Okay, there's are vast empty spaces of gray matter over which these thoughts have been roaming, so let's get to it.
To start, let's examine how spiritual freedom compares with how we view personal freedom. The latter has been most simply defined to be the freedom to do as we choose, and many would add the importance of bearing the consequences of our actions; others insist that a yet more mature view is that it is the freedom to do what we believe to be right. We could have a nice ideological argument regarding which of these we should really embrace, but such a debate becomes a side argument distracting us from the matter of spiritual freedom. While this probably lies closer to the second idea than the first, it might be more fully described as the power to choose and to carry out God's plan for our lives.
There are many things that keep us from consistently making this sort of choice in all areas of our lives. One is our rejection of what Scripture and the Church reveal to be God's plan for our holiness. Another is our insistence on seeing part of our lives as secular and separate from the spiritual part of our lives. Either of these may be a matter of freedom rejected rather than unavailable, but either may instead be a result of spiritual bondage. There are many other things that keep us from spiritual freedom, and it is good for believers to strive to live in the freedom which Christ has won for us.
The
Unbound deliverance model promotes five keys to spiritual freedom. Imagine, if you will, a door with five locks on it. Once this door is open, we can choose to walk through it. However, if any of those five locks continue to secure it, we cannot open the door even a little bit. We have no spiritual freedom whatsoever until all five locks have been opened by the Five Keys. These are:
- Repentance and Faith: Until we have accepted that we need a Savior and put our faith in him, we will remain bound to our sin and cannot be spiritually free. To the degree to which we have sin in our lives of which we have not repented, we will not be spiritually free.
- Forgiveness: Mostly of us have learned that holding onto grudges is emotionally toxic for us, but it can be spiritually binding to us, too, even when we have every right to our pain and anger.
- Renunciation: Once we start living in the kingdom of God, spiritual influences that have entered our lives in a variety of ways have no authority to stay except our permission. Yet we often fail to renounce these influences and thereby kick them out of our lives.
- Authority: Renunciation works because we are living under the authority of Jesus, in whose name we renounce those lies and influences that otherwise keep us bound.
- The Father's Blessing: Our bondage often keeps us from receiving the blessing that God longs to lavish upon us in his boundless love. God isn't a limited resource who disposes of those blessings or gives them to someone else; when we are set free from our bonds, he pours them out to us in abundance.
Again, if four of these five areas are unlocked, we are not 80% free; the door of spiritual freedom remains locked. Each key is important and worthy of further expansion, but the remainder of this post will focus on the key of forgiveness. This is partly because it's the one key on which I've already focused and reflected the most. (Seriously, this will be the
47th blog post on which I've used the Forgiveness tag.)
To counter the mistaken notions that can interfere with forgiving another the deep hurt that they've done to us requires clarity about what forgiveness is and isn't. Generally, my back-to-back reflections from my last round of therapy regarding
what forgiveness isn't and
what it is still seem to ring with truth and applicability even several years later. Until we get rid of our wrong ideas of forgiveness - or detach it from peripherally related concepts - there isn't any point in further discussing its importance, as there are many reasons why these not-exactly-forgiveness-things may be undesireable, whereas forgiving is always good. And the image
in a follow-on post of how we cling to our hurt as if we are thereby protecting ourselves from it also still seems apt. In terms of specific examples, the link to my 47 posts (so far) on forgiveness includes many, many others in which I've grappled to apply the lofty ideals and general principles of forgiveness and mercy practically, toward others or toward myself. But the most immediate reason I find myself writing Yet Another
Post on Forgiveness is that it has come up again in a way that makes it worth revisiting and articulating in this fresh context. My Unbound prayer session from several weeks ago is proving effective, and I believe that is in part because of how it helped me recognize new ways in which I needed to embrace and apply this key.
Of course, to tell someone who has been deeply hurt - especially someone who is just learning to take care of themselves - that forgiveness needs to be part of their healing can sound bone-headedly wrong on several levels. First, it can feel as if we're piling another injury onto the existing ones.
