Our small group has been reading the book by Lewis Smedes, The Art of Forgiving. “Forgiving,” says Smedes, “…is the art of healing inner wounds inflected by other people’s wrongs."
In chapter one Smedes tells us the basics of forgiving are the same for everyone:
1. Rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt us.
2. Surrender our right to get even.
3. Revise our feelings toward the person we forgive.
We’ve been stuck on point one for months. And it may be years.
Rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.
Hurts can be significant. Sometimes those hurts are like having a broken arm; sometimes they are like having an arm hacked off.
Debbie Morris knows more about significant pain than she would have chosen. In her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking*, she tells her story of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped at the age of 16 by Robert Willie and another man. That unfair pain in her young life was preceded by unfair pain of her mother's alcoholism and her parents' divorce.
Smedes asserts that the only remedy for the unfair pain of the past is “a surgical procedure called forgiveness.”
For Debbie that very painful surgical procedure took years. As it turns out, the basics of forgiving for her were the same as they are for everyone, starting with point one, rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.
The implausible notion that buried somewhere beneath the blatant inhumanity of her kidnapper there may be a human being created in the image of God became less remote when she had a son of her own, Conner.
"I realized Robert Willie, too, was a baby once,” helpless and vulnerable. “Over the years, …my heart [was softened] little by little so that I was finally able to forgive him for what he did.”
Part of that ‘little by little’ was her searching the Bible for stories about grace and forgiveness. She remembers, “The parable in Matthew 20:1-16, about the workers in the vineyard, leapt out at me. In it workers were paid the same price despite how long they'd worked. It infuriated the people who'd worked all day that they received the same wages as those who'd put in only a couple hours. I realized I was just like them. I felt I deserved heaven—and Robert Willie didn't. But that parable showed me God's grace is accessible to all of us, regardless of when we turn to him.”
Debbie was surprised that rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt her was easier to do with Willie than with her own mother. She more or less stumbled upon the discovery of her mother’s humanity, seeing her as a person with frailties not unlike her own, when she herself went into rehab for alcoholism. “I finally realized I needed to accept my mom as she was.”
So, why is rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us so difficult?
Smedes points out, “We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible, we say things like, 'He is no more than an animal.' Or, 'He is nothing but a cheat.' Our 'no more thans' and our 'nothing buts' knock the humanity out of our enemy. He is no longer a fragile spirit living on the fringes of extinction. He is no long a confusing mixture of good and evil. He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong.”
The very logical reason we don’t see the humanity of the person who hurt us is simply because we don’t see clearly. We’re vision impaired.
Smedes explains, ”We filter the image of our villain through the gauze of our wounded memories, and in the process we alter his reality.”
Not surprisingly, it would be difficult to see ANYTHING clearly through bloody gauze.
“As we start on the miracle of forgiving,” Smedes asserts, “we begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate. We begin to see a real person, a botched self, no doubt, a hodgepodge of meanness and decency, lies and truths, good and evil that not even the shadows of his soul can wholly hide…We see a human being created to be a child of God.”
As it turns out, in rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us, we see person not wholly unlike the one we see in the mirror- "a human being created to be a child of God.”
The forgiveness miracle begins with seeing more clearly.
*Debbie's story
Email Connie at:
TheJourneyBlog
@aol.com
In chapter one Smedes tells us the basics of forgiving are the same for everyone:
1. Rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt us.
2. Surrender our right to get even.
3. Revise our feelings toward the person we forgive.
We’ve been stuck on point one for months. And it may be years.
Rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.
Hurts can be significant. Sometimes those hurts are like having a broken arm; sometimes they are like having an arm hacked off.
Debbie Morris knows more about significant pain than she would have chosen. In her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking*, she tells her story of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped at the age of 16 by Robert Willie and another man. That unfair pain in her young life was preceded by unfair pain of her mother's alcoholism and her parents' divorce.
Smedes asserts that the only remedy for the unfair pain of the past is “a surgical procedure called forgiveness.”
For Debbie that very painful surgical procedure took years. As it turns out, the basics of forgiving for her were the same as they are for everyone, starting with point one, rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.
The implausible notion that buried somewhere beneath the blatant inhumanity of her kidnapper there may be a human being created in the image of God became less remote when she had a son of her own, Conner.
"I realized Robert Willie, too, was a baby once,” helpless and vulnerable. “Over the years, …my heart [was softened] little by little so that I was finally able to forgive him for what he did.”
Part of that ‘little by little’ was her searching the Bible for stories about grace and forgiveness. She remembers, “The parable in Matthew 20:1-16, about the workers in the vineyard, leapt out at me. In it workers were paid the same price despite how long they'd worked. It infuriated the people who'd worked all day that they received the same wages as those who'd put in only a couple hours. I realized I was just like them. I felt I deserved heaven—and Robert Willie didn't. But that parable showed me God's grace is accessible to all of us, regardless of when we turn to him.”
Debbie was surprised that rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt her was easier to do with Willie than with her own mother. She more or less stumbled upon the discovery of her mother’s humanity, seeing her as a person with frailties not unlike her own, when she herself went into rehab for alcoholism. “I finally realized I needed to accept my mom as she was.”
So, why is rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us so difficult?
Smedes points out, “We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible, we say things like, 'He is no more than an animal.' Or, 'He is nothing but a cheat.' Our 'no more thans' and our 'nothing buts' knock the humanity out of our enemy. He is no longer a fragile spirit living on the fringes of extinction. He is no long a confusing mixture of good and evil. He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong.”
The very logical reason we don’t see the humanity of the person who hurt us is simply because we don’t see clearly. We’re vision impaired.
Smedes explains, ”We filter the image of our villain through the gauze of our wounded memories, and in the process we alter his reality.”
Not surprisingly, it would be difficult to see ANYTHING clearly through bloody gauze.
“As we start on the miracle of forgiving,” Smedes asserts, “we begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate. We begin to see a real person, a botched self, no doubt, a hodgepodge of meanness and decency, lies and truths, good and evil that not even the shadows of his soul can wholly hide…We see a human being created to be a child of God.”
As it turns out, in rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us, we see person not wholly unlike the one we see in the mirror- "a human being created to be a child of God.”
The forgiveness miracle begins with seeing more clearly.
*Debbie's story
Email Connie at:
TheJourneyBlog
@aol.com
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