Unlimited Forgiveness

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.

Our Lord encourages us to forgive always, promptly, and wholeheartedly. God pardons those who pardon others. The mercy that we show to others is the same mercy that will be shown to us.

We're told in the book of Ecclesiastes, he who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the Lord, who keeps strict account of sin. Forgive your neighbor the hurt he does you, and when you pray, your sins will be forgiven. If a man nurses anger against another, can he then demand compassion from the Lord?

Our Lord has perfected this command by extending it to every person and to every offense. Through his death on the cross, Christ has made all men brothers in a new creation.

Saint Peter wondered aloud if this teaching was going too far when he asked Jesus, how many times we must forgive another? And Jesus responded, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22). This means always. It's not a question of mathematical calculations.

Christ wants us to learn how to overcome evil through the power of infinite love. This is the great Christian revolution that we have to try and bring about on the earth.

In the Our Father, Christ taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are reminded that when we pray the Our Father, we have to be united among ourselves and with Christ, well disposed to forgiving one another. This is the only way that we will attract the infinite mercy of God.

To forgive from one's heart often requires true faith. There was a story in the Vatican website yesterday of Pope Leo receiving a lady in private audience who had forgiven the murderers of her son. Her son was beheaded by some people in some Middle Eastern country. She's written a book about this, but she has been able to forgive those murderers, and she's met some of them. It's not often we hear stories like that. A powerful example for us.

Due to the intensity of their faith, holy souls who have lived their lives in imitation of Christ often do not need to forgive. Saint Josemaría used to say, I have no need of forgiveness because I have learned how to love. Holy souls realize that the only real evil is sin. Injuries and calumnies are simply not so very important.

We could examine our conscience, which really means to examine our heart, our mind, our soul, to see if we're holding any resentment, whether real or imaginary. Has our pardon been speedy, sincere, wholehearted, unreserved?

Saint John of Ávila said if they annoy you 50,000 times, that's how often you have to forgive them. Your patience has to get ahead of your bad feelings, wearing them out before they provoke more harm.

If we truly learn how to forgive others, we'll find it to be almost unnecessary, since we no longer feel offended. Sometimes we can be offended by the most trivial things: a lack of gratitude, a sharp word in a moment of weakness, or just a piece of bad luck. At other times, we can be upset because there are serious reasons like calumnies or twisted interpretations of what we have done with an upright conscience. Whatever the provocation may be, if we are to forgive right away and to the full, we need to have our hearts directed towards God.

This grandeur of soul will lead us to pray for people who do us harm. A renowned author posed the problem in the following terms. He said, is it not customary that the sick be treated with more affection than the healthy? Be then the doctor to your enemies. The good you do to them, says Saint Paul, may enkindle worthy thoughts of love.

Think of the means of perfection, says one writer, that your enemies are giving to you. Consider for a moment that it was Herod's hatred that made the innocents holy, not the love which they had for their parents.

Our practice of Christian pardon and of legitimate self-defense can bring many souls to the faith. This was how the first Christians behaved in the face of calumnies and persecution.

As he prepared for his martyrdom, Saint Ignatius of Antioch counseled the early church of Ephesus. But pray unceasingly, he said, also for the rest of men. For they offer ground for hoping that they may be converted and win their way to God. Give them an opportunity therefore, at least by your conduct, of becoming your disciples. Meet their angry outbursts with your own gentleness, their boastfulness with your humility, their revilings with your prayers, their error with your constancy in the faith, their harshness with your meekness, and beware of trying to match their example. Let us prove ourselves their brothers through courtesy. And let us strive to follow the Lord's example, and see who can suffer greater wrong, who more deprivation, who more contempt.

Our Lord is ready to forgive everyone. Saint Paul says to the Thessalonians, “see that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all” (1 Thess. 5:15). And to the Colossians he writes, “bear with one another and forgive one another. If anyone has a grievance against any other, even as the Lord has forgiven you, so also do you forgive” (Col. 3:13).

If we truly learn to forgive others, we will find it almost unnecessary to do so, since we no longer feel offended. We are not following Christ's way if our charity becomes cold to someone in the family or someone in the workplace or in our school.

On those occasions when it's more difficult to forgive, we need to repeat our Lord's words on Calvary, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). In most cases, however, it's enough that we smile, or return a greeting, or do some small favor in order to resume a friendship. The little frictions of each day should not lead us to lose our peace and joy. We can't allow our pride to get the better of us in this regard.

