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The Forgiveness that Comes the Hardest

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By Rev. A. Powell Davies D.D.
April 23, 1950

Most people learn the meaning of forgiveness from their parents--especially the mother. The young child, not quite certain why it is that something he has done has made his mother disappointed or angry, is anxious to put the matter right. He wants to feel himself safe in his mother's affection. So. in one way or another, he seeks a reconciliation. This is his first experience of forgiveness.

Presently, owing to the influence of the father, the matter becomes more complicated. The child may feel that when he loses his mother's approval he can soon regain it, but in the case of his father reassurance may not be so prompt. In this way, the child may come to identify himself partly with the response of the mother and partly with that of the father, so that one parent frees or indulges him emotionally and the other parent restrains him.

At any rate, this would be the simplest way of putting the matter. Too simple, I am afraid, since the influence of neither parent is consistent; nor is the emotional development of a child as plainly traceable as some of the textbooks would lead us to think. Nevertheless, these are useful generalizations if we use them cautiously, since they reveal to us something of the way in which conscience is formed and how it happens that an individual has standards of behavior which he can neither live up to nor renounce. From one parent or from both--or from the interactive influence of the two parents upon him--the child, without really knowing why, begins to think of some actions as likely to gain approval and other actions as certain to be disapproved. But since he never succeeds in restricting himself to the approvable actions only, he finds himself from time to time in need of toleration or indulgence, or of what he learns to call forgiveness.

When he moves out from the home into a wider social environment--the playground, the school, the homes of his friends--he discovers that this attitude of approval and disapproval is encountered wherever he goes. So that it becomes implanted within himself. Some things he can do and be glad he has done them; other things cause him unhappiness, self-criticism, remorse.

Sooner or later, he learns that this is not an accident: not fortuitous; it is part of the nature of things, decreed by God. And he thinks of God as a good deal like his father but much more powerful, and yet at the same time not unlike his mother; so that the same God who condemns him for what is disapproved may also be asked to reinstate him or--as he says--forgive him.

Out of all this, the child as he grows becomes aware of what he calls his conscience and sometimes is much perplexed by it. If his development is wholesome, his conscience will be such that his reason reinforces it; that is to say, he will consider on his own account to what extent the judgments of his conscience make sense and improve his life and its relationships, and will accept those judgments; and at the same time he will reject his guilt-feelings wherever he sees them to be something left over from his infancy and irrational. But this is not a thing he will do easily. If his parents have been unwise or estranged and quarrelsome, or lacking in affection, or overindulgent or in other ways inadequate, the grown child may suffer for it all his life. His conscience may never be wholesome. Or the same thing may happen through some defect in himself. And thus, when we speak of conscience we are discussing something that is far from simple. In some people, it works straightforwardly and in an open and forthright way. These people are mature. But in other people it works quite deviously and does much harm. These people have been impeded in their emotional development; no matter how bright their minds, they are immature.

When it comes to forgiveness, therefore, which all of us throughout our lives must both seek for ourselves and from time to time grant to other people, those who are mature manage it fairly easily but those who are immature are constantly in difficulties with it. They are in difficulties because their own consciences are confused, and the confusion they find within themselves they project out into the lives of other people.

Let me illustrate. A year or so ago, a lady came into my office hoping that I could help her to find her way out of a rather tangled situation. Some injuries had been done to her, she said, which she had freely forgiven. The people who had done these injuries were very hateful people: she was sure of that but nevertheless she had forgiven them. She was acting generously and wanted to go on acting generously. On the surface it was a very creditable story. The lady had done well. But if she had done well, why was she disturbed about it? Why were there tears of anger in her eyes? Why was she seeking help?

The truth was, of course, that she had not done well at all. The forgiveness expressed in her behavior was not a forgiveness that came from the heart. She hated these people. And why did she hate them? Was it for what they had done to her? Not really. This kind of hatred never persists because of what other people do: it is rooted in what one does oneself. This lady hated her relatives and friends because of her self-hate. She could not forgive them because she could not forgive herself.
Which, after a while, was what I mentioned to her. "Why don't you forgive the person most concerned?" I asked. "Isn't the trouble that you can't forgive yourself?" And then she told me of her childhood, a very unhappy one, and of the tortures of conscience--of a confused and sick conscience--which she had never been able to make well. She was in part the victim of her upbringing--as most such people are. But she was also to blame herself--if one may call it blame. She had fortified herself within her own resentments--resentments, however, which she had learned to conceal. She was outwardly sweet and gracious; inwardly she was seething with hostility. She could not forgive herself for being herself, and for not being better than she was. And she represents thousands of other people--not only thousands but millions.

