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A not-so-new element in popular society has a newly minted
phrase: “cancel culture.”
EVERY WEEK at Mass, with the Lord Jesus truly present among us
in the Eucharist, we say His prayer, which includes the words “forgive us our
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Anger/unforgiveness is drinking poison and hoping the other will
die.
Resentment: In choosing to chain the other, we are always and
every time chaining ourselves.
Even worse, we only chain a false other.
CS Lewis - Great Divorce, which is set in the afterlife. One
character meets an old friend who has repented of a murder, but the man cannot
forgive the murderer.
This unforgiving spirit repeats again and again: “I just want my
rights.”
(It’s a good thing we don’t get our rights. Otherwise we’d all
be way worse off than we are in God’s providential design.)
Whoever was more righteously angry than Jesus on the Cross? And
yet what did He do? We can’t match that.
FORGIVENESS turns pain into compassion.
It takes courage and faith in the cross of Jesus to forgive. He
never said it is easy. He just said do it.
2843 Thus the Lord's
words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end, become a living reality.
the parable of the merciless servant, which crowns the Lord's teaching on ecclesial
communion, ends with these words: "So also my heavenly Father will do to
every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." It
is there, in fact, "in the depths of the heart," that everything is
bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense;
but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into
compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.
Everybody needs to forgive somebody. Who is it for you? Who do
you need to free? What are you chaining yourself to?
