Let's talk forgiveness
Becoming our own liberators
Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu, wrote “The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World.” Awhile back I came across this book and immediately turned it into a sermon series at church. Walking with people through forgiveness is one of the most challenging and most profound things we can do.
The book’s description offers this insight: “Tutu's role as the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught him much about forgiveness. If you asked anyone what they thought was going to happen to South Africa after apartheid, almost universally it was predicted that the country would be devastated by a comprehensive bloodbath. Yet, instead of revenge and retribution, this new nation chose to tread the difficult path of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation.”
It’s one thing to learn about forgiveness, it’s quite another to learn about it from Desmond Tutu. For the next few weeks, let’s reflect on forgiveness here on The Thread. By the way, these reflections may name Jesus more directly than I typically do in this space. If you’re not a Jesus person, feel free to take what feels nourishing and leave the rest. I honor that we have readers here from many human spaces around the globe.
We begin with a helpful visual on the cycle we often find ourselves in and the choice we have to step out onto a new path of healing.
It’s a common experience in our home to have two beautiful, wonderful, sweet children fighting with each other over something very important about four times an hour on average. It could be about any number of important matters - like wanting the purple plate instead of the green plate, fighting for the Nintendo Switch when they don’t want their iPad, or this one from when they were little: “Brother, you wouldn’t hold my hand earlier on the stairs and it made me sad. So now I’m doing it to you. I’m not holding your hand.”
You know the feeling when there’s tension and conflict in the space between two people. It doesn’t feel good. We want it to resolve. But we also have lots of other feelings mixed in there. “They hurt me! They should apologize first! I want them to hurt like I do. I’ll just wait until they make the first move. I can hold a grudge for a loooooong time.”
With our children, we let them know they can apologize when they feel ready. It doesn’t usually last too long. I ask them if they’re ready to start over. And I watch their little shoulders sink and see the relief cross their face. Grace. Forgiveness. Letting the other person off the hook. Letting ourselves off the hook for making a mistake.
Powerful stuff. We just want to start over.
Desmond Tutu writes in The Book of Forgiving, “Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world. We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts. The process is simple, but it is not easy.” As we remove one brick at a time from the walls we’ve built around our hearts, let us not be afraid of what awaits us. It might simply be freedom.
Let’s reflect a moment on the story of Jesus, some stones, mirrors, why we might want to forgive, what forgiveness is not and what it is.
There’s a story of a woman who breaks many cultural rules in her day and one common punishment is stoning. She’s brought in front of a crowd and Jesus is there with her. He turns to some leaders and asks whoever hasn’t messed up in life to throw the first stone. One by one they hightail it out of there. The woman is both forgiven and encouraged to move in a new direction with her life.
Jesus is holding up a mirror to people as if to say, “Okay folks. May all the perfect people step up and take the first throw.” One by one by one, people turn and walk away.
How do you feel about mirrors? Do you like what you see when you look in one? Do you quickly avert your eyes? There have been seasons in my life where I looked into my eyes and only saw fuzzy clouds. It was a rough season where I was clearly avoiding parts of myself. Then there are seasons I’ve looked into my eyes and seen deep, calm and clear waters. There’s nothing to fear inside. Even in my inner chaos. With Love, it all belongs and is welcomed.
When it comes to forgiveness, Love holds up a mirror to each of us and says, “Are you perfect? If so, go ahead, withhold forgiveness. Don’t let them off the hook. Make them pay. Make them feel the hurt and pain they caused you.” And one by one, we turn and walk away. For we are not perfect. We hurt others just as they hurt us.
Why would we want to forgive people who’ve hurt us? The anger runs deep. It’s built up over time. They don’t deserve grace - being let off the hook, we want revenge, retaliation, we want them to hurt like they hurt us. It’s incredibly hard to forgive people.
Tony Miltenberger puts it this way: “Forgiveness means restoration and more often than not I want to be justified more than I want to be restored.”
