To love at all is to be vulnerable. The only place outside Heaven where you
can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C . S . L e w i s

Most of us will probably never be faced with forgiving a murderer or rapist.
But all of us are faced daily with the need to forgive a partner, child, friend
or colleague – perhaps dozens of times in a single day. And while doing the
latter may be less difficult than the former, it is just as important. In his poem
“A Poison Tree,” William Blake shows how the smallest resentment can blossom
and bear deadly fruit:

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,

Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

The seeds of Blake’s tree are the petty grudges of everyday life. Often they are
so small that they are barely noticeable, at least at first. But even if we do not
consciously tend to them, they will germinate over time. That is why it is so
important to weed out even the most insignificant ones as soon as they take
root in us – before they can grow.
I had to learn not to hold on to grudges early in my life. My childhood
was a happy one for the most part, but I had my share of unpleasant experiences.
A sickly child, I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus (“water on the
brain”) soon after I was born, and a doctor told my mother I would never
walk. Even though this did not prove to be true – I started walking at twoand-
a-half – classmates who found out about my condition began calling me
“water‑head.” Though this probably hurt my parents more than me, the nickname
upset me a good deal too.
When I was six, I had to have a large tumor removed from my leg. This
was the first of many such operations over the next three decades. The surgery
lasted two hours, and the threat of infection – this was before the days of antibiotics,
and we lived in the backwoods of Paraguay – hung over me for days.
After my leg was stitched shut, I had to walk home from the hospital: no one
offered me crutches, let alone a wagon ride. I can still see my father’s shocked
face as I limped into our house, though he didn’t say a thing.
That was typical of my parents. We never heard them speak ill of others,
and they did not allow us to, either. Like any other parents, they struggled
with their feelings when they felt that one of us children had been mistreated,
whether by a teacher or any other adult. But they insisted that the only way to
overcome the little indignities of life was to rise above them by forgiving.
When I was fourteen, we moved to the United States. The change from a
village in the South American wilderness to a public high school in New York
was enormous. The English language was perhaps the biggest barrier for me,
but there were other obstacles to fitting in: I felt awkward and clumsy, and on
top of that I was naturally shy. In short, I had very little self-esteem.
Every child wants to be recognized by his peers, and I was no different. I
desperately wanted to be accepted, and I went out of my way to please my
new classmates. At first I was spurned, especially by the class bully. Then I
began to fight back, taunting him by talking about him behind his back and
laughing in his face when he tried to find out what I had said. Not surprisingly,
I received my share of bloody noses.
In my twenties, I dealt with more damaging feelings of rejection, when the
woman I was engaged to turned her back on me and broke off our relationship.
It was a struggle for me to let go of my hurt feelings and forgive her,
especially since I had no idea why she had ended the relationship. Later I
convinced myself that it was my fault that things had gone wrong, because I
was such an awkward misfit, and I had to forgive myself too.
A few years later, my hopes were dashed again, when another woman broke
off our relationship after several months. My world crashed around me as I
tried to make sense of what had happened. What had I done wrong?
That second time it took even longer to battle my emotions and rebuild
my confidence. But my father assured me that in time I would find the right
partner, and a few years down the road he proved to be right.
Perhaps the hardest thing about practicing for-giveness in daily life is
that it requires us to confront the reality of our feelings toward those we know
best. It is difficult enough to forgive a stranger we might never see again, but it
is much harder to forgive a person we love and trust. Our family, our friends,
the people we feel closest to at work – they not only know our strengths, but
also our weaknesses, our frailties, and our quirks. And when they turn on us,
we are often left reeling. At least that’s what Clare Stober, a former businesswoman
who is now a member of my church, experienced:
Before leaving the advertising agency I co-owned and moving to another
state, I had to settle affairs with my partner of ten years. This was complicated
by the fact that he and his wife had once been very close to me and
had been fellow church members for the past fifteen years. Over time we had
grown apart, and I felt I could no longer continue working with them.
