The path to forgiveness always begins with pain. You have been hurt, or else one of your loved ones has. Or, as in the case of Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza, one million of your countrymen have.
Immaculée’s Fight to Forgive
This woman had to wrestle with anger and hatred to a degree that most of us cannot even imagine. In her memoir, Left to Tell, she recounts the unspeakable experience of listening to a gang of murderers laughing as they ransacked the room adjacent to the tiny bathroom where she was hiding with seven other women.
There were at least forty men in the house on this occasion, and, along with their evil laughter, their shouts and jeers sounded drunk, their chanting even more vicious than usual: “Kill the Tutsis big and small…kill them one and kill them all. Kill them!”
Immaculée cursed them, wishing that they would burn in hell. The wardrobe that she had urged the Protestant minister in whose home they were hiding to position in front of the bathroom door banged against that door as the men jostled it. Covering her ears, she prayed that the God Who had inspired them to put the wardrobe there would keep it there. God, please. Don’t let them move it. Save us, Lord!
That was when Immaculée’s inner battle began in earnest. She seemed to hear an ugly voice whispering in her head: “Why are you calling on God? Do you not have as much hatred in your heart as the killers do? Are you not as guilty of hatred as they are? You wished them dead. You even wished that you could kill them yourself! You prayed that God would make them suffer and make them burn in hell.”
She could hear the killers on the other side of the door, and she again begged God to make them go away, but the voice interrupted her. “Don’t bother calling on God, Immaculée; He knows that you are a liar. You lie every time you pray to Him to say that you love Him. Did not God create us all in His image? How can you love God while hating so many of His creatures?”
Immaculée suddenly found her thoughts paralyzed. She knew that the demon in her head was right — that she was lying to God every time she prayed to Him. So overwhelmed was she, in fact, with hatred for the people responsible for the genocide that she had a hard time breathing. She tried praying for the killers but could not continue, convinced as she was that they deserved to die for all the unutterably evil crimes they had committed against so many innocent souls.
She asked God how it was even possible for her to forgive the people who were trying to kill her, the people who had most likely already slaughtered her friends and family? The idea of forgiveness made no sense; she offered to pray for the victims instead, for those who had been brutally attacked, mutilated, even murdered. She was willing enough to pray for the widows and orphans, to pray for justice. “God,” she said, “I will ask You to punish those wicked men, but I cannot forgive them — I just can’t.”
Finally, she heard the killers leaving the bedroom, then the house, and then they were walking away down the road, their singing growing fainter and fainter.
Her prayers became those of relief. She thanked God for saving them, and for giving her the idea to put the wardrobe in front of the bathroom door. She wondered where the killers were headed off to, then she began praying for her loved ones: “Please look over my mother, dear God; she worries so much about us. Watch over my father; he can be so stubborn….”
But her prayers felt hollow. A battle had commenced in her soul, and she sensed the hypocrisy of, as she later described it, “praying to a God of love with a heart full of hatred.”
She tried again, this time forcing herself to ask God to forgive the killers, but deep down she could not believe that they deserved mercy. She was in anguish. When she tried to pray for them, she felt like she was praying for the devil. Finally, she felt inspired to beg of God the grace to forgive — “Please open my heart, Lord,” she pleaded, “and show me how to forgive. I’m not strong enough to overcome my hatred. They have wronged us all so much! My hatred is so heavy that it could crush me. Touch my heart, Lord, and show me how to forgive.”
She struggled with the dilemma for hours on end, praying late into the night, through the entirety of the three days following. In fact, she prayed all week, scarcely taking any food or water. She was only vaguely aware of the passing of time and could not remember when or for how long she had slept.
It was during this period of excruciating interior struggle, that Immaculée one night heard screaming not far from the house and then the wailing of a baby. From these hellish sounds, she understood that the killers must have slain a mother and left her infant to die in the street. The child screamed all night, but by morning its cries were feeble and sporadic, and by that evening, it had fallen silent. She heard dogs snarling nearby and shivered at the thought of how that poor child’s life had ended. She prayed to God to receive its innocent soul, and then asked Him, “How can I forgive people who would do such a thing to a baby?”
