When I started my healing journey in college, I heard many abuse victims say, “Forgiveness is a choice.” They said you didn’t have to feel like forgiving to choose to forgive and that forgiving the person who abused you doesn’t mean you let them back into your life.
It all sounded fine but too abstract. What do you do to forgive? Do you say it out loud over and over until it feels true? Do you write it? Do you tell God, “I’m forgiving this person!” and then it’s done?
Everyone’s story is different, but forgiveness was always on my radar. There were months I was so angry that even my dreams were filled with rage. My therapist suggested I buy a set of teacups from Goodwill and throw them against a tree to let the anger go somewhere. I did. I cried hot tears. I had a thousand fake conversations in my shower where I finally said exactly what I thought. I wrote letters and burned them. I did it all… but I always wanted to get to a point of forgiveness. I just wasn’t sure how.
Over the years, people would say things like, “You need to forgive” or “You need to let it go so you can be free!” I think they were trying to help but it just felt like gaslighting and a dismissal of my pain. As a side note, this feeling was extremely similar to conversations I had around my faith deconstruction When I was in the middle of deconstructing, people would often say, “But don’t forget to reconstruct!” And I remember thinking, “Don’t you see that I’m in pain?!”
Being told to reconstruct is a lot like being told to forgive. The folks giving these instructions often miss the point, and more importantly they miss an opportunity to sit with people in their anger and mess. Maybe I’m wrong, but I also don’t know of anyone who was suddenly able to forgive because their friends told them to “let it go” and I don’t know of anyone who suddenly glued together their faith because their friends told them it was time to reconstruct.
But back to forgiveness.
I went to a funeral in December and, for the first time in ten years, I was in the same room as the person who abused me. I knew this would eventually happen and I can’t tell you how many times I imagined how it would go. How I would feel. I wondered if I would look them in the eye. If my heart would race. If I would cry or feel anger or feel shame.
It reminds me of my first year of seminary when a professor said our character is shaped by all the little choices we make. One small example I like to use is how I started picking up trash when I walked outdoors. It was a choice I made one day, then kept making, and now it’s a habit I don’t even think about. It has shaped my character to care more about my neighborhood and the environment. It also has shaped my sense of ownership in my community.
A bigger example would be violence, which is what my professor was lecturing about. A big objection folks have to nonviolence is, “What if someone breaks into your house and threatens to kill your wife and kids!?” His response was that a Christian ought to make little choices every day that prioritize peace and love for neighbor, so that if someone broke into your house, your character would be shaped in such a way that you would act towards them in love. He did not suggest that love = non-resistance, by the way, but this newsletter is not about nonviolence so I am going to leave it here with all the tension and move on to my actual point.
When he said that, it occurred to me the same was true for forgiveness. With this framework, forgiveness could move from an abstraction to a practice. I could make little choices every day that molded me into a forgiving person. I could practice humanizing the person who abused me by picturing them as a child or picturing them with Jesus. I could practice extending grace towards them with a journaling exercise. I could practice applying worth and dignity to them by saying out loud, “This person is loved by God and has infinite worth and value to God.”
Practicing forgiveness was organic. I did not make it a daily ritual or anything. But any time this person or anyone else involved came to mind, I practiced forgiveness in one of those ways: Imagining them as a child, imagining them with Jesus and asking Jesus how he sees them, journaling how I wanted to feel towards them, or saying aloud something like, “They are over by God and have infinite worth and value to God.” Honestly, practicing forgiveness was practicing humanization.
I let myself feel anger when it rose up. I did not monitor “negative” feelings and beat them into submission. I just kept making microscopic turns towards love, knowing Jesus’ instruction to love my neighbor as myself even includes the person who abused me.
When I was at the funeral, I looked at their face and felt a swell of energy in my chest. Partly nerves, I’m sure, but also compassion. I saw their humanity. I saw their belovedness. And even though I did not speak to them- nor do I desire to- I do not hold any bitterness against them. I felt light in my heart and body.
It feels vulnerable to share this because I do not want it to come across as self-congratulatory or indulgent. I hope you feel that. But when I got in the car to drive home, I thought, “Practicing forgiveness actually works.” I felt free.
I also want to share this because for so much of my life, forgiveness felt like a concept I couldn’t sink my teeth into. It wasn’t until I had a helpful framework that I was able to practice forgiving. It stopped being a woo-woo spiritual thing that happened in an ethereal realm and turned into a choice that shapes my character, just like picking up litter at the park. Every time the emotional litter of resentment or judgment or hatred crowd my heart, I pick them up and throw them away as an act of forgiveness.
Forgiveness clears my path forward.
-Savannah
Thank you so much for this. I, too, have struggled to get down to the brass tacks of forgiveness, and actually get a handle on what it means and what it looks like. Your post helps tremendously. I also get easily hung up on the marriage of forgiveness and boundaries, and how they co-exist (or doubting if they should at all, in my moments of sliding back into fundamentalism.) Anyway, thanks for the care and wisdom you’ve put into this post. I appreciate you.
"Honestly, practicing forgiveness was practicing humanization."- This is my favorite sentence from today's post. The idea of choosing to forgive (or, really, choosing to alter any emotion/thought/involuntary internal feeling) has also always felt abstract to me. One way I chose to forgive someone before was to pray for them and ask for God to bless them (in life and in business- business is very important to them), and though it felt inauthentic, I would also be honest with God by saying "I don't feel this way, but I want to." There were times when the compassion I felt for this person shone brightly, and other times when I felt I hadn't even begun the work of forgiveness.
What I appreciate about you calling forgiveness a practice is that it gives validity to the previous sentence. I must continue to practice, regardless of the way forgiveness is presenting itself in each passing day.