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Quote of the Day: Forgiveness Is an Act of Will
“Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.” — Corrie Ten Boom
All of us can recall times in our lives when we’ve been wronged. Whether a hurt happened to us as a child, teenager, or adult, the pain can stay with us. We may have found it difficult, even impossible, to forgive the person who harmed us. Since the pain remains, we assume we are righteous in our anger and may refuse to let go of the incident.
As Corrie Ten Boom* suggests, we might have our strategy backward: to heal, we need to make the decision, the commitment, to let go of the hurt, not so much for the benefit of the other person, but to liberate ourselves; we may never free ourselves from the memory if we wait for our hearts to mend first. Our resentment feeds the hurt; even the mention of the other person’s name can feel like a stab to our hearts. So, if we wait for the pain to vanish to offer forgiveness, we may have a very long wait.
Instead, we can make the choice to be free. We commit to letting go of the hurt, even if the memory stays with us. We also must remember that these recoveries don’t happen overnight; mending one’s heart takes courage, and may take a very long time.
Ultimately, though, if our commitment to forgiveness is genuine, we are on the path to freedom and wholeness. At times we may feel that we’ve relapsed into our anger, that meeting our goal is impossible. We just need to swallow another dose of courage and remind ourselves that we forgive others for our own healing, not because they ask us to forgive them. If they do ask us to, we will be further along on the path to redemption.
Once we commit to the “act of will” to forgive, the heart will follow.
*Corrie Ten Boom was qualified from her life experience to speak about forgiveness. For a two-minute video on her life:
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Published in Group Writing
Sorry this took so long.
The concept of and the reality of forgiveness is God’s doing, and it came form His mind. It did not come first into existence from the mind of Man, but from the mind of God.
Emulate means, in the way I use it here at least, to act in accordance with, or to do the same as you’ve seen done.
Forgiveness, as I use it here, is a debt, obligation, or penalty. One who sins is under penalty from God, and secondarily from the one he sinned against. Forgiveness is the erasure of this penalty.
God forgives man based on repentance, not just repentance for specific sins, but for the fundamental sin of not believing God. I believe that Adam, perhaps when seeing that Eve did not immediately die from eating the forbidden fruit, no longer believed God’s words that he would die if he ate it, though he knew that God told him otherwise. Similarly Abraham believed God and God counted this as righteousness.
The debt that is paid is death, the penalty for sin. God thought of forgiveness as an acceptable substitute for carrying out the penalty, if the sinner is repentant. But God’s justice must be upheld and cannot be waved (Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty) so the LORD* Himself in the Second Person of the Trinity (the Word or the Son)** willingly suffered an undeserved death which the First Person of God (the Father)*** accepted as substitute payment for the deserved death of all members of humanity who have repented in the past or ever will repent.
*(The LORD is God, of one single essence, the single, timeless, all-powerful Being, called the Triune God or the Trinity because He manifests Himself in three separate Persons)
**(existing for eternity past as the Word of God, and in ancient times appeared to man as The Angel of the LORD)
*** (also identified as LORD the Father)
Which is it? The debt or the erasure?
He says while conversing with a Jew and a (small-u) unitarian.
You obviously know what I meant.
Yes, but when the Martians invade and you are our last hope to convince them that we are thinking beings, I want to ensure you represent us well. 😁
Ari, you know as well as I that Martians are punks. They use scrounged Forerunner technology that they can’t even repair. That’s why they got stuck at Roswell.
All they have is an near limitless supply of peutonium — which it why Trump is frantically pushing that Space-X mission. To beat the China.
Late to the party here, but I’m just going to point out that penal substitutionary atonement, as laid out here, is not at all how many Christians understand the crucifixion. This is an understanding that the Eastern Orthodox have never shared, in no small part because sin itself is not understood as somehow being a debt to the Father.
Thank you for raising this issue, @skipsul; I meant to address it with @flicker earlier and I got sidetracked.
I agree with you. G-d limited our lives rather than making us immortal, but not because of sin. I believe he did it because He believed that human beings don’t benefit from living thousands of years. Mortality tells us to make the best of our lives, knowing that our lives are limited in length. We have a short time to be the best people we can be, serving others and serving G-d.
Corrie continued to preach and evangelize for the rest of her life, but in terms of forgiveness there is one incident that stands out. I’m going to paraphrase this a bit badly, and perhaps others can correct or elaborate. She was speaking one evening on her experiences, on forgiveness, and on faith, when she recognized someone in the crowd. Images flashed before her of a prison camp guard, one who had been quite rough with both her and especially her sister Betsie. It was the same man in the crowd. Though she thought she had indeed forgiven all that she and her family had endured, the anger and the pain were again vividly alive in her. The man came up to her, his identity was in no doubt, and it was clear that he recognized her too. He had come to ask her forgiveness, and to her surprise she gave it.
A key part of forgiveness is recognizing that often times we are not the only victims, and that those who have wronged us have themselves been wronged too – maybe by us, maybe by others. To be made to work as a prison camp guard was to be also dehumanized and made to be a brute.