That was when Immaculée heard His answer, “as clearly as if we’d been sitting in the same room”; He said to her: “You are all My children…and the baby is with Me now.” In that simple sentence, Immaculée’s bleeding heart heard the answer to the prayer she had been immersed in for days. Here is how she describes the realization that came to her in that instant:
The killers were like children. Yes, they were barbaric creatures who would still have to be punished severely for their actions, but they were still children. They were cruel, vicious, and dangerous, as kids sometimes can be, but nevertheless, they were children. They saw, but didn’t understand the terrible harm they’d inflicted. They’d blindly hurt others without thinking, they’d hurt their Tutsi brothers and sisters, they’d hurt God — and they didn’t understand how badly they were hurting themselves. Their minds had been infected with the evil that had spread across the country, but their souls weren’t evil. Despite their atrocities, they were children of God, and I could forgive a child, although it would not be easy…especially when that child was trying to kill me.
In God’s eyes, the killers were part of family, deserving of love and forgiveness. I knew that I couldn’t ask God to love me if I were unwilling to love His children. At that moment, I prayed for the killers, for their sins to be forgiven. I prayed that God would lead them to recognize the horrific error of their ways before their life on Earth ended — before they were called to account for their mortal sins.I held on to my father’s rosary and asked God to help me, and again I heard His voice: Forgive them; they know not what they do.
In that moment, Immaculée had taken a critical step toward forgiving the killers. Almost instantly she could feel the anger draining from her heart — in begging for the grace to align her dispositions with those she knew to be truly Christlike, she had opened her heart to God, and He had touched it with His infinite love. The experience was revolutionary. For the first time, she pitied the killers. She asked God with genuine compassion to pardon their offenses and direct their souls toward the beautiful light of His mercy and goodness.
That night she was able to pray for the first time with a clear conscience and a clean heart. That night — the first since she had taken up residence in the tiny bathroom — she slept in peace (cf. Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, 91–94).
It was only by viewing the Hutu murderers as children — selfish, misguided, bad little children — that Immaculée’s attitude towards them was able to change from one of hatred to one of compassion. But to view them, in addition, as God’s children — potential, if not actual — ah, how could unforgiveness triumph over such an outlook?
Forgiveness Was Won for All by Christ
While the path to forgiveness begins with the existence of some injury in our lives, the reality — the essence — of Christian forgiveness, as both a divine gift as well as a divine mandate — began with Christ. With His pain. With His pardon. And, as Immaculée discovered, with His prayer.
This is to say that Christian forgiveness began on Calvary. As Fr. Alban Goodier tells us:
In all the teaching and practice of Jesus nothing had been so striking, nothing, if we may so express it, so new, as His constant forgiveness. The paralytic at Capharnaum, the woman who was a sinner in Magdala, the adulteress in Jerusalem, the Samaritans who refused Him, His enemies at every turn, all these scenes had all but shocked His followers; He had seemed to them to sacrifice justice for mercy, honor for meekness, strength for peace, almost truth itself, that sin might be forgotten and the sinner might go free. Yet in His teaching He had but emphasized the lesson of His deeds. “Forgive and you shall be forgiven.” “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” “Seven times? – Seventy times seven times.” The refrain had run through all His life: “I say to you love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”
Still there was a limit even to forgiveness. In Galilee He had pronounced “Woe” on Corozain and Bethsaida; He had said that Capharnaum should go down even to hell, because they had not heard Him nor received His kingdom as they ought. Over Jerusalem, too, He had wept; Jerusalem would perish because it would not have Him. It would look for Him and it would not find Him; the day would come when there would be left of it not a stone upon a stone. On the Tuesday evening of that very week, when for the last time He had left the Temple and its battles behind Him, as He sat with His Twelve on the Mount of Olives looking down on the beauty of the city below Him, He had foretold to them the doom that was to come. He had added that one day the Son of Man would return in all His majesty and would pronounce on those who had shown themselves His enemies the sentence: “Depart from Me you cursed into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Surely now the time for the fulfillment of that prophecy had come. He had run His course. He had declared Himself, and had been declared, a king; openly at last He had claimed to be the Son of God; and while Pilate crucified Him for the first, His own people crucified Him for the second. Should He now die unavenged, unvindicated, with all this ignominy heaped upon Him, would not His death, unworthy of a king, utterly unworthy of a Son of God, prove His enemies to be right, and His own claims wrong? In the face of such a scandal, what disciple, no matter how devoted, would be able to uphold Him in the future? Moreover, what provocation could be compared to this? He had offered these men the kingdom, and they had refused it; life, and they had rejected it; light, and they had crucified Him….
