At My Most Monstrous

Forgiveness, God, Love 0

I know that when I am most monstrous, I am most in need of love.  When my temper flares out of bounds it is usually set off by something unimportant which is on top of a series of events over which I have no control, which have made me helpless, and thus caused me anguish and frustration.  I am not lovable when I am enraged, although it is when I most need love.

One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love.  And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.

So God does with me.

— Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 250-251

Forgiveness Like the Father

Compassion, Forgiveness, God, Love 0

It is through constant forgiveness that we become like the Father.  Forgiveness from the heart is very, very difficult.  It is next to impossible.  Jesus said to his disciples:  “When your brother wrongs you seven times a day and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I am sorry,’ you must forgive him.”

I have often said, “I forgive you,” but even as I said these words my heart remained angry or resentful.  I still wanted to hear the story that tells me that I was right after all; I still wanted to hear apologies and excuses; I still wanted the statisfaction of receiving some praise in return — if only the praise for being so forgiving!

But God’s forgiveness is unconditional; it comes from a heart that does not demand anything for itself, a heart that is completely empty of self-seeking.  It is this divine forgivenss that I have to practice in my daily life.  It calls me to keep stepping over all my arguments that say forgiveness is unwise, unhealthy, and impractical.  It challenges me to step over all my needs for gratitude and compliments.  Finally, it demands of me that I step over that wounded part of my heart that feels hurt and wronged and that wants to stay in control and put a few conditions between me and the one whom I am asked to forgive.

This “stepping over” is the authentic discipline of forgiveness.  Maybe it is more “climbing over” than “stepping over.”  Often I have to climb over the wall of arguments and angry feelings that I have erected between myself and all those whom I love but who so often do not return that love.  It is a wall of fear of being used or hurt again.  It is a wall of pride, and the desire to stay in control.  But every time that I can step or climb over that wall, I enter into the house where the Father dwells, and there touch my neighbor with genuine compassionate love.

— Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 129-130

Coming Clean

Forgiveness, God, Obedience 0

The people do not earn their place in God’s covenant by obedience; rather, their obedience enables them to experience life with God.  The sacrificial system is given not because God is keeping some divine bank account of blood money, which needs regular deposits to ward off divine judgment.  Rather, it provides a way for the people to “come clean” whenever they break the covenant by disobeying God.  Instead of punitive reprisal, they experience gracious restoration of the relationship.  This is why the Law becomes such a source of joy, as we see in their celebrations and in the praise of the psalmists in the prayer book of the people.

— Richard J. Foster, Life with God, p. 88-89

Forgiveness Mirrors God.

Forgiveness, God 0

Yet even when offenders are unrepentant, we can and should forgive.  There are better ways to protect ourselves than the refusal to forgive.  And when it comes to reminding offenders that they’ve committed the offense, we do that precisely by forgiving.  Recall that to forgive is to blame.  We do condemn when we forgive.  We do it gently and lovingly, but we still do it.

There’s no question that it is more difficult to forgive when offenders refuse to repent.  Their lack of repentance is, in a sense, a continuation of their offense in a different form.  But the forgiveness is unconditional….  It’s predicated on nothing perpetrators do or fail to do.  Forgiveness is not a reaction to something else.  It is the beginning of something new….

Forgiving the unrepentant is not an optional extra in the Christian way of life; it’s the heart of the thing.  Why?  Because God is such a forgiver and Christ forgave in such a way.  And you know what?  We also bear the burden of forgiveness because when we are forgivers we are restored to our full human splendor.  We were created to mirror God.  Anything less is really Judas’ kiss on our own cheek, a betrayal of ourselves by ourselves.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 208-209

Accountability

Forgiveness, Letting Go, Life, Relationships 0

Stop making excuses for other people.

Stop making excuses for ourselves.

While it is our goal to develop compassion and achieve forgiveness, acceptance, and love, it is also our goal to accept reality and hold people accountable for their behavior.  We can also hold ourselves accountable for our own behavior, and, at the same time, have compassion and understanding for ourselves.

— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 260

Give Yourself a Break

Forgiveness, Healing, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

It is important to be gentle with and accepting of yourself throughout your relationship.  You are just as flawed, misguided, and hurtful as your lover, and you both need a good dose of TLC.  While the idea of self-forgiveness might be a “duh” to many of you, the point still needs to be made.  Self-forgiveness enables you to move on with kindness after grieving your flaws and the ways you have hurt your lover.  When you forgive yourself, you look for your good qualities, appreciate the love you offer, and accept with humility the harm you cause.  You also change your story to reflect your positive intention and your effort to do the best you can with what you have to work with.

Self-forgiveness is not that different from forgiving your partner. . . .

Nobody is perfect, and everybody will make many mistakes.  Some of us make mistakes that cause harm, and others make mistakes that only cause a mess.  Because you and your partner are human beings, you will make mistakes, fail occasionally, and sometimes even harm other people.  Your need to be perfect is an unenforceable rule, one that can never be met.  Needing to never hurt your lover is an unenforceable rule.  Demanding that you always be successful in all aspects of your relationship is an unenforceable rule.  When you accept that you are human, you are able to offer forgiveness to yourself and remember that you have the resources at your disposal to improve yourself and help others.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 209-210, 215

Forgiving and Excusing

Forgiveness, God 0

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different.  I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.  But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.  Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.”  But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.”  If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive.  In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….

A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour.  But that would not be forgiveness at all.  Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.  That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.

— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264

Care and Protection

Compassion, Forgiveness, God, Healing 0

But a person with a shattered life . . . doesn’t first need Christ to forgive her or to forgive through her.  Before anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.

And that’s what Christ does.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 206

Strong Views of God’s Love

Forgiveness, God, Love 0

What makes us universalists is not that we have unusually weak views of sin but unusually strong views of divine love and grace.  Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more.

I have argued that eternal conscious torment is not a just response to sin; and in the eyes of some, this amounts to an underestimate of the severity of sin. . . .  However, just because I do not think that a sin incurs infinite demerit, it does not follow that I deny it incurs very serious demerit. . . .

For the universalist, hell is something to be avoided at all costs, just as Jesus warned us.  To object by saying, “Well, if hell is not forever, it doesn’t really matter if someone has a spell there,” is like suggesting that because you will recover from the long and painful illness, it isn’t worth taking precautions to avoid it.  It is like telling an Old Testament prophet not to bother warning Israel to repent, because God will always restore them after the judgment anyway.  The prophet would reply that it is better to avoid the judgment in this first place, and the prophet is surely correct.  I wonder if I could pose a counter-question to our critics:  “Is it perhaps you who fail to take God’s love and grace as seriously as it deserves?”

It seems to me that the only major Christian doctrine threatened by universalism is the teaching that those in hell have passed beyond the point of no return; and, as this belief is quite detachable from the web of Christian belief without doing any damage to the rest of the web, I can only conclude that, although it is a widely held doctrine, it is peripheral in its structural role in Christian theology.  I can be removed and replaced without doing harm to Christian theology.  Indeed, if I am right, once we remove and replace it with a universalist view of hell, we have a much more coherent web of beliefs than we had before.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 165-167