Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Reflection
To forgive is a matter of the heart, according to Our Lord (Mt 18: 21-35). I’m talking about the kind of forgiveness required when someone has really hurt you, especially when the hurt lingers. It is a hard thing to forgive a thing like that. Such a hurt often engenders a grudge. Sometimes it can make you want revenge. It makes you tense and puts your insides in turmoil when you meet or even think of the person who did the hurt.
To forgive hurts like these requires God’s help. It’s a grace. And it makes sense for a person who suffers them to pray for the grace to forgive when the pain from hurt, turmoil, holding a grudge, or desire for revenge lingers.
We have powerful ways and means to pray for the grace to forgive; the sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance (Confession) and the Our Father (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”). We hear it in the words “. . . for the forgiveness of sins” when our wine is consecrated at Mass. And lest we forget, Christ bears witness to it from the cross, saying “Father forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”
The whole of salvation history climaxes with the Incarnation and Pascal Mystery whose essence is love in the form of forgiveness.
When we find it impossible to forgive, the one thing we know will help is God’s grace. A grace is a specific act of God’s love for us personally. It is specified to affect us where we need help, light, guidance, strength, courage, and even the desire to speak or act in real situations where it would be best in God’s eyes and in our own to do so. Asking for the grace to forgive a particularly deep hurt, where doing so seems impossible, is a perfect case in point. Nothing is impossible for God, and God wants to be there, in our hearts, helping us when we cannot alone bring ourselves to forgive those who hurt us.
No one can expect to go through life without being hurt by others. We wish we could. We wish our children could. But we are all vulnerable to being used or abused, neglected or abandoned by others when they become greedy, ambitious or arrogant. When that happens, we are all called to be forgivers. When it’s hard to forgive, we ask for the grace to do so. As we mature in our Faith, the grace abides. This in turn enables us to become men and women with the gift, rooted in experience, to help others who have been hurt: to become apostles of reconciliation. This is an enormously important mission, given the great need for reconciliation throughout our world, in any and every place the Lord may place us.
I only wish I were as good at practicing forgiveness as I am at “preaching” it.
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