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Originally Posted by Nat
What are your thoughts on forgiveness? What does forgiveness mean to you? What does it feel like to you? Do you have methods or rituals of forgiveness? Do you feel there are times when forgiveness is not an option? Do you forgive frequently or rarely? Do you forgive yourself? Do you seek forgiveness for things you regret? If you have kids or have young people in your life, what do/would you teach them about forgiveness? Any other thoughts on forgiveness?
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I'm not sure I really see forgiveness in the same way many people have expressed in this thread. For me, not forgiving someone does not mean I continue to spend all my waking hours or much time at all begrudging an act. I don't see it as some liberating act that allows you to move on from whatever wrong was done to you. There is little room for that particular word in my vocabulary, largely because I find it a useless word in my own life's context, and I'm not sure it has much use outside of a religious or spiritual context. Perhaps I am too reminded of the OE "forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum," and in a way reflects how I've always felt about forgiveness and guilt.
I can actually only think of one instance in my life that really relates to this subject. I am not a person that becomes offended by much of anything, since I see little use in feeling offended by an act or a word or a person. That would be a failure to understand the interpretation of each person's deeds or words as a part of a certain system, and I don't think any given system has any particular moral merit. If I am to be offended, we must both be operating under the same system, and my own does not recognise offense.
Most of the time when someone commits some kind of wrong against me, whether theft, backstabbing, violence or any similar act, I don't find myself thinking about forgiveness. Once the act is done, it is done, and in most cases those people have admitted to what they've done, though whether they've considered it an offense is another story. Those who have not, I haven't felt the need to begrudge, and upon realising that the act was due to some problem they were having, I've even attempted to help them overcome it, since I see more value in overcoming than blaming or forgiving. Every negative action/action that infringes upon the freedom of another that a human being commits has a cause, and often that cause is some kind of negative event that affected them, or perhaps a chemical imbalance and that person may keeping acting a certain way as long as they hold on to that negative past, negative influence or refuse to recognise their condition. Even for them, it is not about forgiving, but about overcoming that event or influence. If that person doesn't take the intiative to free themselves, then I cease to give a flying fuck. I don't forgive them because forgiveness is not an issue, but they are rarely, if ever, brought to mind, and when they are brought to mind, I won't feel any anger against them.
There is one person on this earth that is the epitome of this, and that person is my own father, who was negatively affected by his own father before him. This is why I take issue with victim/victimiser arguments, because very often victims continue to perpetuate the cycle, whether becoming aggressors themselves, or by continuing to remain stuck in the victim mentality. We are also talking about the acts themselves versus those who commit those acts, and we are also talking about placing meaning upon otherwise meaningless acts. Going back to the original OE of the Lord's Prayer, this notion of "forgiv[ing] us our guilts" seems to be like some kind of confessional of erasing the acts so that one may continue toward some good grace. Furthermore, what is it that we are forgiving? In the original OE Lord's Prayer, it is the guilt that is forgiven, which has many connotations, but largely centres around a person's own perception of a deed they themselves have committed, or which has been committed toward another.
Going back to how this affects my refusal to forgive my father, I don't think the forgiveness of some "guilty deed" works for either of us: a) because he does not admit to having ever committed any wrong against me, and b) because I don't believe in his guilt or that some moral transgression occurred, but simply that the cycle affected me negatively and that I need to overcome it.
So what else do we forgive, if not a guilt? An act? If so, my father continues to deny he was ever physically abusive toward me, and, on top of that, his family has erased the acts they witnessed over many years from their minds. As for myself, despite that very few people in my family will even recognise my childhood, I still know that my father committed these acts. Do they need to be forgiven? What is forgiveness and is what I experience even remotely related to this rather subjective and archaic term? Do I continue to be angry with or resent my father? It's hard to say if I feel anything toward him at all, and I'm not sure that I continue to hold him in low regard because of his past actions or his present actions. I know all his actions and words, both present and past, are driven by his own intense sense of insecurity, which was the result of his own father. His insecurity in the past caused him to be physically abusive towards me and toward other children, while his insecurity today causes him to refuse self-examination, education and the ability to discuss anything without becoming emotionally invested, because his false sense of pride rests on a certain notion of himself. I know his insecurities because they plagued me as a child and as a teenager and even in my early 20's. I'd been stripped of my dignity repeatedly as a child, and was mortified of being stripped of it again. But unlike him I combated it, and today he, nor his past actions are of any importance to me, though in many respects my childhood doesn't exist for me, anymore. I continue to fight some of the remaining symptoms, but the symptoms are not him, they are not his actions, they are the result of things long rendered irrelevant, that have no logical reason for continued existence. The important thing is that I continue to fight against those symptoms (rather than against the past or him), while he resigned himself to them.
I think that is why I cannot claim to "forgive" him, while he is rarely in my thoughts, rarely in my actions, rarely in my life. Because I know that in order to overcome, one needs to fight. Nothing I can ever say to him will help him with his demons, nor erase the past. I know the feeling of a thousand tons of guilt and insecurity weighing on your mind, and its enough to drive you insane. But I've also learned to break through it with a strong awareness of my own insecurities, weaknesses, strengths, of my own situation and of what got me here to begin with. It's about having the courage to face that which you're most afraid to face in yourself. I think my refusal to "forgive" (and I am still not convinced this is the right word) is my refusal to allow such a past to be an excuse for actions in the future, because if he is excused, then I am excused. I do not excuse myself, but evolve mself. What I don't "forgive" in him is the fact that he allows his past to be his future.
As such, forgiveness of myself is a non-issue. Because the result of my childhood was the incessant feeling of guilt for no particular reason, I've come to see guilt in relation to myself as a psychological symptom rather than of anything practical that needs release. I think we need to overcome our own regretable acts, rather than forgive them, since there seems to be another kind of resignation attached to that forgiveness. Again, with me there is no release attached to forgiveness, as there seems to be with others. The closest thing to a ritual I have is destroying myself and any "beliefs" I may have so as to rebuild from the bottom up; some shadow of Cartesian or Derridean evolution. As such, I don't feel I am ever the same person that I was yesterday, and so I cannot really resign to any kind of forgiveness, since there is always that element of self-improvement. I knew less yesterday than I do today, and know less today than I will tomorrow.
If I am constantly evolving then forgiveness cannot exist. Whatever my self-perceived fault was yesterday, I am ammending today.
Thanks for this topic. I really enjoyed responding as well as the opportunity to examine my own thoughts on the subject. I hope I did not relinquish to much information, since that wasn't really the intent so much as to examine a portion of myself that most relates to the subject. Thanks again for the through-provoking topic.