Forgiveness is a virtue. Everyone knows that. But sometimes, it’s an extraordinarily difficult virtue to practise.
Once in a while, I read the story of someone who forgives when I would have assumed forgiveness to be humanly impossible. And maybe it is humanly impossible: maybe it takes a special act of grace (divine assistance) to reach that place.
Here are two excerpts from an article, “Portraits of forgiveness”, recently published in the Ottawa Citizen.
In the first excerpt, Everett Worthington tells the story of his extraordinary act of forgiveness.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1995, when burglars killed Everett Worthington’s elderly mother in her home.
“Two young guys broke into the house thinking the house was deserted by people away at a New Year’s Eve party,” recalls the psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“My mom was asleep. There was no indication anyone was home.
“Of course when she discovered them, the guy had a crowbar he had used to break the window, and apparently just bludgeoned her to death there in the home.”
The suspected killer, arrested four days later, was a boy aged 15 or 16.
The horrific loss forced the psychologist to examine whether he was capable of doing what he spends his academic life telling others to do.
In an academic way, Everett Worthington had known for several years that forgiving others, or being forgiven for wrongs we ourselves have committed, is not just a nice thing in an abstract way. It’s good, measurably, for body and mind alike. Forgiveness leads to benefits, mostly stress-related, that include:
- Less depression.
- Lower blood pressure.
- Less cardiovascular disease.
- Lower levels of a hormone called cortisol, which is a sign of a body under physical attack by long-term stress.
- Stronger immune system.
- Less back pain.
But the Virginia professor found that putting his knowledge of forgiveness into practice was one of the toughest things he had ever attempted. The big problem was that he didn’t want to forgive.
“That was one of the most difficult things I have had to deal with in my life. It put the theory to the test, because here I had developed an intervention to help people forgive. We had looked at it in four or five different studies. We knew that it worked. And I had applied it for kind of minor forgiveness issues.”
But this was far greater. And to make it worse, even though the alleged killer confessed, the police fumbled the procedure for collecting and preserving the evidence. A grand jury refused to indict him and he was released.
“I just wanted to bash his head in,” the psychologist recalls. He remembers staring at a baseball bat, wishing for a chance. That’s when he knew he had to force himself through the conscious decision to turn away from anger.
“I was able to practise the method we teach people. I was able to forgive the person who had done this (although we didn’t have total proof who it was).”
In the second excerpt, a university chaplain argues that we are becoming less forgiving as a society.
(A post Christian society … a less forgiving society. How surprising is that?!)
Are we as forgiving as we should be? Definitely not, says Brian Yealland, chaplain at Queen’s University in Kingston.
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