What do you mean so-and-so did this unconscionable thing to me and to heal from it I have to forgive
them? Why don't you just throw another ton of burdens onto my broken back? (S)he's
the one responsible for my hurt, so don't tell me I
need to forgive. I just need to protect myself from them." This is where understanding what forgiveness isn't is so important; it doesn't mean opening ourselves up to more hurt at the hands of the person who has already hurt us. That primary definition that my therapist helped me reach - making a decision to let go of the hurt (repeat as necessary) - is pretty fundamentally practical, though. Think about it: how do we expect to be rid of hurt that we refuse to let go of? When we add in the related idea of wanting what is truly best for the other and we have a pretty complete way to evaluate whether we're there yet.
There are some things that can just seem wrong to forgive, as if forgiving something is at least partly equivalent to condoning it. The thing is, there are many actions we should never, ever condone. In our unforgiveness, we often imagine that we're merely withholding approval of their actions by holding the person who hurt us bound to their offense. (
When you forgive men's sins they are forgiven, when you hold them bound they are held bound - Jn 20: 23). We do not understand that the unforgiveness simultaneously binds us to our own hurt.
But even once we accept, even half-heartedly, that forgiving someone who has hurt us deeply would be a positive thing for us, it can still feel an awful lot like an impossible task. When we've been deeply wounded by someone - in their brokenness, by their intentional choices or, often, both - forgiving them can seem beyond our capacity. And sometimes the circumstances of our lives can make any tangible expression of our forgiveness to the offending person impossible.
Very early in my faith journey I learned of how restrictive unforgiveness can be in our Christian walk. As a result, one of my earliest experiences of realizing there was someone who hurt me deeply that I needed to forgive involved several of the scenarios above. I've
previously written about this initial experience of forgiving my dad, who had taken his life a decade before I realized that I needed to forgive his alcoholism and other dysfunctional parenting, as well as his suicide. Over time, forgiving him became possible with God's help (further details are in that linked post). This helped me as recently as last fall, when I was reunited with some of his family and was able to see him through their eyes, which were not permanently filtered by having grown up in his alcoholic shadow. So when no other act of forgiveness is available to us or within our power, the one thing that we can do for someone who has hurt us is to pray in this way, that God will help us forgive and bless them in the ways they most need.
There turned out to be something else for which I needed to forgive Dad. I wouldn't learn this until I was in my mid-thirties and in mandatory therapy. It wasn't a suppressed memory, but as I worked on my own issues I began to see an incident from my childhood in clearer context and in terms of how it helped set me up for the abuse I received at the hands of
my stepfather, who was an even
greater challenge to forgive.
But despite these deep and long-lingering wounds, the repercussions of which I did not understand for the longest time, far and away the hardest person for me to forgive has been myself. I've used the expression de la mode for this concept; how I've really come to think of it is more like accepting God's forgiveness for myself. One of the things that helps me forgive those who have hurt me is what my therapists made clear from early on: all abuse is, at its root, self-abuse. That doesn't make it okay or excuse it away, but knowing that helps keep me from being harder on others than I should. I've been blessed with a small insight into the damage that sin does to the sinner's soul, and know from my experience that any hurtful act a person does ultimately hurts them worse than those around them. My Unbound prayer session helped me to understand the degree of superiority that refuses to fully accept God's forgiveness because
I should have been better than that. In one sense it's true: I knew better. That's what made my sin mortal. But God forgives even mortal sin, and I rejoice when I see a sinner receive God's grace -
unmerited favor, after all; do I really believe as I profess that not one of us deserves it at all? Do I think, then, that I could deserve it even less than that? Thinking so was indeed evidence of the arrogance that I renounced, which was a real spiritual influence in my life; perhaps now I am more open to grace because I have rejected the contradiction that
I should have been expected to merit the grace that no one does.
