Forgiveness. Rev Lucy Winkett - 17/11/2017

Forgiving someone who’s hurt you is weak. It’s letting them off. It’s letting them get away with it. It’s not just.

So goes a well-worn critique of the words “I forgive them”.

There are some people whose words come to us from the front line of forgiveness. Samir, whose granddaughter, Maggie, was killed in a suicide bombing in Egypt is one such person. We heard his incredibly moving story earlier. For those of us who have not had such a catastrophic life experience as this, forgiveness might seem somewhere between impossibly generous and unattractively pious. And to be frank, a misuse of Christian teaching about forgiveness has been damaging; has kept women in domestically violent situations, has re-traumatised people made to face their abusers and coerced to say they forgive. This is not what forgiveness is about. Forgiveness is not about being a doormat. There is a timeliness about forgiveness, and for many people it isn’t yet. It isn’t now.

Forgiveness in the Christian tradition is more of a process than an event, and it’s rooted in hard, sweaty, sobbing work of facing the truth of the past; finding that our humanity is indelibly marked by our need to be forgiven, thus inviting the possibility that we might be able to forgive.

Forgiveness is absolutely not about being nice. And it’s not about enslaving us in the service of some abstract moral code.

This Tuesday evening, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, I will be in dialogue with Marian Partington, whose sister Lucy was killed by Fred and Rosemary West. For 21 years she didn’t know where her sister was. Her discovery of the shattering truth set her on a path that I guess she is still on, working with the Forgiveness Project. Her words too come from the front line of forgiveness.

Forgiveness she says is “giving up hope of a better past”. She knows what she’s talking about.

When I embark on a process of trying to forgive you, or forgive myself, I’m taking a deep breath, and turning my face towards the past that I know I can’t change. It’s not weak. It’s strong. And the hallmark of the process of forgiveness is found in the root of the word used in the New Testament: to set aside, to let go.

What is forgiveness then? Listening to Samir, perhaps it begins in defiance. Choosing what is inevitably a costly path – to freedom.

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