Richard Rohr: Forgiveness
“As long as you can deal with evil by some means other than forgiveness, you will keep projecting, fearing, and attacking it over there, instead of “gazing” on it within and “weeping” over it within yourself and all of us. Forgiveness demands three new simultaneous ‘seeings’: I must see God in the other; I must access God in myself; and I must experience God in a new way that is larger than an ‘Enforcer.’” Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 193-194. from Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr Daily Meditation, April 30, 2017.
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Richard Rohr is teaching us more basic lessons about how to forgive. It involves seeing the Christ, God in the person we are forgiving as well as seeing God or Christ in ourselves. That makes sense. But then Rohr throws in this third condition. We must see that God is more, larger than a hall monitor handing out detention slips, checking a list, looking at our every action and judging whether we and our neighbors are behaving on the side of right or wrong.
My experience is that we are called to enlarge our God to become a God of love. How do we do this? We place ourselves with other people who seem to be experiencing God’s love. We observe how they know how to forgive others.
As we begin to see the Christ in those who live with the Christ, the God of love, the Christ in us awakens and slowly, often very slowly we begin to see the Christ in those who have harmed us. We begin to see what tragedies brought them to the place of hurting others. This often occurs as we pray daily, sometimes hourly for the person who has harmed us.
We realize we are still carrying around a heavy load of resentment for that person that is like a cancer, destroying the joy in our lives a little each day. They are still hurting us. They are becoming our higher power, our God, because more and more that is all we can think about.
As we daily pray for them, they may never change, but my experience is that we will.
Joanna joannaseibert.com