The sacrament of penance helps us to be merciful towards others. Our Lord gives Peter a memorable explanation of the nature of Christian pardon in the parable of the two debtors. One debtor owed 10,000 talents, while the other owed 100 denarii. The difference in value is enormous. It took 6,000 denarii to make a single talent. The lesson is that God's mercy is immensely greater than our own. True mercy belongs to humble souls who understand how much they've been forgiven.

Just as the Lord is always ready to forgive us, so we must always be ready to forgive one another. The world has a great need of souls who know how to forgive in our communities, in our families, in our organizations, and in our own very hearts. That's why the special sacrament of the church for forgiveness, the sacrament of penance, is such a precious gift from God.

In that sacrament, God extends his forgiveness to us in a very personal way. Through the ministry of the priest, we come to our loving savior with the burden of our sins. We confess, says Saint John Paul, that we have sinned against God and our neighbor. We manifest our sorrow and ask for pardon from the Lord. And then through the priest, we hear Christ say to us, “your sins are forgiven. Go and do not sin again.” Do we not also hear him say to us as we're filled with this saving grace, extend to others, seventy times seven, this same forgiveness and mercy?

Confession is a marvelous and magnificent school of love and generosity. One writer says this sacrament renews the soul and vivifies its capacity for pardon. In his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, John Paul II says the church must profess and proclaim God's mercy in all its truth as it has been handed down to us by revelation. And this task, which belongs to every Christian, is particularly urgent in our times.

Saint John of the Cross says, trouble not yourself either much or a little as to who is against you and who is with you, and strive ever to please God. Look not at the imperfections of others. Keep silence and have continual converse with God. These three things will uproot great imperfections from the soul and will make it mistress of great virtues. Pray to God, he says, that his will may be done in you. Love him greatly, for this you owe him.

The strongest things in the world often seem the weakest. Gentleness is stronger than cruelty. Patience is stronger than impatience. Mercy is stronger than revenge, and love is stronger than hate.

There was a story of a couple in Texas who had an only daughter, who was brutally murdered. Eventually the culprit was caught and put in prison. And the parents campaigned for the death penalty. They wanted vengeance. They wanted justice.

A week or two before that penalty was to be carried out, they decided to go to the prison and visit him. They wanted to look into his eyes and see how he felt as he faced his own death, and somehow get vengeance for the death of their daughter, to let him see how she must have felt in those moments. But when they went to see him, they were expecting to find a monster, but they found just a kid who had made a big mistake in his life. He was very sorry, very repentant.

They were a bit perplexed by this. They came away and talked to each other about it, and they said, well, maybe this guy doesn't really deserve to die. But they also thought maybe we're mistaken. We'll go back a second time and get another impression. So they went back a second time, and even more the second time they saw this person does not really deserve to die, very repentant.

So they campaigned against the death penalty. The guy got a reprieve. He served a number of years. These parents kept visiting him, understanding a little more each time about his background. He came from a poor place, a deprived upbringing, all the different factors that were there. They also said that as soon as they began to understand where he was coming from and understand this kid, they began to sleep better at night. They got a new calm in their life. This whole phenomenon of forgiveness.

When eventually he was released from prison, they met him at the prison door, not with a gun or with a whip. They took him to their home, they tried to help him to get started again in life. And they lived happily ever after. Peace and joy coming from forgiveness.

There's a famous story of a Consolata nun here in Kenya, who worked here for many years, I think it was a nurse. And then she worked in Mogadishu in Somalia. And one day, she was shot in the street. As she lay dying on the pavement, she said the words, I forgive, I forgive. People die as they have lived. She must have been practicing forgiveness all through her life. The following Sunday, Pope Benedict mentioned this event and how she died from the balcony of St. Peter's. Messages of forgiveness go around the world.

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:1–8).

We do well to meditate on these beautiful words of Saint Paul with a certain frequency. They can mean so much to us.

Forgiveness is the loving refusal to demand compensation for past injuries or hurts. We can ask ourselves, do I keep a black list somewhere in the fold of my brain? Sometimes we can have an amazing memory. Forgiveness, because possibly the people who hurt us don't even know that they're hurting us. Every person should have a special cemetery in which to bury the faults of friends and loved ones.