If then He now came down from the Cross, if at this dramatic moment He pronounced on these His murderers the doom with which He had already threatened them, would not all posterity applaud the magnificent act of justice? Would not all the world resound with hosannas to the Son of David Who had so vindicated His own honor? Would it not be said that once more the prophecies and types had been fulfilled, the floods of Noe, Sodom and Gomorrha, the destructions in the desert, the exile of the Chosen People themselves in foreign lands?
Maybe the world would have applauded; maybe even the Christian world would have bowed in homage before a proof of divine justice, but such was not the way of Jesus Christ. The prophets had said of Him that He “would not break the bruised reed,” and He had said of Himself that He had “Come not to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” He had preached forgiveness as no other man had ever preached it before Him. He had said that if a man be struck in the face he should not retaliate; that vengeance belonged not to men, not even to Himself, but to the Father Who knew all things and to Him alone. He had said that He would be the example of men, in this as in all things else; He was “the way, the truth and the life.”
If, then, He had so taught forgiveness, that greatest of virtues in so far as it is the hardest, the most opposed to human nature of all the things that He taught, then as Man must He give a supreme example. If, as He had said, forgiveness makes man most akin to God the Father, then, to prove Himself indeed the Son of that Father, must He put forgiveness before the world as His own last manifestation. From the throne to which He was nailed, lifted up at last so that He might draw all things to Himself, at the solemn moment when He was to be declared the Redeemer of the world, He must set an example of forgiveness beyond which no man could go. He had told men to forgive that they might be “the children of your Father Who is in heaven.” This, then, would be the way He would prove He was the Son of that Father, not the way men expected, or these His very enemies demanded of Him. He would be “perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.”
He looked, not at men and their judgments, not at His enemies and their defiances, but upwards to the Father Himself. He spoke, not as the Judge that He was to be, not as the Master that He had always been, but as the Redeemer that at that moment He was. He searched for a reason to forgive, and even in that vast ocean of evil His infinite love found it, as love always finds it when it seeks. He allowed the words to be heard, by some at least around Him. That they were words of prayer did not surprise them; those who knew Him were accustomed to His prayer. But this was a prayer to be ever remembered; the prayer of Jesus Crucified, for these His executioners, in such a place, at such a time, under such conditions. “And Jesus said Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ (Fr. Alban Goodier, SJ, The Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 332–336)
Our Lord, being the Son of God, acting at that moment in His office of Savior of the World, uttered an infallibly efficacious prayer: “Father, forgive them.” Meaning, “Lay not this sin to their charge. Punish them not for their crime. True, they deserve punishment, but I love them so much that I wish to prevent this harm from coming them. Have mercy on them, Father, for My sake.”
The first thing we must realize, dear Christian, if we are to understand aright the mystery before us, is that Christ was not merely praying for His executioners. He was praying for us. For all of us. All have sinned and fallen short; if any man thinks he has not sin, he is a liar.
Like our first parents in the Garden, we unhappy children of Eve have, by our selfishness, all fallen into negligence; and by our negligence, into sin; and by our sin, into varying grades of treachery and disloyalty. We all, therefore, need His mercy.
Including you.
Forgiveness Is Available for All to Receive
Christ, our Redeemer, our Best Friend and Eternal Lover, Christ our God and our all, prayed to His Father that we might be forgiven because we know not what we do when we sin. First and before all else, we have offended Him. God Himself is the primary Victim of our sins. But do we realize that we, too, are victims of our own sins?
Psychological harm. In our pride we tell ourselves that we have legitimate reasons for acting or speaking or desiring as we do; and if legitimate then good, and if good then in nowise liable to God’s displeasure let alone punishment. This in itself is striking evidence of our selfish tendencies which place our own satisfaction as the greatest good achievable, that to which all other goods (obedience to God’s laws and docility to His counsels, for instance) hold secondary status.
Laban marrying his eldest daughter to Jacob against their agreement, David putting Bethsabee’s husband in the front lines of the battle against the Ammonties, Judas approaching the Jewish elders in order to bargain with them for Our Lord’s arrest — all considered themselves justified. Did their consciences trouble them after the fact? We can hope. This would have been punishment in itself, for if a clean conscience is a soft pillow, what shall we say of a soiled one? Nevertheless, of what avail will this gift of conscience be to us if we deaden its salutary admonitions by repeatedly ignoring them? See how sin, even venial sin, psychologically harms us by distorting the conformity of our minds to reality, gradually causing us to perceive wrong as right.
