I am very grateful for your contributions to this little blogspot. Your discussion on forgiveness is enlightening and provocative. I guess I should jump in.
For the Christian, forgiveness is not a choice. There is simply no way around this, as much as we argue with it, in all of our pain and our legitimate desire for justice. Jesus commands us to forgive without end, and indeed, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we tell God that it's okay to forgive us in the same measure that we forgive others.
Two questions arise. The first is: Easier said than done. What does it mean to forgive, then?
First I'll run through a list of what forgiveness isn't.
Forgiveness isn't denying that wrong was done. It's not excusing it. It's not denying the impact of the wrong. It's not a replacement for justice. To me, forgiveness means letting go of the hurt from a wrong as it specifically relates to the wrongdoer. If you hurt me, and I forgive you, I do not deny that you hurt me. I don't say that I'm glad you hurt me. I don't say that I understand why you hurt me. I don't say that I will relate to you as if you had never hurt me (although now we are reaching a point where I'm sure I'll have some argument). It's not saying (as we often do when we're asked forgiveness), "Oh, that's okay. Don't worry about it."
We're saying: You hurt me, but I still see you as a human being. I still understand that you are loved by God. I hope for justice for you, but I do not seek revenge or unjust pain or suffering.
Think of the person who has caused you the most serious harm in your life. What does it mean to forgive him or her? Could you say those words?
But does forgiveness require something more? Does human forgiveness and mercy require a degree of restoration and - love? Does it mean that we must say to the person we're forgiving, "I love you as a brother or sister in Christ?" Does it mean that life must go on as it did before the harm? I don't know.
After all, what is the alternative to forgivness? Anger? Holding on to hurt? Is that what Jesus calls us to?
Quite often, when debating what it means to be a follower of Jesus (in my own head), after I am through rationalizing myself away from the Gospel, I force myself to think in just those terms - what is the alternative?
Wretched.
But forgiveness and mercy is like anything else good. It can be perverted and misused to do further harm. So to the point that many commenters have made: It is a fear, a sneaking supsicion that rhetoric about "forgiveness" has been used to protect priestly predators from justice. It has been used to place the weight of making things right on the victim.
And why is that? It's because mercy has been separated from justice. I'm going to quote at length from a book called The Heart of Virtue by Donald DeMarco. Perhaps it will help:
...mercy is exquisitely poised between the demands of justice and the disposition of the sufferer. 'It does not destroy justice,' as Thomas Aquinas notes, 'but is a certain kind of fulfillment of justice.' 'Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution,' he writes; but also, 'justice without mercy is cruelty.'...'Mercy seasons justice,' as Shakespeare rightly says; but it is not a meal in itself. It needs justice as salt needs the meat it flavors. To pardon the unrepentent is not to offer mercy but to negate justice. Mercy follows justice and perfects it; but it does not replace it. Its essence is not license. Mercy can flourish only when it is in a context of justice. Accordingly, C.S. Lewis has stated that 'Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety.'
What seems to be bothering some of us is that in relationship to the present Situation, and all of its satellite issues, is that mercy has, indeed, become divorced from justice. Many of the priestly perpetrators seem to think they have done nothing wrong, or are victims themselves. Church personnel, from their fellow priests, to other enablers, to some bishops, routinely think of these situations in terms of self-protection first, victims last if at all. Perhaps we need to be reminded once again that in the vast majority of these cases, parents or victims (foolishly, perhaps) went to the Church first for help and support. It was only when they were ignored, or told to "forgive," or had the tables turned on them by diocesan-hired pit bull attorneys that the rage escalated.
Which moves us onto justice, which is where I'm going to stop. What does justice demand? When do we know where the line is between justice and vengefulness, or when we have made the mistake of trying to do God's work with our human justice?
As always, I present not a thorough treatment, but simply more food for thought.
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