Contributor: Rather, I have a question for you, Vladika. If we are ready to ask for forgiveness and the situation is somehow sorting itself out, but we can see that it is inappropriate, silly, embarrassing from the point of view of the person before whom we are guilty, how should we behave in that case? Should we nevertheless push ourselves forward with our request for forgiveness?
Metropolitan Anthony: You know, I cannot give a sensible answer. I can only say that you can ask for forgiveness, or forgive, only when you see that the other person is capable of receiving your words. Otherwise it will be taken as offence or humiliation: ‘I forgive you’ or ‘Forgive me’, as groveling in the eyes of people who are not ready. Therefore asking and granting forgiveness has to be done With discernment. It is not enough to say ‘I forgive you’ and ‘Forgive me’ in order for it to bear fruit, as the wound is sometimes too deep for it to be healed simply by your words. Sometimes the person has not grown sufficiently to receive those words, so that sometimes you have to endure, wait for the person to grow in order to ask him for forgiveness. Of course we have to take preliminary measures. You cannot just sit and wait for him to change by a miracle. You can undermine, if you can put it like that, his anger or grief or hurt. Or you can prepare the way for the person to be able to forgive, placing him in a preparatory stage for this. It would be too easy to walk up to the person and to say, ‘Forgive me, I have hurt you,’ or, ‘I forgive you.’
Very often it seems to us that it is enough to think that I am guilty, I shall ask for forgiveness, and that person must forgive me since I am asking to be forgiven- or vice versa. But here a careful preparation is needed. Sometimes the person is so wounded, not in what you are asking but in his whole life. Your hurt, what you have done to this person, is simply the conclusion of a whole tendency in life. And therefore for this person to be able to forgive you, it is necessary for a whole area of life to be healed. I remember one person who could not forgive anyone or anything in essence, because she was so wounded that she could not touch her wound. This elderly lady had been sent at the age of 14 to a concentration camp. When, at the age of 18 or 20, she was released, she was a tramp and all the hurts that thereafter accumulated were piling up on top of all this. To heal that period was not so easy.
So that, sometimes, I think that a person can say honestly: ‘I cannot forgive you. I would like to, but I cannot because I do not have the strength of forgiveness Within me, this impulse of strength which is necessary, or I cannot receive the forgiveness you are offering me because it requires openness. I cannot allow myself this openness; if I open up, blood will flow to death.’ Here it is necessary to give help to the person, sometimes for years, not necessarily by someone who is involved in the matter but by all the people around who need to assume responsibility so that he could, step by step, forgive at least something. Sometimes there remains a parcel of unforgiveness here or there, which the person cannot at the moment forgive, that can only be resolved perhaps after his death. That is, I am certain that it will be resolved, though maybe not before death.
+Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), from Coming Closer to Christ: Confession and Forgiveness, Questions People Ask
No comments:
Post a Comment