Some of you may be motivated to consider forgiveness when we are reminded by many medical and psychological studies that show an increased risk for anxiety, depression, insomnia, high blood pressure, ulcers, migraines, backaches, heart attacks, & cancer when we hang on to anger and resentment. When we live in a constant state of stress, we can damage our hearts, our bodies and our soul.
Yes, we should want to forgive people. But sometimes we have assumptions about forgiveness that aren’t quite true.
Forgiveness is not…
Forgiveness is not saying it’s okay that they hurt you.
It’s not waiting for them to admit, confess or apologize. That day may never come.
It’s not eliminating consequences or preventing justice.
It’s not forgetting what happened.
It’s not necessarily reconciliation.
It is not dependent on the actions of others.
Once we clear up some of that, then we might be curious about what forgiveness really is. I often think forgiveness happens once the other person has said they’ve wronged me. But not really.
Forgiveness means setting people free. Rob Bell says it this way, “Forgiveness is setting people free all over the place and realizing you’re one of them.”
Forgiveness is a process. Something we enter into. Sometimes we do this quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time.
Forgiving is passing along to others what you have received. Someone has let you off the hook at some point. You messed up and they could have held that over you for years, but they didn’t. Now it’s your opportunity to pass that along to someone who has wronged you.
And this may mean forgiving yourself. Letting yourself off the hook. Some of us are harder on ourselves than anyone else could ever be.
The good news is there’s an art to letting yourself and others off the hook. It’s a muscle we can strengthen.
Tutu reminds us, Forgiveness is easier to practice when we realize no person will always stand in the camp of perpetrator or victim. In some situations we have been harmed, and in others we have harmed. Sometimes in arguments with people we love, we occupy both camps in the same conversation!”
There's a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: “Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father.” On Saturday 800 Pacos showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their fathers.
Desmond Tutu describes it this way: You can say, “I am willing to forgive you for stealing my pen, and after you give me my pen back, I shall forgive you.” This is the most familiar pattern of forgiveness. In this understanding, forgiveness is something we offer to another, a gift we bestow upon someone, but it is a gift that has strings attached. -- The strings become the chains that bind us to the person who harmed us. The perpetrator holds the key to those chains.
“I will not speak to you until you say you are sorry!” one child will rage. An older sibling, thinking the demand unfair and unjustified, refuses to apologize. The two remain locked together in a battle of wills bound by mutual resentment. The older child can apologize or the younger can decide to forgo the apology and forgive unconditionally.
Unconditional forgiveness is a different model of forgiveness than the gift with strings. This is forgiveness as a grace, a free gift freely given. In this model, forgiveness frees the person who inflicted the harm from the weight of the victim’s whim— what the victim may demand in order to grant forgiveness— and the victim’s threat of vengeance. But it also frees the one who forgives.
Ultimately, forgiveness is a choice we make, and the ability to forgive others comes from the recognition that we are all flawed and all human. We all have made mistakes and harmed others. We will again. We find it easier to practice forgiveness when we can recognize that the roles could have been reversed. Each of us could have been the perpetrator rather than the victim. Each of us has the capacity to commit the wrongs against others that were committed against us.
Beloved ones, as we journey deep into the heart of forgiveness, you are invited to reflect on a relationship in your life where there’s some forgiveness work to do. There’s some hurt. Things happened that can’t be undone. Someone is holding a grudge. This week, I genuinely invite you to spend a little time thinking about the relationship. Is this a thread you want to explore? Just know - a resurrection may be waiting for you on the other side.
Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness; that person will be our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberators. We don’t forgive to help the other person. We don’t forgive for others. We forgive for ourselves. So that we can be free.
Forgiveness is setting someone free. And realizing it’s you.
Thank you, Jenny. I think a lot about how helpful it would be to have a Truth and Reconciliation process in our country and I appreciate the insight into Desmond Tutu's path for that. I just finished listening to a great podcast episodes about understanding and repairing harm too that I'll add to the conversation. It's Miriame Kaba on Prentiss Hemphill's podcast: Harm, Punishment, and Abolition. https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s2e12
I've really struggled with forgiveness in recent years. This post was incredibly helpful to me, incredibly encouraging. Just what I've needed.