Unitarian Universalist Church Hot Springs
Forgiveness
October 13, 2013
Denise Henderson

Opening Words

I forgave because that is what I needed to do to feel whole, to like myself, and to rid myself of the excess emotional baggage that was weighing me down and holding me back. I wanted peace of mind, and I could not have it as long as I was stymied by unfinished business from my past and experiencing most of my energy nursing my unhealed wound. I was not happy with myself or my life. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could do more and be more than I was. And so I chose to heal.

Questions to ponder:

What does it cost not to forgive?
What keeps us from forgiving?
How have I learned to forgive?

Suzanne Simon

Welcome

Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hot Springs. My name is Denise Henderson, and I will be your lay leader today. Thank you for being here.

We believe that we do not have to think alike to love alike. As a living, evolving liberal religion, we freely draw from many sources for inspiration and guidance.

We pose no creed, for we believe that religious faith is uniquely personal and evolves as we each engage in our inner search and in our life journey. This quest is enriched and empowered by the diversity of our community.

We promote acceptance of one another within our congregation. You are welcome here regardless of your race, color, sexual orientation, theological background, age, gender, income or mental or physical abilities.

Challis Lighting

Where hate rules, let us bring love, where sorrow, joy
Let us strive more to comfort others than to be comforted
To understand others, than to be understood
To love others more than be loved
For it is in giving that we receive and in pardoning that we are pardoned
St. Francis of Assisi

Affirmation of Covenant

Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest for truth is its sacrament;
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace;
To seek knowledge in freedom
To serve humankind in fellowship;
To the end that all souls shall grow
Into harmony with the good.
Thus do we covenant with each other.

Reading # 461

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous can be accomplished alone;
Therefore we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the stand point of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Service Message

The journey of forgiveness is very difficult for me, and I thought long and hard to put my words on a page. In planning the program I reached out to our friend, Mac McPherson. He led me to the book, Forgive & Forget – Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes.

I will share with you some contents of the book and my own personal experience. This service is as much for me as it is for anyone. Please know that I am just a messenger – and not one who by any means has a command of the topic…

Somebody hurt you, maybe yesterday, maybe a lifetime ago, and you cannot forget it. You did not deserve the hurt. It went deep, deep enough to lodge itself in your memory. And it keeps on hurting you now.

You are not alone. We all muddle our way through a world where even well-meaning people hurt each other. When we invest ourselves in deep personal relationships, we open our souls to the wounds of another’s disloyalty or even betrayal.

There are some hurts that we can all ignore. Not every one of them one sticks with us, thank goodness! But some old pains do not wash out so easily; they remain like stubborn stains in the fabric of our own memory.

Deep hurts we never deserved flow from a dead past into our living present. A friend betrays us; a parent abuses us; a spouse leaves us in the cold – these hurts do not heal with the coming of the sun.

We’ve all wished at one time or other that we could reach back to a painful moment and cut it out of our lives. Some people are lucky; they seem to have gracious glands that secrete the juices of forgetfulness. They never hold a grudge; they do not remember old hurts. Their painful yesterdays die with the coming of tomorrow. But, most of us find that the pains of our past keep rolling through our memories, and it seems there’s nothing we can do to stop the flow.

The great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, toward the end of her epochal study on The Human Condition shared her discovery of the only power that can stop the unstoppable stream of painful memories is the “faculty of forgiveness.” It is a simple as that.

Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply.

Virtually every newspaper in the Western world told the story of how, one January dawn in 1984, Pope John Paul walked into a dank cell in Rebibbia prison in Rome to meet Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had fired a bullet at his heart, and forgave him.

But, the Pope is a professional forgiver; and it may be easy for such a highly placed professional to forgive when he knows ahead of time that the whole world will be watching.

It is many times harder for an ordinary person, whom nobody is watching, to forgive and forget.

Forgiving is love’s toughest work, and love’s biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.

Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love’s power to break nature’s rule.

Ask yourself these questions:

What do I do when I forgive someone who has done me wrong?
Who is forgivable?
Have some people gone beyond the forgiveness zone?
How do I do it?
Why should I even try?
Is there a pay-off?
Is it fair?

The act of forgiving, by itself, is a wonderfully simple act; but it always happens inside a storm of complex emotions. It is the hardest trick in the whole bag of personal relationships.

We forgive in four stages. If we can travel through all four, we achieve reconciliation –our end goal.

The first stage is “Hurt”: When somebody causes you pain so deep and unfair that you cannot forget it, you are pushed into the first stage of the crisis of forgiving.

The second stage is “Hate”: You cannot shake the memory of how much you were hurt, and you cannot wish your enemy well. You sometimes want the person who hurt you to suffer as you are suffering.

The third stage is “Heal Ourselves”: You are given the “magic eyes” to see the person who hurt you in a new light. Your memory is healed; you turn back the flow of pain and are free again.

The fourth stage is “Coming Together”: You invite the person who hurt you back into your life; if he or she comes honestly, love can move you both toward a new and healed relationship. The fourth stage depends on the person you forgive as much as it depends on you; sometimes he or she doesn’t come back, and you have to be healed alone.

When you forgive someone for hurting you, you perform spiritual surgery inside your soul; you cut away from the wrong that was done to you so that you can see your “enemy” through the magic eyes that can heal your soul. You detach that person from the hurt and let it go; the way a child opens his hands and lets a trapped butterfly go free.

Then you invite that person back into your mind, fresh, as if a piece of history between you had been rewritten, its grip on your memory rewritten – reversing the seemingly irreversible flow of pain within you.

The first gift we get is new insight. As we forgive people, we gradually come to see the deeper truth about them, a truth our hate blinds us to, a truth we can only see only when we separate them what they did to us.

The truth about those who hurt us is that they are weak, needy and fallible human beings. They were people before they hurt us, and they are people after they hurt us. They needed our help, our support, our comfort before they did us wrong; and they need it still.

According to Joel Osteen, “Hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude or inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily.”

New insight brings new feelings. When the truth lets us see the truth about our enemies, it gives us a new feeling toward them.

What forgiving is not…

Forgiving is not forgetting.

But, the important thing is that we have the power to forgive what we still do remember.

Excusing is not forgiving.

Excusing is just the opposite of forgiving. We excuse people when we understand that they were not to blame. Maybe there were extenuating circumstances. So why should we forgive them? We forgive people for the things we blame them for.

Forgiving is not the same as smothering conflict.

Some people hinder the hard work of forgiving by smothering confrontation.
When others advise you to “forgive and forget,” what they really mean is “Don’t make a fuss, I can’t stand the noise.”

Accepting people is not forgiving them.
We accept people because the good people they are.

We forgive people for the bad things they did.
Forgiving is not tolerance.

You do not have to tolerate what people do when your forgive them. You forgive people, but still refuse to tolerate what they have done.

I have no conclusion to this story about forgiveness. For now, it’s too soon to tell.

Closing Words

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

Kent M. Keith