Author Archive: directorifi

“Forgiveness Is Unfair Because It Puts the Burden of Change onto the Victim”

I heard this statement from a person who holds a considerable degree of academic influence.  The learned scholar, however, did not give a learned response as I will show in this little essay.

Suppose that Brian is driving his car and is hit by a drunk driver.  Brian’s leg is broken and he must undergo surgery and subsequent rehabilitation therapy if he again will have the full use of his leg.  What happened to him was unjust and now the burden of getting back a normal leg falls to him.  He has to get the leg examined, say yes to the surgery, to the post-surgical recovery, and to months of painful rehab.  The “burden of change” specifically when it comes to his leg is his and his alone.

Yes, the other driver will have to bear the burden of paying damages, but this has no bearing on restoring a badly broken leg.  Paying for such rehabilitation is entirely different from doing the challenging rehab work itself.

Suppose now that Brian takes the learned academic’s statement above to heart.  Suppose that he now expects the other driver to somehow bear the burden of doing the rehab.  How will that go?  The other driver cannot lift Brian’s leg for him or bear the physical pain of walking and then running.  Is this then unfair to Brian?  Should we expect him to lie down and not rehab because, well, he has a burden of restoring his own leg?  It would seem absurd to presume so.

Is it any different with injustice requiring the surgery and rehab of the heart?  If Melissa was unfairly treated by her partner, is it unfair for Melissa to do the hard work of forgiveness?  She is the one whose heart is hurting.  The partner cannot fix the sadness or confusion or anger……even if he repents.  Repentance will not automatically lead to a restored heart because trust must be earned little by little.  As Melissa learns to trust, she still will need the heart-rehab of forgiveness (struggling to get rid of toxic anger and struggling to see the worth in one who saw no worth in her) that only she can do.  Once hurt by another, it is the victim who must bear the burden of the change-of-heart.

We must remember: The rehab and recovery are temporary.  If the forgiver refuses to engage in such recovery, then the injurer wins twice: once in the initial hurt and a second time when the injured refuses to change because of a woeful misunderstanding that he or she must passively wait for someone else to bear the burden of change for him or her.

Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas tend to have bad consequences.  Learned academics are not necessarily learned in all subjects across all cases.

Robert

I was in what I thought was a good relationship for almost three years and then my partner abandoned ship. As I look back on it now, she never was going to come back, but once I started to forgive her, I waited and waited and waited for her, hoping she would accept my forgiveness. It never happened. I feel kind of ripped off by forgiveness because it kept me hanging around too long, about a year after she dumped me. Any insight would be appreciated.

You raise a good point about a possible weakness in the virtue of forgiveness if—if—we appropriate that virtue exclusively without justice.  When we forgive, as you say, we do sometimes delay exiting an untenable relationship as we stand in the hope of reconciliation.  Even when we bring justice alongside forgiveness, we still may delay the inevitable because forgiveness does hold out that hope of reconciliation.  

So, forgivers need to realize that the hope of reconciliation may not bring about a true reconciliation.  Yet, as forgivers wait in hope, they have to keep asking the question, “Is the other capable of entering into a true, loving relationship?”  If the studied conclusion is “no,” and if trusted confidants agree, then justice needs to come forward so that the forgiver is not left stranded for the rest of his or her life.  

Yes, forgiveness may delay the conclusion that the other will never return, but a delay is not a permanent state.  Eventually, a forgiver can and should stand in the truth of the other’s incapability of relationship (if this is true) and then act accordingly, but always in love and concern for the other.

What Is Love?

“I know what love is,” the sincere Forrest Gump famously proclaimed.

I was a bit taken aback by a recent Facebook discussion. One of my friends proclaimed that love is letting each person do as he or she wishes as long as the actions do not hurt anyone else. The context was this: Her friend insisted on continuing to drink alcohol even though further drink could kill her. “It is not hurting me and she just can’t help it the way she drinks,” her statement went.

The ancient Greeks had four words for love. One, storge, is the natural love of a mother for her baby, for example. A second form of love, philia, constitutes the natural love that we have come to call brotherly love in which related people cooperate with each other and have a natural affection. Eros, or romantic love, is the third. The fourth, which was vaguely specified in ancient Greece, agape, came to be known by such scholars as Thomas Aquinas as love that is in service to others for the others’ good.

