Jesus makes several no-nonsense statements about the absolute necessity of forgiving those who hurt us. And he links our ability to do so with the health of our relationship with God (“If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions”). When I left the Catholic Church at 20, this ultimatum about forgiving was one of my justifying reasons. Jesus, it seemed, was always commanding us to do impossible things. It was not until the night I dreamed of killing someone that I began to rethink my position. My victim was an awful person, true, but no matter what she’d done to me, I could not fathom the glee I felt at her death. I woke shivering at my unsuspected capacity for violent anger. The shock of this murderous dream helped drive me back to the foot of the cross, where I finally saw why Christ puts such a stake in forgiveness. At the heart of his mission here on earth is the call to love one another as he loves us, and it is impossible to comply with this command when we are nursing ancient wounds. “Doing what comes naturally” through fantasizing about revenge only fuels more wrath. If we want to participate in Jesus’ project of redemption, we must instead learn how to return good for evil (“When someone strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other”). As one Desert Father discovered when he forgave the thief who robbed him, even a hardened criminal can be converted through love. ‘Agonizingly difficult’ Yet forgiveness can be agonizingly difficult, as I discovered when I made the decision to forego retaliation against my tormentor. Not only is it hard to let go of justifiable anger, we must often grapple with serious intellectual and spiritual impediments besides. Even when these are overcome, most of us cannot simply decide to be merciful. More often than not, we must carefully prepare ourselves before we’re able to extend our hand to someone who has wronged us. One obstacle I met along the way was my secret anger at God for allowing people like the woman in my dream to wreak havoc in the lives of others. How could an all-powerful, loving deity permit these evil deeds in the first place? And didn’t forgiving such acts encourage more of them? These difficult-to-answer questions are legitimate, and many atheists point to them as perfectly good reasons for rejecting religion altogether. However, after the wake-up call that followed my dream, I knew that living life without God was no longer an option for me. And if I were going to develop a relationship with him, I had to learn how to forgive, despite my doubts. One explanation that was especially helpful suggests that God in his infinite wisdom created the best possible world, including human beings who enjoy free will. However, when we are truly free, we can freely choose to do wrong, and if God intervenes to prevent our wrongdoing, he suppresses our freedom. Thus, he lets us be. An eye for an eye? A trickier issue for me was how to forgive while somehow still meeting the demands of justice. Shouldn’t wrongdoers have to suffer for what they’ve done? And whatever happened to the old “eye for an eye” formula? That seemed like a much fairer solution than having to turn the other cheek, especially when the crime was heinous. If we forgive the perpetrator, aren’t we dishonoring the victims? This question caught international attention when 10 little Amish girls in Nickel Mines, Pa., were tied up in their one-room schoolhouse and shot execution style in 2006. Within hours of the murders, community members were in the home of the killer’s widow and children, offering their love and support. And when monetary donations began to pour in, they turned around and offered a generous portion to the family. The outside world was amazed, but some viewers were also offended. What about those poor little girls? Wasn’t it more important to be angry on their behalf than to be kind to the relatives of a vicious murderer? When the Amish were queried about their motives, they were equally baffled. As one man put it, “Why is everybody all surprised? It’s just standard Christian forgiveness; it’s what everybody should be doing.” As Catholics, we rely on the steady love of a just God, and each time we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we call upon his mercy (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”). The objection that forgiving violates justice takes on a different coloring when we consider our own situation before God. If he held us to the standards we so zealously defend, all would be lost. Jesus knows that most of the time we judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves (“Why do you seek to take the speck out of your brother’s eye? Look to the log in your own eye first”). We can neither see our own sin, nor understand how sin contributes to this spiritual myopia. Thus, Jesus warns, “Judge not that you may not be judged.” He is not referring to legitimate moral judgments here, but instead, to using justice as an excuse for hanging on to resentment or rage. How do we change? As I struggled to forgive the woman in the dream, I was brought up against a painful reality: My anger was entirely out of control, and was thus dominating both my thinking and my actions. Before I could think about forgiving, I needed to change — but how? The Desert Father who was capable of embracing the thief who robbed him did not arrive at that place by accident. Neither did the Amish in Nickle Mines. Both cases reflect years of deliberate spiritual training. Both reflect sober decisions to give up the easy way — “doing what comes naturally” — for a harder path, one that requires self-sacrifice and discipline. One ancient spiritual technique, known as “watching the thoughts,” requires that we become intensely aware of what we are thinking, and then learn to block the thoughts that lead us back into emotional turmoil, particularly anger. In a forgiveness situation, this translates into noticing whenever we begin to dwell on the person who harmed us. Almost invariably, our thoughts will be negative, even contemptuous. The Desert Fathers said they must be crushed before they can take hold of the mind, for once they do, we will quickly find ourselves embroiled in the same old stew of hurt feelings and resentment. Another ancient technique has to do with developing humility. We live in a society that rates self-esteem very highly. We believe that psychological health depends upon feeling good about ourselves, and that we have an obligation to vigorously defend ourselves in any conflict. Yet too much emphasis on maintaining self-esteem makes it nearly impossible to forgive; we cannot get past the wound to our sense of self. Humility in the ancient Christian sense means that we know who we are — children of the Heavenly Father — but understand that we are neither gods nor worms. Humility allows us to accept other people’s weaknesses, for we recognize them as our own. Forgiving is one of the most difficult challenges we can ever take on, but Jesus does not leave us on our own to grapple with it. If we are truly trying to obey him, including his difficult injunction to forgive without measure, he will flood our lives with empowering grace. “For lo,” he says, “I am with you always, even to the close of the age.” Finding forgiveness in the sacrament The sacrament of reconciliation can play a big part in our coming to forgive others and change are own behavior to be more Christlike. This reflection from the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults (see pg. 239) offers some thoughts on this profound sacrament: What is this sacrament called? “It is called the sacrament of conversion because it makes sacramentally present Jesus’ call to conversion, the first step in returning to the Father from whom one has strayed by sin. It is called the sacrament of penance, since it consecrates the Christian sinner’s personal and ecclesial steps of conversion, penance and satisfaction. It is called the sacrament of confession since the disclosure or confession of sins is an essential element of this sacrament. In a profound sense, it is also a ‘confession’ — acknowledgment and praise — of the holiness of God and of his mercy toward sinful man. It is called the sacrament of forgiveness, since by the priest’s sacramental absolution, God grants the penitent ‘pardon and peace.’ It is called the sacrament of reconciliation because it imparts to the sinner the love of God who reconciles: ‘Be reconciled to God’ (2 Cor 5:20). He who lives by God’s merciful love is ready to respond to the Lord’s call: ‘Go, first to reconcile to your brother’ (CCC, nos. 1423-1424, citing Mt 5:24).”