Unforgettable (12.11.24)

That's why darling, it's incredible.

It is written that “love keeps no record of wrongs”. But we hold fast to our sense of injury when we are wronged. I am no stranger to it, having endured racist taunts (just last week: “China China!”), unprovoked violence (shoved into the closet wall in 5th grade), and betrayal (a friend declining to take my side so as to accrue status with my antagonist). I do not solicit your sympathy; others, including you, have endured far worse. I recite them as indicators of our common experience: of the outrage, indignation, and pain we feel when we are hurt, intentionally or not, by others.

We are taught that it is healthy to “forgive and forget”. And indeed it is. Harboring resentment often hurts you more than the target of your anger. They have perhaps moved on, but you are still stuck here, frozen in place, nursing thoughts of vengeance, hoping for their comeuppance. In holding fast, you allow them to hurt you again and again, the original harm multiplied in the relentlessness of the reliving. If forgiveness is not easy, forgetting is nearly impossible. It is one thing to let go of the pain clutched in your clenched fist. It is another to fully wipe away its memory. For deep cuts leave scars: on trees, on flesh, and especially in hearts.

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But there is always another side. If you are the one who has wronged, and you regret the pain you have caused, you are also burdened: with guilt for your action, shame for your behavior, and self-loathing for your failing. These are also destructive. When your inner voice turns negative, you shun good things and tolerate unwarranted hurt because you feel you are undeserving. What your heart truly craves is to be set free through the forgiveness of the one you have wronged. But the nature of such chains is that they cannot be worked off, much as we may try.

Most of us need both to forgive and to be forgiven, but our desire to reset can feel futile. Where then, does hope come from?

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The word “grace” means “unmerited favor”. Forgiveness is a grace. It is a gift, painfully borne, and painfully given, by the person wronged. It should not be given cheaply, but it is sometimes clung to dearly. We resist giving this grace because to forgive is to love the undeserving. But if they were deserving, would it not be entitlement, rather than love? Such is the dilemma.

Christmas comes later this month. For some, it is a controversial holiday. It has become so because of the many who have ruinously clasped at its ideals with clumsy hands and tainted hearts — that is to say, Christians. Still, it provides a profound basis for the very difficult grace of forgiving and forgetting to be accomplished. If you are grappling with this, it might help to know that your pain can be transferred — that in choosing to forgive, or in remaining unforgiven, you can release your pain to another, one who has borne our iniquities and carried our sorrows.

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-J/Isa 53:4