THE ZIG OF HURT, THE ZAG OF FORGIVENESS ~ 6

 

                                   The first example in Sacred Scripture of how poisoned thinking morphs into out-of-control emotions of jealousy, anger, hatred and explodes into hurting, through lashing out verbally, physically – or simply choosing the punitive option of distance and silence – towards the one[s] who have directly, often indirectly because we have imagined it to be so – hurt us, is that of Cain and Abel. [Gn.4:1-18]

When we cling obsessively to actual or perceived hurt inflicted upon us by another/others, sometimes even God becomes the target of our blaming hurt.

There is within most people a seeking, aided, and abetted by satan, to find any means to cauterize the pain. Cain’s choice was to murder his brother. There is a holier alternative to punitive action against those who hurt us: asking for and embracing the healing grace of Christ. Without such healing we will never be complete as a person. Without such healing we will both remain prisoners in the darkness of hate-filled pain and tend to seek out others wounded and in bondage as we are. Such relationships are truly the blind leading the blind and are inevitably disastrous.

So, we should, indeed I should, take seriously each time we pray the Our Father: forgive us as we forgive those, being un-hurting of ourselves because while so praying sincerely it may take some time for our emotions to calm down and catch up with our hearts.

It is, as I write, Pentecost Sunday and in the Sequence, we pray: Light most blessed shine with grace in our heart’s most secret place.

So long as we do not invite the Holy Spirit into the secret place where we harbour and cling to unforgiveness of those who have hurt us, unforgiveness of self, of God if we are blaming Him for apparently not protecting us, the latter both an emotional wound lie and satanic lie, which keeps us from our true selves, beloved children of the Father who cradles us in His arms, His embrace healing us wound by wound IF we but stay still in His embrace.

We bend so much towards ourselves that we think we are able to cauterize the pain by our own devices of hedonism, drugs, or a type of faith which is not faith but religiosity. Thus like the proverbial house cleansed by Christ of devils – the house being ourselves – failure to do our part, with Christ’s help to keep the door closed to satan and his agents, seven more demons come to dwell in the house of us, bringing with them the offer of the seven deadly sins as promises they claim will cauterize all wounds. Their offer is a dark panacea filled with snakes which will poison us even more than the wounds we bear.

We further delude ourselves – at least I often do – if we can just face and be healed of hurt X, by some self-help book, therapy, addiction, then we’ll become impervious to further hurts in life.

As a priest I am in persona Christi, in the person of Christ: whole Christ, which includes having a pierced Heart, a broken open Heart, like Christ’s, where every human being may enter. Christ’s Heart was broken open with a lance. The hearts of priests are broken open by the vicissitudes of life from the moment are born, to the moment we are ordained, to the moment we die.

Thus, I keep constantly in my heart a reminder from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, describing the consecrated Bread, which is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ, before He is disturbed as Holy Communion: Broken and distributed is the Lamb of God.

When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride………There are two sides to forgiveness: giving and receiving……...Only when we can receive forgiveness can we give it. [1]

It is only by inviting Christ into the depths of memory and inviting the Holy Spirit into the secret places of my heart that I am able to write about my childhood, and to forgive all the inflicted by others, or self-inflicted hurt. If we do not invite Jesus to heal our memories of hurt, which does not mean forgetting but having the memories purified of the pain, bitterness, anger, then we will never be free because we will continue to be in bondage.

“Let us not forget that God forgives and God forgives always. Let us never tire of asking for forgiveness. ~ Pope Francis.

I am struck by how I cling to my own wounded self. Why do I think so much about the people who have offended or hurt me? Why do I allow them to have such power over my feelings and emotions? Why can’t I simply be grateful for the good they did and forget about their failures and mistakes? [2]

An equally destructive aspect of being in bondage to unforgiveness is we become easy prey to the “noonday devil”, the devil of nihilism, relativism, hate, all the negatives of unforgiveness, the torpor of a present infected with: acedia: As a reaction to the gloominess of the present there may indeed be a tendency to cultivate an excessive nostalgia for the successful, well-spent moments of the past. To embellish it, to delight in it, to tell stories about it. When nothing goes well anymore in the present, it is so reassuring to become attached to the past………Often, however, the flight into the past or the escape into the future produces nothing but sadness and disgust; one finds in them a taste of bitterness and dissatisfaction. [3]

The above points to mind-games we play with ourselves to exempt ourselves from looking at our past with and in the light of Christ, seeing things in all their unvarnished truth, the first step of truth setting us free, because protected by Christ when we do so we are protected from any of the hurt being re-enacted, see objectively whom and what needs be forgiven, including ourselves, whereas imaging some benign future is a pyrrhic victory at best because, in particular for faithful disciples of Christ, there is no future without suffering. It is the reality, to be embraced, of picking up our cross each day and following Him.

Since I strive in these posts to avoid TMI that has posed a major problem, because how to write about my childhood without detailing how it unfolded, the damage done to my personhood?

After much prayer to the Holy Spirit for the right words this encompasses all of it: Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse, mental or physical. [4]

[1] THE WAY OF FORGIVENESS, pp.42,43; Orbis Books, 2019

[2] Henri Nouwen, quoted in THE WAY OF FORGIVENESS, p. 159; Orbis Books; 2019

[3] THE NOONDAY DEVIL; Acedia, the unnamed evil of our time; Jean-Charles Nault, o.s.b.; p. 125; Ignatius Press 2015

[4] 12 RULES FOR LIFE; Jordan B Peterson; p. 122; Random House Canada, 2018

© 2021 Fr. Arthur Joseph