These people, as I have indicated, have become what they are largely through an unfortunate childhood conditioning. For that reason, they should be understood sympathetically. Yet sympathy alone will never cure them. They have to gain insight into their own invalidism; they have to understand that in their cases conscience is not a guide to spiritual health, but only a mechanism for gaining approval. They have to know that a more wholesome state of conscience is possible. And they have to begin by forgiving themselves--which is the hardest kind of forgiveness.

Such people are often very good people--that is to say, in overt behavior. If they are cruel or intolerant, it is always in a quite disguised and very subtle way. If they do other people an injury, they always make it seem like a kindness: something generous--on the surface--which is nevertheless intended as a condescension, or even a humiliation. The rectitude of their outer lives conceals an inner lie.

As I have said, this is not a simple condition--or one that is easy to describe. The extent to which I have described it this morning gives only the barest indications. Nor has it been possible to describe it even to this extent until rather recent years, for in this matter we are much more indebted to modern psychology than we are to religion, or at any rate, to the religion of yesterday. Nevertheless, the condition itself is not new; and neither is its importance. It was this self-hatred, this self-accusing unforgiveness, that gave impulse to heresy-hunts and inquisitions, and to all the harshness perpetrated in the name of religion. It has done the same thing in the life of families. It has destroyed the harmony of human relationships of every sort.

Anyone who wishes to see what its effect was in the Victorian Era can do so by reading Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh. Or if they wish to come a little closer to our time they can read The Forsyte Saga. Or, for a thoroughly modern and very clear and useful treatment they can go to Rabbi Liebman's Peace of Mind, particularly the third chapter.
There is no forgiveness--none whatever--that comes so difficult as the forgiveness wherewith we forgive ourselves. I sometimes think it ought to have been included in the Lord's Prayer. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive ourselves--as well as those who trespass against us." It is not too difficult --not usually--to forgive those who trespass against us. However deeply we resent an injury at first, after a while we are ready to forgive it. Our trouble is that it is not the injury done to us, but the injury we do that is hard to forgive. We can forgive others, in one measure or another, but we cannot forgive ourselves. The person who has done us a wrong we are not embarrassed to meet; but the person to whom we have done a wrong --we cannot forgive him because we cannot forgive ourselves. He is a constant reminder of what we want to avoid remembering--that we did a wrong. So we project the wrong we did out on to him; and such is the ingenuity of our minds that we provide arguments to persuade ourselves that we did not do the wrong; it was the other way around; he did it.

But what it comes to is quite plain when we are willing to look at it. We cannot forgive ourselves. And the reason, of course, is that we do not want to admit that we need forgiveness. We want to justify ourselves. Not outwardly, perhaps. No, but in the last analysis. For we do not want to face ourselves as we really are.

And whether this is a condition brought upon us by our childhood conditioning, producing in us a muddled conscience, or whether it is something that we bring about ourselves--or both, and I think that it is often both--what we are up against is that we hate ourselves. And so we project our self-hate out into the world, out to other people.
And from this--or so I increasingly think--comes more unhappiness, more sickness of soul, than from anything else in the world. It is quite frequently from self-hate that people commit suicide. But there is also a self-killing that goes on in day to day existence: a sort of chronic suicide. People kill off a part of their own nature--the best part. And go on killing it off. Because they do so, all their relationships have something of death in them. They kill off the kindliness in other people, the natural friendliness that is offered to them, the spontaneities that make life joyous and bountiful. Wherever they go, these people, they are killers of the soul. Yet, there is nothing that they do to other people that is anything like as evil as what they do to themselves. Human beings are not like serpents, immune to their own poison: they can never poison others as severely as they do themselves.

 

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