(I continue to wonder at this approach we have to Christianity: that its goal is to get us to a point at which we become good enough to merit God's love and grace.)
In
Unbound: A Practical Guide to Deliverance, Neal Lozano points out a link between forgiveness and blessing that I had never considered before. It is found in careful reading of the familiar
parable of the unforgiving servant. We understand pretty easily that the servant did not appreciate the great favor his master did him in forgiving his massive debt, but Neal points out that the servant
did not ask his master to forgive his debt; he requested only additional time to repay him. Of course, his master wisely recognized that the debt was too large to ever be repaid, and bestowed upon his servant a mercy for which he did not ask. It is as if the servant
asked to remain indebted, and when this request was met with greater generosity than he could imagine, he didn't know what to do with it. He certainly did not receive it with a heart of gratitude. I wonder if we don't often approach God for forgiveness in the same way:
Let me make amends, or
Let me avoid this from now on or, ultimately,
Let me remain somehow bound by (and to) my debt and sin. We don't know how to receive the grace that is greater than we can even imagine (let alone request).
Especially for cradle Catholics, I suspect that this approach to our own forgiveness, and therefore to our forgiveness of others, is rooted in the element of penance which is part of our sacrament of Reconciliation. Our earliest formation in this wonderful sacrament almost invariably omits - or, worse, misrepresents - an important piece of theology. The element of penance is an important one for demonstrating that the penitent is truly sorry for what they have done wrong. The Church then uses this evidence as a condition to declaring that the confessed sins are absolved. Just consider the abuse that could run even more rampant in the absence of such an element in this sacrament. But as a result, from an early age we conclude that God does not forgive us unless we have served our time in the penalty box, and we thereby also learn to expect reparations commensurate with the hurt we have received as a condition to forgiving others. The parable represents what might be the best indicator of whether we have sincerely repented and received the mercy and blessing of God: have we likewise forgiven others their debt to us? But how could the Church ever make this our penance? Doesn't our forgiveness of others need to be offered as freely as God offers it to us?
Oh, but hold on just a second there . . . you might be thinking.
Isn't God putting a condition on his forgiveness by requiring us to forgive, and especially to forgive such a great wrong as I have received from whoever it is that has hurt us so deeply?
And doesn't that impose an obligation on me to forgive rather beyond offering it freely? There are at least two things wrong with these objections. One is how little we understand the harmfulness of our own actions. I wonder whether the burning fire of Purgatory as we understand it will consist mainly of the pain of clearly seeing for the first time all the hurtful results of our own decisions. But that may not be the biggest mistake we make in considering this parable. I know it concludes with,
So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. (Mt 18: 35). But what if the reality is not so much that God makes the mercy he offers conditional on the mercy we offer others, but rather that the mercy we offer others flows like an unstoppable river from the mercy we accept? I am convinced God is always the first mover of all mercy and grace, which he offers freely and with out any condition to all. Our forgiveness of others, then, is not a condition of God's grace to us but the natural result of our having received it. The degree to which we eagerly seek to forgive others reflects how completely we ourselves have accepted God's grace and mercy.
Now, sometimes the path of wanting what is best for the person who has hurt me - in mercy and grace - includes holding them accountable, not as a condition of forgiveness but for their own sake. In the case of receiving forgiveness, perhaps this accountability is psychologically inextricable from the entire process, but that is a different thing from granting forgiveness to others. And sometimes the only way I can put into practice any desire for what is best for my offender is to pray for them while I also pray for God to set me free from the unforgiveness I bear. And as I've discussed elsewhere, forgiveness is often not a one-and-done deal: the act of letting go of our right to cling to our injury is often a reiterative effort, particularly in response to our deepest hurts.
But above all, we must remember God is patient and loving and merciful with us in helping us forgive, in teaching us to be merciful as he is. We should be patient with ourselves and remain determined to seek his help when forgiveness continues to seem utterly beyond our capacity.
