Our Forgiveness Blog
International Conference on Forgiveness for Peace to Be Held in Jerusalem, July 12 and 13, 2017
Come, and deepen your understanding of forgiveness. Come, and join us for the Jerusalem Conference on Forgiveness for Peace on July 12 and 13, 2017.
To forgive is to work toward reducing resentment and offering goodness of some kind to those who have not been good to you. To forgive is not to give in to injustice or to excuse wrong-doing. Forgiveness is from a position of strength, not weakness. As forgiveness frees a person from debilitating resentments, then he or she has more vitality to see clearly and to pursue a better way with family, community, and the larger society.
Day 1 concerns interfaith dialogue among Jewish, Christian, and Muslimxperts discussing what the term “to forgive” means within their own belief system and how that knowledge of forgiveness can be used to
enhance interfaith dialogue. Internationally notable speakers will participate: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (this year’s recipient of the Templeton Prize), Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Archbishop of Manila, the Philippines, and Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti Emeritus of Bosnia. All are world-renown within their own faith
community.
Day 2 focuses on forgiveness education with educators from Belfast, Athens, Lebanon, the US, and the Galilee or Jerusalem areas discussing how they implement forgiveness education for children
and adolescents. You may gain insights on how to bring forgiveness within your own family and community. There will be opportunities to: 1) hear personal testimonies of those who have forgiven much and 2) share your own view.
The conference will take place at the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center. More information is on our website at the top of our homepage.
Robert
Is There Such a Thing as Self-Forgiveness?
When you self-forgive, you are practicing the virtue of mercy toward yourself. And this next point is very important: You continually extend virtues toward yourself, such as being fair to yourself (the virtue of justice), taking care of yourself (the virtues of kindness and wisdom), and being patient with yourself when you are learning new things in life. If you can practice all of these virtues toward yourself, why would anyone want to bar you from the most important of the moral virtues: loving yourself in the face of disappointment, disapproval, and in extreme cases, self-hatred?
Robert
Enright, Robert (2015-09-28). 8 Keys to Forgiveness (8 Keys to Mental Health) (p. 181). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
One Reason Why We Need Forgiveness Education: People Misunderstand What Forgiveness Is
Too often in society the word forgiveness is used casually: “Please forgive me for being 10 minutes late.” Forgiveness is used in place of many other words, such as excusing, distorting the intended meaning. People so often try to forgive with misperceptions; each may have a different meaning of forgiveness, unaware of any error in his or her thinking.
Freedman and Chang (2010, in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling, volume 32, pages 5-34) interviewed 49 university students on their ideas of the meaning of forgiveness and found that the most frequent understanding (by 53% of the respondents) was to “let go” of the offense. This seems to be similar to either condoning or excusing. Of course, one can let go of the offense and still be fuming with the offender. The second most common understanding of forgiveness (20%) was that it is a “moving on” from the offense. Third most common was to equate forgiveness with not blaming the offender, which could be justifying, condoning, or excusing, followed by forgetting about what happened. Only 8% of the respondents understood forgiveness as seeing the humanity in the other, not because of what was done but in spite of it.
If we start forgiveness education early, when students are 5 or 6 years old, they will have a much firmer grasp of what forgiveness is…..and therefore likely will be successful in their forgiveness efforts, especially if these students are schooled not only in what forgiveness is but also in how to go about forgiving.
Robert
Looking Forward Rather than Backward
When we have been treated deeply unfairly by others, there is a tendency to look backward far too often. We brood, we engage in the “what ifs” of life……we begin to live with discouragement.
Forgiveness helps us to tie up the burdens of the past so that we are not continually unwrapping the package of bad memories. Yes, we have been hurt. Yes, we might even have been hurt by our own actions. Yet, that is not the story of whom the other is or of whom we are as persons. Our past does not define us and forgiveness helps us to see that because we can overcome the past so that it is not our obsession of regrets.
Forgiveness helps us look forward……to our new-found ability to love others more deeply. Today, I will try to be of service to those I meet. Today, I will try to ease the pains inside at least one other person because I have been in pain and know what it is like.
Forgiveness points me to a future of being able to love no matter what. Pains of the past will not stop that. Other people’s harsh judgments of me will not stop that. My own past failings will not stop that. I can love…….and I choose to do so……now……and in the future.
I will be defined now by what I can do in love rather than by what has happened to me in the past.
Robert
Increased Quality of Life
The term quality of life refers to an overall positive sense of comfort, contentment, or happiness with one’s life as it is experienced right now. Quality of life encompasses one’s physical strength and health, one’s psychological adjustment to life’s challenges, the fulfillment of one’s purpose in life, and the amount of support that one senses from important others in one’s life. Forgiveness can increase benefits in all of these areas in people who take the time to work through the process.
In one rather dramatic example, Mary Hansen and I helped terminally ill cancer patients to forgive those who had hurt them in the short time of four weeks. This brief time period is unusual, but in this case, the people knew that they were dying, their energy was fading, and so they did the intensive work of forgiving those in the family toward whom they were still fuming. Some of the patients had held on to this unhealthy anger for decades.
Upon forgiving those who had been very unfair to them, these courageous people reported that their overall quality of life, including how they were feeling physically, was significantly improved. They even reported that their purpose in life became clearer to them because they were leaving their families more settled, more at peace because of the forgiveness that they were offering as they were dying. We saw how their actual physical condition deteriorated over those four weeks while, at the same time, their overall well-being— their reported quality of life— kept increasing. Forgiveness helped these individuals to die well.
Robert
Enright, Robert (2015-09-28). 8 Keys to Forgiveness (8 Keys to Mental Health) (p. 5). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
