Forgiveness

a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves

Photo: © David Whyte

FORGIVENESS

is a heartache and difficult to achieve because, strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.

It may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive, that, remarkably, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system, our psychological defences must remember and organise against any future attacks – after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, unforgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow, and through a kind of psychological virtuosity extend our understanding to one who first delivered it.