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’s Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media, 2008), pp. 193-194.
the burden we carry with us when we cannot forgive
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 see that God is larger than a hall monitor, handing out detention slips, checking a list, looking at our every action, and judging whether our neighbors and we behave correctly.
My experience is that we are called to enlarge our concept of God as a God of love. How do we do this? First, we place ourselves with others who seem to experience God’s love. Second, we observe how they know how to forgive others.
As we see the Christ in others who know love, the God of love, the Christ in us awakens—and slowly, often very slowly, we also begin to see the Christ in those who have harmed us. We may discover that personal tragedies have brought them to the place of hurting others. This awareness starts 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, which makes it so challenging to live and walk on our journey through life. It is like a cancer, destroying the joy in our lives a little each day. That person is still hurting us. They are becoming our higher power, our God. More and more, they are all we can think about.
As we pray daily for that person, they may never change, but my experience is we will.
I will be speaking at the Arkansas Daughters of the King Fall Assembly in Little Rock, on September 9 on Forgiveness and the Spirituality of Aging. Contact me for more information.
Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/