On forgiveness and healing

Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt (1636)

To forgive does not mean to forget what has happened, but to shoulder the weight of another person’s frailty or even another person’s evil. St. Paul says, “Learn to carry one another’s burdens.” These burdens are often the failure of each of us to be worthy of our calling, our incapacity to love one another, to accept one another, to serve one another, to help one another on the way that leads to God. Let each of us pass a judgement on our whole soul, on our whole life, judge ourselves honestly, and ask forgiveness not only from God but from our neighbor, which is sometimes much harder than asking forgiveness from God.

We are all frail. We are all in need of support. Do we give this support to one another? Or do we choose those whom we want to support because we like them, because supporting them is a joy, because supporting them means that they also respond to us by gratitude, by friendship? Let us avoid seeking reasons not to forgive.

I remember a man who said to me, “I can forgive every person who has sinned against me, I can even love them, but I must hate the enemies of God.” I thought of something which is told to us in the life of one of the saints, in which a priest was praying to God to punish those who betrayed Him by their lives if not by their words. And Christ appeared to him and said, “Never pray for the punishment or the rejection of anyone. If there was only one sinner in the world, I would choose to be incarnate again, and again to die upon the cross for this only sinner.”

Remember, if we do not forgive our brother, it is not only he who goes away with pain and tears in his heart, but we are wounded. If we do not forgive, we are ourselves not healed. The evil that occurred to us at the hands of another person remains with us, damaging our soul, destroying us.

Let us learn to forgive, so that others may be healed, but also that we may be healed ourselves. Come and bow down before the icon of Christ and of the Mother of God, and then turn to one another with the readiness to be forgiven and to forgive, whatever the cost to us.

+Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh
from a Forgiveness Vespers sermon given in 1999

Source:  In Communion magazine #55, 2010