Confession time. I’ve been a Christian as long as I can remember, and a pastor for 15 years, and I don’t know how to forgive people. To this day, certain people and events just rile me up.
I have been coming to grips with the yawning difference between the expectation that I should forgive, and knowing how to do it. What do I do when no recognition of that hurt has ever been given, and no apology has ever been made?
Too slowly, I realised the apologies I longed for were not coming — that my pain hadn’t registered on the emotional Richter scale of those who hurt me. It dawned on me that if I was going to get past this, I had to take responsibility for it.
Worst of all, while I waited for the people who had hurt me to play a part in my healing, I had practised a kind of emotional self-harm, poking away at my inner wounds. I was making it worse, but I didn’t know how to stop.
I should note that it isn’t as if I have had an especially terrible life. My parents loved me and my older siblings only beat me up when provoked — more or less. I’ve experienced the usual helping of human suffering, but nothing excessive.
So my incapacity to forgive isn’t about the scale of my pain, but my inability to let it go.
I decided recently that I’d had enough of that. I tracked down some people who actually knew how to forgive, and asked them how they did it. They had worked through real pain, and here I was, still wallowing in my garden-variety hurt. I needed to know their secret.
What they told me was so profound I ended up turning it into a podcast.
Kim, a business consultant, got me to hold a cup of water out at right angles from my body. It felt like an eternity. Ten minutes holding a half cup of water was an effective metaphor for the effort it takes to hold on to pain.
Geoff, a Nashville-based record producer, insists that while we think of bitterness as the easy path, it is in fact brutally hard. These people had come to forgiveness not from some profound spiritual insight, but from the sheer exhaustion of the alternative.
Kim, who’d been abused by her mother, unlocked forgiveness by cultivating curiosity about her mum’s story. She learned her mum had been abused and neglected, and that she’d had no experience of love and nurture to draw from when raising her own children.
For Kim, this didn’t justify the abuse, but it did help her understand. She realised her mum had done her best, even though her best wasn’t good enough. This insight helped her begin to rewrite the victim narrative she’d been stuck in, because forgiveness gives us back our agency when it has been taken away.
Forgiveness was part of Teina breaking the cycle in which she had been abused as a child, when she then found herself in an abusive relationship with a partner threatening her young daughter. Getting out of that cycle meant forgiving herself for repeating the pattern, while affirming her worth gave her a solid base from which to begin forgiving those who had harmed her.
But forgiveness was not about forgetting the harm. Instead, it was about refusing to let it define the future.
When Geoff’s wife of nearly 20 years told him she was leaving to return to a former partner, he spent his fair share of time feeling hard done by. But then new feelings emerged. He realised he felt grateful to his wife for telling him the truth and for giving their relationship such a good go. As he let himself feel honestly, he began finding his way towards forgiveness.
Murray, a theologian, told me that forgiveness opens new possibilities for the future, for both victim and perpetrator. Without it, we’re stuck in a cycle of revenge. I can attest to being stuck in that rut, in some cases for years, waiting to tell my story and be taken seriously.
The thing is, I have been heard by good friends who have validated my experience.
But I’ve been waiting to tell that one person who hurt me — and I’ve realised that they’re the least equipped to help or heal me.
Recently, a friend asked me how I was going with forgiveness and I noticed the little changes.
There was one person who had really hurt me, but I could now see that they had been in a lot of pain themselves.
Like a drowning person, thrashing around in the water, they had smacked me in the face without noticing.
Alongside that, I realised that some of my actions had made it harder for them to stay afloat.
I was finding my way towards forgiveness, for them and for me.
Perhaps this Easter is a time to consider forgiving those who have hurt us. Maybe they hurt us out of their own pain, and maybe forgiving them might be how we reclaim authorship of our own life story.
Since it’s Easter, Jesus’ words from Luke 23:34 are particularly pertinent: "Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing."
- Malcolm Gordon is an ordained minister at First Church in Dunedin and host of the podcast A Field Guide to Forgiveness.