One of my mother’s favorite sayings about her mother is, “Well, she had a mother, too.” Apparently, that woman was even worse.
The situation that is being debated between “forgiveness researchers” like Flicker and myself and then Arahant’s viewpoint partially involves the idea that if someone hurts an individual, and if then that individual – who is the victim – wishes to release themselves from the anger, the resentment, and the hatred they may be consumed by, is that forgiveness?
To me, unless the matter involves some type of compassion for the perpetrator, that process should be called “letting go” as it doesn’t seem to involve much at all related to the other person.
That doesn’t mean that “letting go” is not a good thing to do. And it could also be a pivotal activity that leads to actual forgiveness.
JRR Tolkien, in they mythology undergirding his writings, refers to Death as the “gift of Illuvatar” (Illuvatar being one his world’s names for the Almighty). He does not elaborate much on this, save to hold it in contrast to the immortality of the elves within the bounds of creation – the elves have their own issues, but men are at least released from the world. JRRT did explore this further in his unpublished works, though never to his own satisfaction. But he was trying to express that with immortality in this world, all would in time fall, making death a release.
There are things I know about my grandmother…
My priest instructs that we should pray for those who wronged us, but not in the sense that we pray they “see the light” or whatnot, but that we pray for them, period. And if we still are holding on to our wounds, then we pray we learn to forgive, for to be unable to forgive is to also be unable to repent.
And I have observed over the years that we all do love to hold onto our wounds, our sacred scars, and to never let them heal. They are a source of perverted pride in ourselves, something we can always point to as an excuse for our own failings, or as a way to justify ourselves to ourselves.
To borrow a character from one of @she’s favorite books, Cold Comfort Farm, we all run the risk of turning out like Aunt Ada Doom, who “saw something narsty in the woodshed” once upon a time, and so confine ourselves to a misery of our making ever afterwards.
A very insightful comment, @caroljoy. I need to think this over. But I think that whatever people can do to relieve themselves of their suffering, it is a good thing. I think of my sister who felt I had wronged her (although I wasn’t clear specifically in what way) and I asked for her forgiveness. She said she forgave me. Did she really do it in the way you describe (which seems only right)? I doubt it, but in God’s eyes, I asked for her forgiveness sincerely and she gave it. (In Judaism, you need only ask three times, and if the other person refuses, you just try to let it go and move on.)
That depth of forgiveness requires a level of compassion that people may not be able to find in themselves, although they might find it over time. That limited forgiveness is probably still a good thing–for the person forgiven, and the person forgiving–even if it is limited. There is no one to make a ruling whether it’s a legitimate act of forgiveness or not. A very fine point you’ve made.
Since various religions are practiced by people here on Ricochet, most of us have different ideas on things such as sin and forgiveness.
A Jewish person is not a follower of Jesus Christ wherein His teaching focuses greatly on His having died the torturous death that ended on a cross, an event undertaken to satisfy the debt all of us sinners. Christian teachings impose the concept that each human is born of a sinful act, and then we go on to commit sins all throughout our lives. Christ’s death atones for our sins.
It could be that is what Flicker was implying.
Catholics also have the world view that after committing a sin or sins, an individual can go to confess the sins to a priest, who will then assign a penance. In past eras, such assignments could be severe. So you have stories of kings being forced to wrap themselves in rags and stand outside in extreme weather conditions to fulfill the penance offered to them to make up for their sins.
I believe you have missed my point.
As one doesn’t just walk into Mordor, one doesn’t just forgive people. It takes a change in understanding, a paradigm shift. It might come through growth and experience, such as a child growing up and having children and understanding what their parents went through. They start to understand why their parents did the things they did. It might come through years of prayer work. It might come through receiving a sincere apology.
The question is, “Are there tools for reaching a change in understanding faster?” I happen to believe trusting in God and asking for divine understanding of situations can work pretty well. I am not speaking of some shallow nonsense, “Oh, we’re suppose to forgive, so I forgive.” (Trust me, I know some of those people, and they are the most wretched and hateful types.) I am speaking of delving into God and God’s understanding of life and our growth. This is all throughout the Bible. I believe I quoted Joseph earlier on this. He knew his brothers had intended to harm him, but he came out on top and was in a position to help his family. He was taken beyond forgiveness to the awe of God’s mighty works.
Anyone who isn’t there is the one who is only taking half measures.
I have heard one can perhaps bicycle into Mordor though…
Your priest is a very wise man. Those who are incapable of recognizing repentance in others, and then of appropriately bestowing the gift of forgiveness and mercy on them will never recognize, nor bestow, any of the three on themselves.
Also very true.
Oh, indeed. As I’ve said before, one of the things I like most about the best literature is that it’s true. It may not be “real,” but it’s true.
My mother had a good bit of Ada Doom in her. Not as much as the matriarch of a Prince Edward Island fishing family I once knew, but quite a lot. “Aunt Ada’s,” of both the male and female persuasion, aren’t as rare in life as we might wish them to be.
That only works for fish.
Ahh. When Kate Beckinsale was a natural, rather than what Dorothy Parker might call an “assisted,” beauty. Those were the days.