How can forgiveness help me to see in a new way?

I am always amazed by coincidences when their timing is just so perfect we can’t help but think that God has had a big hand in them. It happened to me on Thursday of last week.

I’d been having a conversation with someone about forgiveness; and in particular how important it is, for our own sake, that we find a way to forgive others who have wronged us — irrespective of whether they have repented or not, nor the severity of the wrong. Then, not two hours later, the following email arrived. It really affirmed, for me, the conversation we had, and helped to clarify my thinking.

How can forgiveness help me to see in a new way?

As long as you can deal with evil by some other means than forgiveness, you will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin. You will keep projecting it over there, fearing it over there and attacking it over there, instead of “gazing” on it within yourself and “weeping” over it within all of us (see Zechariah 12:10).

The longer you gaze, the more you will see your own complicity in and profit from the sin of others, even if it is the satisfaction of feeling you are on higher moral ground than other people.

Forgiveness is probably the only human action that demands three new “seeings” at the same time:

I must see God in the other who has offended me,
I must access God in myself to forgive major grievances, and
I must meet God in a very new way that is larger than as an enforcer or a judge.

Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 194

Mantra:
Jesus, help me absorb
and transform evil.

The email was one of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. I came across them recently, and subscribed straight away. If you would like to subscribe too, and I can recommend them, the website is here: The Center for Action and Contemplation. It won’t cost you anything.