I think that my Facebook friend had in mind the agape variety of love as she proclaimed her friend’s right to drink herself to death. Yet, such tolerance is a poor substitute for the real-thing of agape love because letting the friend die, perhaps a painful or even tortuous death, hardly is in service to that other.

Since when did tolerance become equated with agape love? “As long as it does not hurt me” sounds much more self-serving than other-serving.

Have we so privatized love that it means letting others do as they please regardless of the outcome…..as long as the other really, really wants to do this and as long as I am not directly and concretely harmed by the action? This seems to me to be the antithesis of genuine love, which would express concern and attempt to help, even if this made the helper uncomfortable……or even made the other uncomfortable.

“I know what love is.” Love unexplored and proclaimed as tolerance does not seem much like love to me.

Robert

“Nothing Good Ever Comes From Anger,” says Eva Mozes Kor, Auschwitz Survivor

The World Post, U.S. Edition – “For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy.”

Those are the words that 81-year-old Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Eva Mozes Kor posted on her Facebook page after she encountered a former Nazi guard during his court trial.

Former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening is being tried in Germany as an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz. Groening, now 93, admits he kept watch as thousands were led to the gas chambers at the concentration camp.

Kor, who was subjected to horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz, testified last week at Groening’s trial. Afterward, she approached the former SS guard in court to “thank him for having some human decency in accepting responsibility for what he has done.” To Kor’s surprise, Groening kissed her on the cheek and embraced her. Kor posted the photo on her Facebook page but wrote that she still holds Groening accountable for his actions during the Holocaust.

“He was a small screw in a big killing machine, and the machine cannot function without the small screws,” Kor wrote. She added, however, that she forgives the man, and believes that there may be value in bringing “the victims” and “the perpetrators” together to “face the truth, try to heal and work together to prevent it from ever happening again.”

Read the full story in The World Post: “Former Nazi Guard Oskar Groening Kisses Holocaust Survivor Eva Kor During His Trial“

After 39 Years in Prison for a Crime He Didn’t Commit, Man Forgives the One Whose Lies Put Him There

After 39 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Ricky Jackson became a free man last November after a judge threw out his conviction for a 1975 murder at a Cleveland grocery store. The conviction was based on a lie told by a 12 year-old boy who was under pressure by police to say he witnessed the crime. Eddie Vernon, the boy who is now grow up, recanted his testimony, which freed Jackson and two other men who were also convicted and imprisoned.

In light of Vernon’s recantation, the state withdrew their case. The hearing ended on a Tuesday. That Friday, 39 years, 5 months, and 27 days after his arrest, Jackson walked out of the courtroom unshackled, making him the longest-serving wrongfully convicted person in American history. Amazingly, Jackson was not revengeful nor vindictive, but forgiving.

When asked by the press what he thought about the man whose false testimony put him behind bars, Jackson said: “Even when I was in prison I feel like I had a better life,” he says. “He couldn’t have a life. He had three ghosts following him around. Despite what people say, without him, we’d still be in prison. He’s the one who put us there, and he was the one who eventually got us out. All is forgiven in my book.”

“People have to remember that they see him as a grown man today, but in ’75 he was a 12 yr. old kid and he was manipulated and coerced by the police and they used him; they used him to get us in prison. So, as far as that young man is concerned, I wish him the best. I don’t hate him; I just wish he has a good life. It took a lot of courage to do what he did in that courtroom that set us free. He’s been carrying a burden around for 39 years, like we have, but in the end he came through, and I’m grateful for that.”

Read the amazing details of Ricky Jackson’s life and the unbelievable circumstances surrounding his more than 14,000 days and nights behind bars and his eventual freedom:

After 39 years in prison, an epic tale of innocence found and bitterness lost
The Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2015.

Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 39 Years Forgives the Man Who Put Him There (video)
Aleteia, a worldwide network sharing faith resources for the world’s 3.2 billion Catholics and Christians, April 1, 2015.