Forgiveness is a Waterfall

Hello, dear reader! Thank you for being here. This week I’ve been thinking about forgiveness. Asking for it is the very first thing we do in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, before reading the appointed Psalm(s) and long before praying for our own needs and the needs of others.

Offering or accepting forgiveness, or even adopting the posture of considering it, feels like a powerful act in our current moment. Christians are called to it. Not least because Jesus gave himself for our salvation. We are promised forgiveness for our sins when we ask for it with true and contrite hearts. I love this response after we stand from kneeling: “The Almighty and merciful Lord grant us absolution and remission of all our sins, true repentance, amendment of life, and the grace and consolation of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Pretty amazing stuff to be granted for free every day! We can begin again each morning and evening with a clean slate (even more frequently if we need it). Also, amendment of life. What a perfect phrase. Not only a healing of our lives, repaired and transformed, but also a bettering, new-and-improved versions of our lives that have been re-considered in love and fixed or annotated accordingly. So each time we stand up from confessing our sins to God we are amended, restored, and brought closer to the perfected iteration of ourselves we were made to be.

Forgiveness. If we are offered it so freely, why is it so difficult to extend to others, and even at times to give to ourselves? This week at the end of yoga our teacher asked us to consider the people in our close circle, and to examine whatever things we still manage to hold against them, possibly after many years. What little grudge or irritation, or maybe something larger, have we been clinging to, and can we see that by holding it tightly, we’ve only done damage to ourselves? How can we begin to send forgiveness outward, while releasing the bitterness of the grievance’s hold on us?

It is a powerful practice. When we get the hang of it we can expand the circle outward, and begin to include distant friends, acquaintances, that annoying guy in the post office line who is not wearing a mask. It harms us to see the world this way, keeping tabs and judging someone taking more than her share of toilet paper from the common shelf. And of course there are many grievous harms that take much more work to forgive. More grace, more supernatural healing, more prayer.

I’m not suggesting we must roll over and accept injury or let ourselves be trampled on. I am suggesting we might consider, as Simone Weil so brilliantly said: “I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

I can’t get much further without throwing some Scripture into the mix:

Luke 17: 3-4 (NRSV)

³ Be on your guard! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. ⁴ And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.”

Matthew 18:21-22 King James Version (KJV)

²¹ Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? ²² Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Ephesians 4:31-32 (NIV)

 ³¹ Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. ³² Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

What does forgiveness require of us? A great deal of courage, and also humility. Just as we are more than (and different from) all the ways we think we know ourselves, so is every other person we encounter more than the tiny sliver of their actions and reactions we can know. How can we strive to treat the stranger, the friend, and even and especially the people nearest and dearest to us, with a fresh wonder and compassion, as the one who created them does? 

I like the image of forgiveness as a waterfall. Not only does it wash us clean with a powerful, at times turbulent force, it has many “trickle down” effects.

And I love this passage from With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen. (Thanks, Katie, for introducing this book to me!) 

“Compassion grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls that might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compassion you can say, ‘In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face and in the hands of the oppression I recognize my own hands…their capacity to forgive I find also in myself…In my heart, I know their yearning for love and down to my entrails, I can feel their cruelty. In another’s eyes I see my plea for forgiveness and in a hardened frown, I see my refusal…in the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share love and hate, life and death.”