Thoughts on Forgiveness

I’ve been examining forgiveness since that Lent in 2001 when I became Catholic. My journey that year, during those 40 days, was to forgive my mother. At the time, we hadn’t spoken for about five years. She had tried to apologize many times, but I was the model for a hard heart and deaf ears. It took me all of Lent to come to terms with things that might seem silly or inconsequential to anyone not residing in my head. I spent those 40 days praying and pondering and trying to listen. Near Easter, I wrote a letter to my mom, asking for her forgiveness.

It’s not that we became best friends after that.

And taking that step caused me plenty of grief.

For five years, I had been adamant in my insistence that I would not talk to Mom, and I went so far as to nickname her something so cruel I can’t reprint it here. So, given that background, it shouldn’t have been surprising that my dad and stepmom reacted a bit violently to my new point of view.

That June, my father returned the gift certificate I had sent him for Father’s Day.

My stepmom wrote me a letter that went on and on - I don’t remember just what it said, to be honest, but I remember the wound it caused. I saved it, but I’ve never looked back at it.

You see, after their reaction, I had a whole new mountain of forgiveness in front of me.

After the birth of my oldest child, that mountain, which I had been trying to go around, proved to be blocking every path in my life.

I realized, slowly, that I was not “done” with forgiveness. I was not “cured.” I was the same Sarah, with a hard heart and deaf ears.

My journey through forgiveness has been ongoing. I’ve realized it’s more than just “It’s OK.” I’ve found the need to keep on forgiving, whether or not it’s deserved or requested.

The hardest part, by far, has been the forgetting part. It’s easy for me to say to myself, “Oh, that’s forgiven” and move on to the next item on my to-forigve list, without any real change of heart having taken place. It’s not so easy to stop rehashing the old hurts, to stop reliving old pain, to be like Jesus was as he hung on the cross.