Each day at Lauds and Vespers the Abbot recites the Lord’s Prayer aloud. St Benedict tells us that it is so that the members of the Community will hear the words: “Forgive us as we forgive.” By the daily repetition of the prayer, we learn to forgive. Perhaps it is something in our culture that allows us to repeat words aloud without considering ourselves bound by them. I remember reading a sermon by a contemporary of St Benedict, telling of people who deliberately avoided saying this part of the Lord’s Prayer aloud so that they could keep up their vendettas, feuds and grudges. While they tried to avoid saying the words, perhaps we just ignore them, because whether people are living now or living then, forgiveness is not easy. It is not just a slight adjustment of our outlook on another person, it means a very deep change in ourselves. It is not simply an emotional change. In order to forgive we have to use all of our human resources, our intelligence, our will, our patience. Often we need a lot of time to forgive. It can take us to our deathbed. Rob Roy, the famous outlaw, died a Catholic and on his deathbed the priest asked him to forgive his enemies. Rob Roy struggled with this for some time but at length consented to forgive his enemies. He forgave them, then turned to his son standing by the bed and said, “I forgive them, but look you to them!”
One of the reasons we can find it hard to forgive is that we often find it hard to think of ourselves as forgiven, or even as being in need of forgiveness. We are at the centre of our universe. Everything else exists for our benefit: all things, all people and even God. Insofar as we should ever need forgiveness, then it is God’s job to provide it.
Of course we all know that we are not the centre of the universe; we know that God is not simply a force that arranges the universe for our benefit. We know it, but often enough you would never guess it from the way we actually live our lives.
We have to be genuinely convinced of our sinfulness and that means knowing who we are in relation to God and the history of that relationship. Now, some of us are prone to depression and find it all too easy to wallow in a sense of our own worthlessness. This is not from God. For the thing is that at the same time as we admit our sinfulness, there has to be the realisation that we are sinners who have been forgiven. We owe God a debt we can never repay, ten thousand talents worth (it is as if we were personally liable for the national debt, all 2 trillion pounds and more of it). God has forgiven us because He is sorry for us.
It is the realisation that we are forgiven sinners that should lead us to forgive. No debt of anyone else towards us ever comes close to the debt that God has forgiven us. The other person is a fellow servant,. Whatever they have done rises from the roots of our common humanity. It may be truly terrible, but the roots of the same act lie in us too.
We pray “forgive us as we forgive”. We pray that the forgiveness we receive will be related to the forgiveness that we give. So to refuse to give forgiveness is to reject the forgiveness that is offered to us. Forgiveness costs us something, but for, and in God, forgiveness cost the life of his only Son. That is the depth of God’s forgiveness. If we unite ourselves to Christ, our forgiveness of each other can become a part of his forgiveness of each and all of us.
DMS