What stops you forgiving?
When do you find it hard to forgive? Why? What barriers (thoughts, habits, relationships, beliefs) hold you back?
Genocide
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- byron smith
- Byron is a husband, and father of two small children. He keeps worms, bees and a compost pile, with a small garden to justify them. In his spare time, he is an ecological ethicist, author, activist, speaker, assistant minister and postgraduate student.
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9 comments:
Usually when it suits me to have a grudge. It is fun to feel self-righteous: the opportunities are so rare.
It is petty, isn't it?
It's very hard to forgive a person or a group of persons who are responsible for changing the course of your life into suffering.
a convenient blindness that leads me to ignore that I am harbouring insults and offenses in the first place, storing them up and brooding upon them almost-but not quite-unknowingly.
Forgive? Of course I forgive...
one salient oversight, and michael j - i completely agree!
i have also found forgiveness to be extremely difficult when the person who you are struggling to forgive doesn't think they've done anything wrong or hurtful. not only is it difficult to forgive in this situation, but it makes it more difficult to forget - it's hard to tell whether you've truly forgiven someone when there's an ongoing hurt because they refuse to recognise your pain/sadness or say "i'm sorry"...
I find it hard when I know (or think I know) that the behaviour will be repeated and probably soon. This is usually for fairly mundane, day-to-day sorts of things but it still gets tough well before the 7 times in one day mark.
For bigger things I especially have trouble forgiving things that cut at my own self-image. The more unrealistic my beliefs about myself are and/or the more attached I am to them; the more difficult I find it to forgive.
Thanks for the honesty and insight of these answers. I'm giving a sermon on forgiveness in a couple of weeks. Once again, I recommend Volf's little book Free of Charge on this subject.
I find it really hard to forgive when I know there is nothing more I can do for reconciliation and I feel as though the other party is persisting in wrong or hurtful behaviour.
I find it very hard to forgive myself, honestly. I suppose holding oneself to a higher standard than everyone else is at its root pride, but it sure is difficult to shake.
wow, there's a tough question. I'm going to steal if for justice and compassion this week.
I heard a great talk on forgiveness once from this super brilliant Italian fellow in Genova. He talked about how sometimes words get translated via meaning, and sometimes via sound. And so with "forgive", the second part, "give", comes from the latin "to give" which is to say, "donare". But the first part, the for, is transliterated, or carried across by sound--so the lating "per" becomes the english "for". And this doesn't help us get the meaning very well. because the latin "per" is talking about "completely, altogether". so it's sort of "super give"
And what stops me from that? Moslty just my still being fairly small, and fairly self centered, egocentric, jingoistic, etc.
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