September_11

Homily for September 11, 2005
Liturgical Year A-Cycle I
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Dcn. Ray Alcouffe
Topic: Forgiveness
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Please forgive me? or, Will you forgive me? These are the words that many times, we would so much like to hear from someone who has wronged us or caused us pain. Yet, most of the time, we don’t hear these words and so, we think that we don’t have the opportunity to forgive. Therefore, we should just live with the pain and get on with our lives. Wrong! We do not forgive because someone asks us to; we forgive because we want to heal the pain that is within us. On a higher level, forgiving one another is essential for our salvation - it connects us to the great act of reconciliation that our Lord accomplished on the cross - “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). So, how does this forgiveness business work?

Perhaps, this can serve as an illustration: Billy was a scrawny little kid. It was his first day in mid school as a seventh grader. Everett (Bull) Jones and his pack of friends greeted him in the hallway. They took an immediate dislike to Billy. Bull, being the bully he was, slammed Billy into the lockers for no reason. Well, Billy was humiliated and scared. From then on, he tried to avoid Bull and his friends - but to no avail. Each encounter meant that Billy would again be slammed into the lockers, wall, or whatever. Billy got angrier and angrier each time. Yet, Billy loved Jesus and he remembered something about Jesus saying that you have to forgive someone who wrongs you 77 times. So, Billy ignored his pain and began keeping count while he plotted a way to get even. He prepared for his revenge by secretly working out and learning the art of self-defense. He was slammed the 57th time, then the 71st and finally came the magical 78th. Billy was by now super-prepared. He caught Bull in a vicious hammerlock, slammed his head into the lockers, put the stunned bully on the ground, and made him grovel for his release before he let him up. For Billy, revenge was so sweet and no one dared cross him again.

So goes the fantasy most of us imagine when we have been wronged by another person; we will find a way to get even! There are so many fallacies here. The most obvious is that if Billy had understood Jesus’ exhortation to forgive 77 times, he would have had to wait forever, for that is what Jesus meant by 77. More importantly, forgiveness does not mean to continue to suffer abuse either physical or emotional. Forgiveness does not mean we ignore the pain inside us or pretend it does not exist. Forgiveness does not mean we wait until we can get revenge. Forgiveness does not mean we let bygones be bygones and resume the relationship we had with the person who hurt us.

So, what is forgiveness then? What relationship does it have to vengeance, justice, and reconciliation? (Lewis Smedes, “The Art of Forgiving”). If we get down to it, when we are hurt, we have only two options as an active response: vengeance or forgiving. We must go down one path or the other. There is no middle ground. Really, what is vengeance? Vengeance is our pleasure in seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Vengeance is personal satisfaction but it cannot and thus will not heal us. Only forgiveness can do that. Forgiving is a healing process that we decide to pursue within ourselves. In forgiving, we perform a basic transformation inside our inner self. This happens when we feel a strong wish to be free from the pain that glues us to a hurtful moment in the past. We forgive when we are ready to move toward a future unshackled from a painful past we cannot undo. This happens so much in families. Forgiveness does not depend upon the request from the person who hurt us, it only depends upon us - it is an interior conversion. Why should I forgive? Because I want to be healed from my pain, my very real pain. I am a person with dignity and I see my self worth. I do not want this pain to continue to drag me down.

How do I forgive? Lewis Smedes gives three steps:
(1) We must come around to seeing the person who hurt us as being human. When someone hurts us, we only see the sin that has been committed against us and the person becomes that sin (liar, abuser, drunk, cheat, bully). We cannot forgive the person who is the sin, we can only forgive the deed he did; and though he is completely blamable for his actions, we come to realize he is also a human being like we are, weak and fallible.
(2) We surrender our right to get even, our desire for vengeance after we have been wronged or wounded. No human right seems more sacred than the right to get even with the scum who wronged us. We want to make her feel as much pain as she made us feel. We want the satisfaction of watching him turn and burn slowly on the rotisserie of remorse. In order to forgive, we must give this up. On the other hand, forgiving never surrenders the claims of justice. Justice is secured when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another. Thus, where vengeance is personal satisfaction, justice is objective moral accounting. In giving up vengeance, we give up our personal pleasure in seeing the wrongdoer punished but we still pursue justice.
(3) We revise our feelings toward the person we forgive. This is the hardest part - for it means the same thing as to love our enemy. However, we must transform our hate into something positive, something that approaches agape, a love in which we wish, reluctantly at first that good things may come the reprobates way. If we can reach this point, it means that we are made aware of partnering with God in a modest miracle of healing our self.

Forgiveness is self-healing; a special kind of soul doctoring that makes us a well person again. How often must we do this - as many times as it takes. We are all amateurs at forgiving and the same hurts may pop up again and again and thus forgiveness needs to continue. Our motivation - Jesus is telling us that God has forgiven us infinitely more than we need to forgive one another. To forgive is our stepping on the road to salvation. We may never hear the words “Please, forgive me,” but we know how to go through the process of forgiving anyway for our own sakes.

Finally, does forgiveness mean reconciliation or reunion? Do things or does our relationship go back to normal once we forgive? No. Reconciliation or reunion demands a price and that price is honesty. The currency of honesty is remorse (or contrition) and conversion. We don’t accept someone back into relationship with us unless the price has been paid. The deeper the hurt or the greater the pain, the longer the process of forgiveness and any possibility of reconciliation takes.

As Catholics, we recognize this as the process of the sacrament of reconciliation. Forgiveness from God comes first and that all happens without our having to do anything. Reconciliation is our response and we have to pay the price by being converted from our sins before reunion with God takes place. Then, with God’s grace that will happen.