Forgiveness: The First Step Toward Healing

By Ned Abenroth

There are a couple of people with whom I have unfinished business. I’ve done what I can to reach out, but relationships are a two-way street. No one can fully heal a relationship on their own. Not everyone is ready or willing to engage. Not all healing will happen in this lifetime. Regardless, we’re still responsible for our own inner work, even when the other person is disengaged.

This spring, I guided a quest in the wild canyons of Utah. There, I started a long letter to one of the men with whom I still need a resolution. The grief I’ve carried around this relationship over the years has been intense, and the work I’d done meant I felt, for once, far more open than gripped. At the beginning of the letter, I felt kindly toward the recipient. But as the words tumbled out, anger bubbled up, with a tightness in my chest that surprised me. So much for my imagined largesse; parts of me still hadn’t forgiven him! I put down my pen and turned away.

For most of my life, I’ve thought of forgiveness as a byproduct of making an apology, restitution, or amends, and as part of the steps toward reconciliation. I had been waiting to fully forgive this man until after a meeting with him that may never happen. As a result, the anger remained inside me—buried, perhaps, but still there, and able to stop me from writing a letter.

Recently, I’ve been taking in Jewish wisdom, which teaches that forgiveness is a prerequisite, independent of everything else. Forgiveness is for our own internal freedom, and it leaves the door open to deeper work when the time is right. Reconciliation may have to wait. Forgiveness can always begin now.

At Illuman’s Elders’ Rites of Passage, the returning elder program works intensely with forgiveness, tending to the charged places we haven’t yet resolved. I’ve never met an elder who said they didn’t have more forgiveness work to do. And so it is with the rest of us. Forgiveness isn’t easy, but the alternative is even harder: a lingering wound that keeps returning to sting us.

My experience with Christian forgiveness is that, too often, it’s a performative and suppressive act rushed into prematurely. Growing up, I was terrified that if I didn’t forgive others, God wouldn’t forgive me, so I quickly “forgave” anyone who “wronged” me. There are many limitations in that simplistic understanding. As a kid, I understood forgiveness more as a proclamation than a releasing, more about being clean than being liberated, more as a single transaction than an ongoing practice into wholeness.

I was also looking through the lens of individualism, in which “wrongs” are specific acts done by another. I was missing the deeper reality that we are inextricably bound together in a web in which brokenness, or sin, is a constant wave pulsing through all of us. We’re only conscious of the acute points of pain where we’ve personally felt this larger wave, but its impact stretches far beyond our awareness.

We need Grace for the immensity of our fragmentation. Grace extends beyond the horizon of what we can see. Forgiveness, which rests on this larger, universal Grace, is our small part in bringing loving, releasing awareness to one particular place of conscious pain. Our job is to “start close in,” as David Whyte says, in the places and with the people we don’t want to address.

Life is hard. We’re entangled in a web that includes the inherited traumas of our ancestors, the suffering born of our illusion of separateness, the pain of the cultural lies we propagate, and so much more. Mature people move closer and untie the knots until the only ties that bind consist solely of love. It’s an audacious project, with ripple effects that reach farther than we can see. What is bound will remain bound until it’s loosened. What is loosened will be loosened not just here, but on the other side. This is a project God doesn’t do alone, but with us and through us.

The letter I left unfinished in the desert is calling me to return. I may need to write it a thousand more times as part of my process of forgiveness and release. I’m still somewhere in the middle of the wider arc, between the beginning and the end.

Forgiveness of unfinished business requires an ongoing posture, not just a single completed action. It isn’t an emotion itself, but a deliberate action that, especially in the early stages, may fly in the face of everything we feel. It may not be the end of anger, but it’s the beginning of the end of our attachment to and identification with anger. It won’t be the end of grief, but it will turn grief from despair toward hope and redemption.

I wonder, for all of us: Where are we called to forgive? Which parts of us ache to begin this process? How will we each move from idea into action? What are we waiting for?