None of our advisors wanted to tell me how best to divide our assets equitably.
I wanted to go beyond just being fair – I wanted nothing weighing on
my conscience – so I made a proposal to that effect. I thought it was a very
generous distribution. But my partner saw the whole thing differently and
stopped talking to me the day I told him of my desire to leave the business.
Unfortunately, it was two more months before I felt my tasks were sufficiently
handed over, and the transition was long, silent, lonely, and punctuated
by angry words.
We still had not signed an agreement by the time I left. Lawyers had
been brought in by both sides, but they only clouded the waters. I had
wanted an outside source to arbitrate the offer, but my partner fired the arbitrator
and sought advice instead from an accountant we had worked with
for seven years.The accountant quickly real-ized that his future lay with the
partner who was continuing with the business and helped him to make my
leaving very difficult.
It took a lot of offers and counter-offers to come to a final agreement.
I won’t go into details here, but the result of their demands was that I was
made liable for one-half of the firm’s earnings for the last full year I was with
them, from January to December, even though I only received my share of
the earnings through June. I ended up paying $50,000 in taxes which they
should have paid.
When I realized what they had done, and that they had done it with
forethought and deliberation, I was so angry I could not sleep for days. I felt
they had conspired to crush me. I’ve been through a lot of difficult times in
my life, but I have never spent so many sleepless nights, tossing and turning,
consumed by anger and deep hurt. When I thought about what had happened
during the day, the waves of anger that welled up within me were so
powerful they would leave me shaking.
To make matters worse, a friend asked me, “What are you so upset
about? It’s only money.” That made me even more angry. Sure it was “only
money,” and I didn’t really need it at the time. But it was a lot of money, and
it was mine, and they had cheated me. Obviously, the IRS could not be put
off, though, so I wrote the check and hoped in a God of vengeance.
My journey to forgiveness took years. It was like crossing a stream by
hopping from one stone to another. I took the first step as I was driving
alone one night, listening to the radio, and a song came on about forgiveness.
The performer explained the lyrics before he sang it. He talked about
how we keep our hurts in a cupboard in our hearts and repeatedly bring
them out to turn them over and replay them. We examine our hurts over
and over, and nurse our self-pity.
There was a surprise at the end of the song: it talked about how we think
we’re imprisoning those who have hurt us by not forgiving them, but if we
look at the face of the person locked in the tower, we’ll see that it is our own.
At that point I knew, at least intellectually, that forgiveness was the key to
getting on with my life.
I took a second step when I began to examine my own feelings and realized
that I was more hurt by my partner’s cheating me out of money, than
by his slander. It began to bother me that I had let money have such a hold
on my life and feelings.
Another step came about a year later when I was embarking on a new
chapter of my life in a new location. I was talking with a friend who knew
my old partner, and she asked me if I had ever forgiven him. I quickly said,
“Sure.” She wasn’t satisfied, but pressed further, explaining to me how important
forgiveness was for both of our futures, even if we no longer worked
together. She said that by not forgiving him, I was somehow binding him
and not letting him get on with his life – not to mention that I was hurting
my own future in the same way. I asked my friend, “So how does forgiveness
work, then?” She described it as a gift – we can will to forgive as much as
we want, but ultimately it must be given to us. Reluctantly, I began to will
myself to forgive – though in retrospect I see that I still felt it was my partner
who should be asking for forgiveness, not me.
The final step came later, during a time of deep spiritual introspection. I
was trying to clear up everything in my life that had gone wrong up to that
point, and make a clean slate before God. Frankly, I was getting nowhere –
I thought I had nothing to clear up.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Sure, I had been wronged, but I had
done more than an equal share of wrongs in my life – against my partner,
and against others. I sat down and wrote him a letter, telling him how much
bitterness I had carried, and asking his forgiveness. I felt such a release as I
licked that envelope and put the letter in the mail. No matter what their
answer, I could now be free of my anger.
About a month later, the same friend who had advised me to forgive
happened to call me and asked me if I had been able to do so. I told her that
I had, and that I now felt free. She answered, “I thought so. I’ve noticed a
new freedom in him, too.”