Emotional harm. In common with the animals, man possesses eleven passions, also called emotions or appetites: love, hate, desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, fear, daring, hope, despair, and anger. These are integral to our human nature. However, unlike animals’, our human emotions are triggered not merely by physical stimuli but also by thought. A mother bear will feel angry when she perceives the human coming towards her cub. But a human mother will feel angry when she so much as thinks about an individual she knows to be dangerous coming near her child.
So it is that when we think of having done wrong, we feel sadness. Remorse. Regret. Depending on the nature of the infraction, we may even feel fear that we will receive the punishment we know we deserve. These emotions, though painful, are supposed to move us to rectify the disorder caused by our sin. Remorse should steer us towards the confessional — perhaps even to ask pardon of another person whom we may have offended.
Lasting emotional damage occurs, however, when we ignore these emotions; when our will chooses to do violence to them by insisting that they are out of place. Emotions, like conscience, may thus become warped and fail to function properly, a common catastrophe, given how apt our is pride to rebel at the idea that we can ever be in the wrong.
Spiritual harm. Every morally evil action carries with it the built-in punishment of a diminution of personal freedom. If we define freedom with St. Thomas as the ability to choose the good (cf. ST, I-II:6:2), we see that personal freedom is compromised by sin inasmuch as the intellect is darkened and the will is weakened: how can anyone choose the good if he cannot identify it as such? How can he pursue the greater good if his will is bound by the habit of giving precedence to lesser goods? We think of the anguish of St. Augustine when, having conceived a holy desire for wisdom, he could not freely break with his worldly lusts in order to pursue it (cf. The Confessions, Ch. 7); an experience which led him to famously proclaim that, “A man has as many masters as he has vices” (City of God, Bk. 4, Ch. 3).
Relational harm. Guilt, according to moral theology, is neither a conviction of wrong-doing nor a feeling of regret; it is an objective state of estrangement from God. It is like a wall of our own construction by which we have chosen to separate ourselves from the Three Persons Who love us most, thereby rendering ourselves undeserving of Their assistance. Now, God may by His actual graces bypass this wall and reach out to our hearts — but the wall remains in place until we ourselves remove it.
Seeing the damage we have done to ourselves, and loving us as He does, it is any wonder our sweet Savior takes pity on us?
It is as if a prince, hearing that a cherished friend had been thrown into debtor’s prison by his father, the king, appealed to his father on the friend’s behalf. Unable to refuse his son, the king orders a bag of gold coins, sufficient to cancel the man’s debt, to be thrown into the prison cell and the jailer to be on the alert for a speedy release.
We are that prisoner. From the point of view of the one offering forgiveness — our Heavenly Father — pardon, mercy, and the cancellation of our debt have been given at the request of the Prince of Peace.
From the point of view of the receiver — ourselves — we have but to accept the gold of forgiveness made available to us by the Church and present ourselves at the Tribunal of Mercy, the confessional, in order to be released from the debtors’ prison of our own sins. Think what a blessed thing is the Sacrament of Penance! The humble admission of our misdeeds, the unburdening of our conscience, heals us psychologically, awakening in us the conviction that we have just as much power to choose to do good as we have to do ill. The reception of God’s forgiveness, the assurance of total absolution, turn our emotions from sadness and fear to joy, relief, and gratitude. The freedom God intended us to have both to recognize the good and pursue it, while perhaps not instantly restored (for virtue is a habit that must be practice before it can be mastered) is certainly strengthened. And finally, the bliss of intimacy with Our Lord is re-established. Our trust in His never-failing goodness is renewed, for we have received evidence of it yet again. Once more we feel ourselves to be His privileged children.
It is no wonder the devil will marshal all of hell to keep us out of the confessional! Woe to us if we let him frighten us.
Forgiveness is both a gift given and a gift received, and its reception is never forced upon us. The souls in hell are a perpetual testament to the fact that God’s pardon can be rejected and His love spurned. But for those who desire mercy, the confessional door stands wide open to them with its awesome assurance of full pardon. “At each confession,” Bl. Dom Columba Marmion tells us,
we seem to hear Jesus say to His Father: “O My Father, I offer Thee, for this soul, the satisfactions and merits of My Passion; I offer Thee the chalice of My Blood shed for the remission of sins.” Then, just as Christ ratified the judgment and pardon given by the priest, so the Father in His turn confirms the judgment and pardon granted through His Son. He says, “I also forgive thee.”
