Nothing is as important as forgiveness. This statement from Fr. Ron Rolheiser highlights a key to true happiness and the most important spiritual imperative in our lives. “We need to forgive, to make peace with the hurts and injustices we have suffered so as not to die angry and bitter. Before we die, we need to forgive others, ourselves, and God, for what happened to us in this life. Wounds to the soul take time, a long time, to heal, and the process is excruciatingly slow, something that cannot be rushed. Indeed, the trauma from an emotional wound often affects our physical health. Healing takes time. The ability to forgive is more contingent upon grace than upon willpower. To err is human, but to forgive is divine. This little slogan contains a deeper truth than is immediately evident. What makes forgiveness so difficult, existentially impossible at times, is not primarily that our egos are bruised and wounded. Rather, the real difficulty is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body; it strips us of our strength. This is particularly true for those soul-searing and soul-shattering traumas that take can take a lifetime to heal or sometimes can never be healed in this lifetime. Wounds of this kind radically disempower us, particularly towards the person who did this to us, making it very difficult for us to forgive. We need a Spirituality of Sabbath to help us. God set up a certain rhythm for our lives. That rhythm is supposed to work this way:
We work for six days, then rest for one day.
We work for seven times seven years, forty-nine years, then have a jubilee where the world itself goes on sabbatical.
We work for seven years, then rest for one year (a sabbatical).
We work for a lifetime, then enjoy an eternity of sabbatical.
Now, that rhythm is also intended as the rhythm for how we move towards forgiveness:
We can hold a mini-grudge of seven days, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a major grudge for seven years, but then we need to give it up. (The “statute of limitations” is based on this.)
We can hold a massive soul-searing wound for forty-nine years, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a massive soul-shattering wound until our deathbed, but then we need to give it up.
This highlights something which is too often absent in therapeutic and spiritual circles today, namely, that we need time to be able to forgive and that the length of time needed is contingent upon the depth of the hurt.”