been raped as a child by an adult you were supposed to trust and respect.  Perhaps you never dared tell anyone, or perhaps you told and no-one believed you.  So when you finally talk to a counsellor who does believe you, then if the counsellor says, ‘Well, you’ll have to forgive your abuser, otherwise you’ll go to hell,’ then this can be as traumatic as the original abuse.  Sometimes, counsellors have even argued that if you truly forgive your abuser, you won’t go to the police and give evidence to get them imprisoned to stop them from abusing other people.

Then there are people who feel that it is not their place to forgive.  For example, if your child was murdered by a serial killer, or your grandparents were murdered in Hitler’s concentration camps, you may feel that you do not have the right to forgive, since you were not the person killed.  And we can’t know what the dead person thinks about the situation and whether they forgive their killer.

But in addition to those who feel too angry or grief-stricken to forgive, there are also those who won’t allow themselves to feel angry.  A friend of mine copes with his experience of having been abused as a child by taking the view that there is no such thing as ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, no such thing as ‘experiences that a child should not have suffered’, because, since he did experience them, then this was simply part of nature, and neither good nor bad. 

As he puts it, ‘You wouldn’t call a lion a murderer for killing another lion’s cubs, and you wouldn’t call a cloud an unjust cloud for raining on you, so why should we think of humans any differently?’  He himself would never behave in a violent way, because he doesn’t want to, but he doesn’t see anything wrong in other people behaving violently to him.  Then, if there is no judgement, then there can be acceptance, but not exactly forgiveness, at least as most Christians would understand it.

This friend takes a pantheistic, impersonal view of God, but in the past I have come to a similar position from a fundamentalist Christian starting point.  This happens by assuming, ‘Whatever I read in the Bible means whatever it looks to me at first glance as if it means, and that means God is saying it to me and it is non-negotiable.’

So, I started off by reading that Jesus said, ‘Do not judge, or you will be judged,’, and taking this to mean that I must not judge that anything that anyone has said or done to me is wrong.  Therefore, if someone said to me, ‘You’re a waste of space,’ I wasn’t allowed to judge that this statement was untrue.  (Technically, by the same logic I shouldn’t have judged that it was true and therefore that I must believe that I ought not to exist, but I ignored this.)

However, I knew that Jesus also said, ‘if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.’  So, to me, this implied that we were not allowed to judge that anyone had sinned, therefore were not allowed to forgive them, therefore were not allowed to be forgiven, therefore would go to hell.

So, there are all kinds of people who cannot forgive because of various responses to trauma.  But equally, what about when we simply feel at peace?  If we don’t feel anger and hurt at anyone, who is there for us to forgive?  And if we don’t feel particularly guilty about anything right now, do we have to scratch around in our memories searching for something to apologise for and ask God to forgive us, and then rummage around some more trying to find something to forgive someone else for, in order to earn God’s forgiveness?

I think the problem is that we start at the wrong end when we assume that the relationship between humans and God is primarily that of defendants before a judge, and that God may give or withhold forgiveness, and may (ironically) offer us forgiveness only conditionally, in return for our forgiving other people un-conditionally.  With this model, the best we can hope for from God is that he might refrain from punishing us.

I think a better way of looking at it is to say, simply: God is love.  God loves all of us, always, no matter what we do.  Loving us does not mean that he always likes the way we behave.  But it does mean that he values us, and cares for us, and wants the best for us.

So, if you live in harmony with the way God loves, then you will love those God loves: yourself and other people, including your enemies.  So, even if you don’t like what people have done for you, you want the best for them – and for everyone else, not just your enemies. 

So, you might work to get someone who has abused you sent to prison, perhaps because you consider that it is in their best interests not to be hurting people any more, but surely because it is in the interests of other people not to be in danger from this person.  But at the same time, if you love your enemy, you pray for them, and accept that God loves them and wants them to be saved, and therefore that you may well meet them in heaven.

But forgiveness is not the most important thing we need, or the most important thing that God can give us.  It is simply an attribute of God’s love: the way God’s love shows itself in relation to sin.

When the sun’s light falls on trees or grass that absorb the red and blue frequencies of light, what we see reflected is green.  But this does not mean that the sun is green, only that green-ness is part of what is available in the sun’s light.  And the sun’s brightness is no less real whether it falls on green grass

or white snow which reflects its whole light.

Okay, this parable isn’t a very precise allegory, since green-ness is the part of the light that the leaf doesn’t want, rather than the parts that it needs.  But this in itself should probably be a lesson to me against reading Jesus’s parables too precisely as detailed allegories.  So it’s probably best just to conclude: God is love.