“Now say you’re sorry,” a father chides.
“I’m sooorrry,” little Timothy says, rolling his eyes.
“I forgive you,” Susie spits out.
A few hours later, the 3 are distracted with electronics (yes, including the father) and none of them remember Susie bragging about her bigger scoop of ice cream or Timothy knocking her mint chocolate chip right off the cone and into the pine needles clogging the street drain. None of them remembers because the event has been forgiven and forgotten, so to speak. But what kind of apology is the one Timothy offered? And—though Timothy did not deserve better—what kind of forgiveness is Susie offering him? Are we content with those reactions?
The trouble isn’t that people aren’t saying the words.
For better or worse, sorry’s are spat out daily and I-forgive-you’s flung into the wind just as often. I think it’s fair to say that a decent portion of our population believes the words themselves are good enough, but I think it is also fair to presume that a larger portion of us think that there is something missing in hollow words. “I forgive you,” needs to have meaning behind it if it is to count for anything.
Like the 1 Corinthians 13:1 prattler, I could “forgive” and “forgive” all day and it would count about as much as birdsong if I didn’t mean it. Please note, I do not mean to call birdsong meaningless: it soothes, it reminds us of pretty things in life and happy niceties, it stops us from retaliation. But as humans, we lack the study necessary to comprehend the language of birds, so birdsong apologies and forgivenesses simply stir something in us and fade away. They don’t count.
It doesn’t help that these false forgivenesses make us feel better. Birdsong niceties help the people wronged feel like some justice has been restored to them, and the people who did the wrong get to feel like they are still “good” people.
Imagine CEO Karen Brown is walking briskly down the sidewalk with her phone in one hand and a horribly cliché cup of coffee in the other and one of those crazy Pokémon Go-ers is chasing down a Pikachu in the other direction and happens to collide into her, spilling the coffee. While we may hope the gentleman would stop and apologize profusely to the CEO, Pikachu is truly quite rare, so the youngster may offer a small “sorry” and keep going. (Wrongly and I’d like to hope uncharacteristically, I might add.)
That kid’s “sorry” is worth about as much as the money Karen spent on her spilt Starbucks. But it’s good enough. Apparently. Because they’re both in rushes, and as far as justice goes, that’s the best each can hope for.
Now if a “sorry” can mean so little, can’t the same be true for an “I forgive you?”
I’m not talking about the ice cream scenario at the beginning where Timothy never really asked forgiveness from his sister and was probably still glad he tossed her ice cream in the gutter. No, what I mean is what happens if someone genuinely from the heart apologizes and the other person says a birdsong “I forgive you?”
It's not hard. I’ve done it.
People will say they forgive others, but they make sure to remember what has happened. They forgive but they do not forget. This makes for a smart society; you see, by never really forgetting, you get to keep one arm up, ready to block in case the person you forgave hurts you again. But what kind of forgiveness is this? The more I say I forgive someone and keep remembering, readying myself, the more I rub the word “forgive” into the dirt and remove its power.
Forgiveness is supposed to wash things clean. Forgive requires forget.
Perhaps we need to remember some things in order to avoid putting ourselves in danger, but we can’t hold onto things to the point that we don’t allow the people behind the things to change. If forgiveness is done right, it cleans and allows for growth. But it’s not easy, because it requires injustice and depends on vulnerability.
Injustice—because a forgiveness wipes away wrong; it does not justly or fairly return a blow for a blow but allows the wrong to have happened and aims to move forward without justice. Vulnerability—on both sides, as it would happen. The person wronged risks the forgiven person misusing a second chance, and the forgiven person risks trying to do better when the person wronged could potentially (purposefully or not) never allow the person to undo the damage they’ve done.
For forgiveness to work, both sides need to forgive and let their shield-arms down. I like to aspire to this, but it is hardly an easy task, and I’ve failed often. All the same, I don’t think it’s impossible, and I think we can really catch hold of it on our good days if we try. There is no forgive-and-forget. There is only one, true, powerful Forgive.
