AtQ – What Might Forgiveness Look Like?

Exploring Powerful Questions

In this week’s note, I explored the ideas of honesty and forgiveness as they relate to right judgement and spiritual formation. Without honesty we are destined to live in a world of delusion – lying to ourselves and others. Given a goal of the kind of person we want to become, without forgiveness, we are destined to be condemned the first instant we miss the mark. Honesty begets transparency, which allows for knowledge (interactive relationship), which undergirds love. Forgiveness is an act of love that allows for the ongoing process of formation in relationship with ourselves and others even through offenses – which will surely come.

But what of a life in which forgiveness was not the norm? How might we begin to look at learning and practicing an activity so integral to the path, yet potentially so foreign? As with most cycles of change I like to begin with questions that probe the vision. Given a possible situation in which forgiveness would be necessary to prevent a rupture, we might ask this question…

What might forgiveness look like?

When talk of forgiveness arises, there is often a significant amount of resistance. We wonder what forgiveness looks like. Depending on the type and scale of the offense, the relationship may note be able to return to what it was before in the same way. There may be quite a bit of intuitive self-protection at play – all rightly placed.

Sometimes we might think that forgiveness means reconciliation. That in forgiving someone (even ourselves) we are obligated to reestablish the patterns of the relationship as they were before the offense. This is not true. Forgiveness is one aspect of the journey of reconciliation, but it is not the whole thing. Let’s take a closer look.