Those are words to establish the soul in peace. Think what it is to receive from God the assurance of pardon. If I have offended a loyal man, and he, holding out his hand to me, says: “I forget all,” I do not doubt his forgiveness. In the Sacrament of Penance, it is Christ, the Man-God, Truth in Person, Who says to us: “I forgive thee” — and can we doubt His forgiveness? No, we cannot doubt it; this pardon is absolute and irrevocable. God says to us: “If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow.” He says again: “I have blotted out thy iniquities and thy sins as a mist.” God’s forgiveness is worthy of Him. What a king does is royal; what a God does is divine: let us believe in His love, in His word, in His forgiveness.
This act of faith and confidence is extremely pleasing to God and to Jesus, for it is homage rendered to the infinite value of Christ’s merits. It proclaims that the fullness and the universality of the pardon God grants to men here below is one of the triumphs of the Blood of Jesus. (Christ the Life of the Soul, 196–197)
God, being God, is free to make our reception of His pardon contingent on the fulfillment of whatever requirements He pleases. For a valid absolution in the tribunal of Penance (sacramental confession), the “three acts of the penitent” — contrition, confession, and satisfaction — are necessary and sufficient. But, if we refuse forgiveness to those who have offended and wounded us, we set up an obstacle in our own disordered wills to being forgiven (cf. Matt. 6:15 and 18:35). Cognizance of our own sinfulness and consequent need for forgiveness should make us humbly willing to forgive our brother who has wronged us. The order is perfect — how can we possibly know how important it is to forgive others until we have known the bliss of having been forgiven ourselves?
Forgiveness Is Required of All
And so it is that we who have received mercy are commanded to show mercy, and our mercy is to have no strings attached. Unlike God’s, our forgiveness is not to be contingent on the apology of our offender nor on his promise to never hurt us again. It is to be contingent on nothing, for we who have been pardoned have no right to place demands on our fellow servants (cf. Mt. 18:32–33).
How do we know this is true? We know it by the very nature of Christian forgiveness.
I propose that the Christian forgiveness extended from one man to another has a two-fold definition. We know from St. Thomas that forgiveness is an act of the virtue of mercy. Well, mercy is a two-fold movement: “one whereby one is affected by another’s misery; the other whereby one is moved to dispel that misery” (ST, I-IIae, Q. 30, A. 1).
Applying the two-fold nature of mercy to the specific act of forgiveness, we can reason to a clear and practical way of understanding forgiveness in its essence: It is first the interior compassion whereby we feel pity for the misery of our offender; and, second, the exterior compassion whereby we strive to show our offender that we no longer consider him in our debt for what he has done to us.
Both the interior and the exterior elements are necessary. If we genuinely pity our neighbor, whose debt to God has far more significant — even terrifying — consequences than his debt to us, and we do not act upon our pity if given the chance, then the feeling, though itself laudable, is no more than a sterile natural emotion. Had the Good Samaritan seen the man lying half-dead in the ditch, his feeling of compassion would have been to no avail if he decided to leave the man there unaided. Similarly, if we say to ourselves or others that we have forgiven the injustice we have suffered, all the while continuing to hold the action of our offender against him in our hearts, then we are liars.
What could be simpler to understand than that God requires both internal compassion and external kindness when He says, Forgive that you may be forgiven (Lk. 6:37)? To define forgiveness, therefore, as either thoughts or actions of benevolence, either the interior release or the exterior offer of pardon, is to miss half the equation. This mistake is easily made especially by those authors who treat of merely natural as opposed to Christian forgiveness.
Natural forgiveness is the willed existence of internal thoughts of kindness and their corresponding external actions, but Christian forgiveness is far more. Christian forgiveness is natural forgiveness elevated, ennobled, and infused with the unction of the Holy Ghost. It becomes thereby a supernaturally meritorious act, one which, inspired by Christ’s own charity, conforms the members of the Mystical Body to their Divine Head. As such, Christian forgiveness must be defined as thinking of our offender with Christ’s own compassion and acting towards him with Christ’s own kindness. We see this definition come to life in the following powerful passage from Immaculée’s memoirs.
Immaculée’s Heroism
In 1995, nearly a year after her escape from Rwanda, Immaculée returned.
She recounts how she arrived late one afternoon at the prison and was greeted by Semana, the new burgomaster of Kibuye, a man who had been a teacher before hell had broken loose in their country. As a good friend and colleague of her father’s, Semana had also been like an uncle to Immaculée. Four of his six children had been slaughtered in the genocide. As burgomaster, Semana was the politician in charge of arresting the killers who had terrorized that region. His had been the task of interrogating hundreds of the Interahamwe. He knew better than anyone else who the victims were of the specific killers.
And he knew why Immaculée had come. He asked her if she wanted to meet the leader of the gang that had killed her mother and brother.
She replied, “Yes, sir, I do.”
She watched Semana through his office window: he walked across a courtyard and returned from the prison shoving a limping old man in front of him. She started as the two of them drew closer, for she instantly recognized the disheveled prisoner. His name was Felicien. He had been an affluent businessman. Tall. Handsome. She remembered the expensive suits he would wear and his flawless manners. She remembered playing with his children in elementary school. Then she shivered as she realized that it had been Felicien’s voice she had heard calling her name when the killers had ransacked the pastor’s house looking for her. Felicien had wanted to kill her. We let Immaculée continue the narrative:
Semana pushed Felicien into the office, and he stumbled onto his knees. When he looked up from the floor and saw that I was the one who was waiting for him, the color drained from his face. He quickly shifted his gaze and stared at the floor.
“Stand up, killer!” Semana shouted. “Stand up and explain to this girl why her family is dead. Explain to her why you murdered her mother and butchered her brother. Get up, I said! Get up and tell her!” Semana screamed even louder, but the battered man remained hunched and kneeling, too embarrassed to stand and face me.
His dirty clothing hung from his emaciated frame in tatters. His skin was sallow, bruised, and broken; and his eyes were filmed and crusted. His once-handsome face was hidden beneath a filthy, matted beard; and his bare feet were covered in open, running sores.
I wept at the sight of his suffering. Felicien had let the devil enter his heart, and the evil had ruined his life like a cancer in his soul. He was now the victim of his victims, destined to live in torment and regret. I was overwhelmed with pity for the man.
“He looted your parents’ home and robbed your family’s plantation, Immaculée. We found your dad’s farm machinery at his house, didn’t we?” Semana yelled at Felicien. “After he killed Rose and Damascene, he kept looking for you…he wanted you dead so he could take over your property. Didn’t you, pig?” Semana shouted again.
I flinched, letting out an involuntary gasp. Semana looked at me, stunned by my reaction and confused by the tears streaming down my face. He grabbed Felicien by the shirt collar and hauled him to his feet. “What do you have to say to her? What do you have to say to Immaculée?”
Felicien was sobbing. I could feel his shame. He looked up at me for only a moment, but our eyes met. I reached out, touched his hands lightly, and quietly said what I’d come to say.
“I forgive you.”
My heart eased immediately, and I saw the tension release in Felicien’s shoulders before Semana pushed him out the door and into the courtyard. Two soldiers yanked Felicien up by his armpits and dragged him back toward his cell. When Semana returned, he was furious.
“What was that all about, Immaculée? That was the man who murdered your family. I brought him to you to question…to spit on if you wanted to. But you forgave him! How could you do that? Why did you forgive him?
I answered him with the truth: “Forgiveness is all I have to offer.” (Left to Tell, 203–204)
* * * * *
The world tells us that forgiveness is a choice; that it is the free offer of undeserved benevolence; that we have a right to hold onto our anger; that our choice not to forgive must be respected.
The world is wrong.
The One True Faith teaches that, although we do in fact have a right to our anger, we have no right to hold on to that anger. While we are not bound to seek out our offender the way Immaculée felt called to do, (St. Thomas says that this is forgiveness practiced in its most heroic form), we Christians do have an sacred obligation to forgive, both interiorly and exteriorly. In the Parable of the Unjust Servant, the protagonist was not punished for demanding payment from his fellow servant, but for an utter lack of compassion when the man begged for mercy. A follower of the Crucified does have the choice not to forgive, but that choice no more deserves to be “respected” than does his “right” to go to hell.
Whether or not our gift of forgiveness is received by him whom we have pardoned is out of our hands. Regardless of our offender’s acceptance or rejection of our kindness, our Christian hearts are to be miniature confessionals where anyone who comes seeking our external forgiveness receives it immediately because we have already given it interiorly.
What bliss that we should have opportunities to practice mercy as Our Lord practiced it! Blessed are we when we are merciful — for we shall obtain mercy.
