Forgiveness can be defined as a spiritual act of compassionately releasing resentment, anger or the desire to punish someone for an offence committed by him. Before you can forgive someone, you should feel anger against him.
A Stanford research study shows that practising forgiveness decreases stress, anger and psychosomatic symptoms. Forgiveness comes from your higher self and it is an expression of vision.
Ultimately, it does more for you than for anyone else because it liberates you from negativity and pushes you forward. Forgiving might not make anger totally dissolve, but it will give you the freedom of knowing that you are full of the milk of human kindness.
We have been conditioned to hold on to hatred and grudges by what we read in novels and see in films. We are completely unaware that hatred and grudges can produce grave physiological consequences. When you think of your enemy, your heart becomes full of hatred against him.
Tit for tat
You begin to think of retaliation or doing tit for tat. Then your body responds with pent-up anger and ill feelings. As a result, your body will be flooded with stress hormones raising your blood pressure and impairing your immune effectiveness. The only antidote against such a situation is forgiveness. Forgiving someone against whom you have held a grudge reverses the biological reaction. Soon your blood pressure will lower and the heart rate will stabilise. You will move into a pain-free state.
Apart from personal gains, forgiveness can have social consequences. While wounds are fresh, forgiveness does not require condoning an offensive act, forgetting what happened or reconciling with the perpetrator. It means that you have to find a way to free yourself from the chains of obsession about the hurt. Let’s face the bare facts. When someone hurts you, you cannot simply forget it. That is the human nature.
Very often you think that you do not deserve the hurt and it remains in your memory giving you immense trouble. Such situations are quite common in society. When we go through life, even well-meaning people hurt us. A close friend may betray you and your spouse may leave you.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt discovered that the only power that can stop the stream of painful memories is forgiveness. Sometimes, you will remember how Pope John II walked into a cell of Rebibbia Prison outside Rome in December 1983 to meet Mehmet Ali Agca who had shot him. In a quiet moment, the Pope forgave him.
Although he did so, an ordinary person is unlikely to forgive his would-be killer. In that respect, the Pope’s act seems rather unnatural. This is because ordinary people do not act in that manner. They think that if someone does something against you, they must pay for it. However, the Pope’s forgiveness brought about a miraculous healing and reconciliation.
When a child knocks against a chair and falls, mother will rush to him and ‘punish’ the chair by hitting it with something. Although you cannot punish an inanimate object, the child learns a rudimentary lesson that he should punish the offender.
On the other hand, we get a queer satisfaction by thinking that our enemies would suffer some damage sooner or later.
For instance, a woman hopes that her former husband will be miserable with his new wife. A man may hope that the friend who betrayed him would be fired from his job. Such passive aggressive behaviour will also damage your health.
Getting rid of ill feelings against your enemy is not an easy task. How can you let go of a hurt so easily? However, if you care for your own physical and mental wellbeing, you have to learn how to forgive your enemies. Usually, we do not admit that we hate someone.
While hating someone we try to hide our feelings. Therefore, if you wish to forgive someone, you have to perform a kind of ‘soul surgery.’ In the first place, you must acknowledge the fact that you hate somebody. If possible, tell the person who hurt you that he has done something wrong. This may not be possible when the wrongdoer happens to be your employer or someone superior to you in the workplace.
Once a manager of a company told a new recruit that he was not suitable for the post he was holding. However, the new recruit performed his duties conscientiously. Unable to understand the reason for the manager’s dislike against him, he tendered his resignation.
Strong feelings
However, he carried strong feelings against the manager and wished him a disastrous downfall. Later, he met the manager and told him that he had done something wrong to him but he was willing to forgive him. It led to the birth of a great friendship between them.
You can be angry at the deed but not the doer. In other words, you should be able to separate the wrongdoer from the wrongful act. The Bible describes a dramatic event of atonement. God took a bundle of human sins off a man’s back, tied it to a goat and sent the ‘scapegoat’ to a solitary land.
When you forgive someone, you will find a new vision of the person who has wronged you. That leads to a new insight. Ultimately, you will realise that all human beings are fallible and there is no need to hate anyone.
A childless couple adopted a baby girl. When she turned to be a beautiful teenager, she wanted to know who her biological mother was. She also wanted to know why she had been given over to someone else.
Later she happened to share her friend’s conflict. Her friend too had given her baby for adoption. When asked why she had done so, she said it was done for the welfare of the baby as she had no means to maintain it. The girl realised the fact that it was a fruitless task to find who her real mother was.
Eye for an eye
Mahatma Gandhi said, “If all of us live by an eye for an eye, the whole world will be blind.” However, to forgive your enemy, you have to be a tough person. It takes a lot of guts to deal with the wickedness done to you.
Love is the real power behind forgiveness. Love should be coupled with respect and commitment. Carrying hatred and bitterness with you is something burdensome. If you lust after revenge, you will remember that it is going to eat you up from within. If you let it go, you will be doing a great favour to yourself.
C.S. Lewis, the British scholar who wrote many children’s stories was the victim of a bullish teacher. Young Lewis could not forgive his teacher and it troubled him until he became an adult. Then Lewis lost track of his teacher. One day he came to know that the teacher had died. He felt sorry for him. At last he realised that he had forgiven him. However, most people find it difficult to break their hate habit.
Some scholars have argued that forgiving an offender is a fruitless task. They say forgiveness is unjust because you are letting off an offender without punishing him. They even cite Bernard Shaw who said, “Forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge.”
However, it is the considered view of educated people that forgiveness is not a weakness, but strength. After World War II, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, “We must finally be reconciled with our foe, lest we both perish in the vicious circle of hatred.”
To err is human and forgive divine. What is more, forgiveness is love’s healing miracle.