A friend asked my opinion on forgiveness. My answer was long and sufficiently general that I figure I’ll share it here:
I very much feel that some kind of contrition has to occur for there to be forgiveness. I don’t buy into the Christian form which is, by my understanding, saying that it’s ok the person (who needs to be forgiven) totally screwed you over and that the mean or bad or evil action doesn’t matter anymore.
My philosophy is a selfish one: I want to experience lasting happiness and to avoid suffering. I also want to help others if I can. At the very least I want to avoid causing more suffering. When someone hurts me, it’s entirely normal and reasonable that I get angry and want to hurt them in return. That said, I think that’s clearly a gut-level reaction: I want to hit back and see them suffer in the same way that I did. My experience is that the sooner I can get back in my thinking brain, the sooner I’ll be calm and happy again. I think this is true regardless of whether or not they show contrition. It makes it easier if they do … but I think that my anger is my job, not theirs, to deal with.
That said, we’re playing with different definitions of “forgive.”
I think it’s possible to “forgive” someone and still keep in mind that you can’t trust them anymore, at least in the domain where they hurt you. I certainly don’t think that we should pretend that anyone gets a magically clean slate with forgiveness. You’ve got to protect yourself, and sometimes that means staying away from someone, not doing business with them, or even involving the law to keep them away from you. If someone hurt you physically, you’ll probably have a physical reaction when you see them. That means that if you want to be happy and calm, you probably can’t see them anymore … at least until the body has settled down.
So when I talk about forgiveness, I think I mean: “giving up on the desire to hurt someone in return for how they hurt me.” For one thing, there’s no guarantee that I’ll succeed in hurting them. I might fail. I might end up hurting the wrong person. Even if I do succeed, I don’t think that it’ll really take away my suffering. I’ll just have put myself in a mindset of trying to hurt, rather than trying to be happy. The longer I stew in that anger, the worse it is for me … no matter whether I actually hurt the other person or not.
I think that forgiveness, for me, is “deciding not to be angry anymore.” This is an entirely internal decision. The question seems to me to be whether there is value for my own lasting happiness in holding on to the perfectly reasonable flash of anger that arose when someone hurt me. So yes, perhaps I won’t trust them in the future. Maybe I’ll still try to get them locked up or executed because I know that they’re a risk to me and others … but the key to forgiveness is that I need let go of the angry desire to hurt them and exact revenge.
It helps a lot that I try not to divide the world into sinners and saints anymore. We’re all messed up. We’ve all got some incredible amount of history that brought us to where we are, and none of us has the faintest idea about other people’s situation. Given that I think it’s better to not get too stuck on anger … if at all possible.