Our Lord asks, “why do you persecute me?” When we criticize or judge or compare, we're persecuting our Lord. Saint Josemaría liked to link forgiveness and understanding. Charity above all means understanding. And all the greatest crimes that others may commit against us are nothing compared to what God has forgiven us.

Hurts or abuses, injustices, they can burrow actively in our memory. Woundology can be in fashion. But poking at sores often prevents healing. Retribution does not heal the hatred that destroys life. We're called to hand over life's hurts to the Holy Spirit. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.

We need to learn to excuse rather than to accuse. Pope Benedict says forgiveness is not a denial of wrongdoing, but a participation in the healing and transforming love of God which reconciles and restores. We can ask our Lord that we might grow in the art of forgiving.

One writer said the most creative power given to the human spirit is the power to heal the wounds of a past it cannot change. We do our forgiving alone inside our hearts and minds. What happens to the people we forgive depends on them. The first person to benefit from forgiving is the one who does it.

Forgiving happens in three stages. We rediscover the humanity of the person who wronged us. We surrender our right to get even. And we wish that person well.

Forgiving is a journey. The deeper the wound, the longer the journey. Forgiving does not necessarily require us to reunite with the person who broke our trust. We do not forgive because we're supposed to. We forgive when we are ready to be healed. Waiting for someone to repent before we forgive is to surrender our future to the person who wronged us.

Forgiving is not a way to avoid pain, but is rather a way to heal pain. Forgiving someone who breaks a trust doesn't mean that we give them their job back. Forgiving is the only way to be fair to ourselves. Forgivers are not doormats. To forgive a person is not a signal that we're willing to put up with what they do. Forgiving is essential. Talking about it is optional.

When we forgive, we set a prisoner free, and discover that the prisoner we set free is ourselves. When we forgive, we walk in stride with the forgiving God.

Nothing is more tenacious than the memory of past wounds and humiliations. All who root their lives in forgiveness are able to pass through rock-hard situations like the water of a stream, which in early springtime makes its way through the still frozen ground. Forgiving others brings about understanding where there is opposition.

Certain memories of the past can be enough to keep two nations apart. When we seek tirelessly to forgive and be reconciled, our future opens up beyond our expectations. The most profound changes are not necessarily determined by prestigious talents or great expertise, but more than we suppose, by a burning charity.

The keeping of the scorecard of past wrongs, the chewing of a cud of resentment, the licking of wounds and the memories of how we received them, the playing of the tapes of injustices real or imagined, can be so many proofs that we've not yet digested what our faith teaches us and our lips confess, that all trials come from the hand of God.

We can ask our Lord that we might advance in that art of forgiving. We might also purify our memory. There is no limitation to forgiveness. No injury is so gross that it cannot be forgiven. The sea absorbs impurities, remaining undefiled. Love keeps no record of wrongs, and God is love. Love is in the will. Like is in the emotions, the senses.

Without memory, there is no healing. Without forgiveness, there is no future. Love does not allow the wrongs of others to pollute its flow of positive energy.

God invites us to participate in a breathtaking mercy. In the liturgy, in the Eucharistic prayer, we refer to God the Father of mercy. Understanding and forgiving are the most radical manifestations of love.

Lord, help me to try to understand those who don't understand me, even those who don't want to understand. Help me to understand with no duplicates in the files. If we're to live this understanding and forgiving well, there's a need for mortification. At times we need to be willing to give in and to realize that nothing really matters in this world. Blame hurts, forgiveness cures.

Our first reaction can be an emotional one. We need to be careful with those first reactions. Our Lord places that goal in front of us of seventy times seven, invites us to have a forgiving approach to life, without limit, unlimited pardon. And that's in the face of arguments or trifling matters or sharp replies or disconcerting gestures, which often can be caused by no more than just tiredness.

We're not living our Christian vocation if at the least sign of friction, our charity begins to grow cold and we feel distance from others. Following our Lord means finding, even in areas of tiny contradictions, the way to holiness.

Mercy has the interior form of love. It seems to reach down to every prodigal child, to every human misery, and every form of moral misery. When this happens, the person doesn't feel humiliated, but found again and restored to value.

We can ask Our Lady that we might have a magnanimous heart like her own. She can help us to avoid brooding over disappointments and injuries. And she may help us also to continually grow in our spirit of reparation to the merciful heart of Jesus.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW