by Youngbear Roth

Created on: March 31, 2010

I've read amazing material concerning forgiveness – all of it valuable to a point, the point where I slam the book shut painfully on my finger checking my vital signs, because I realize I've spent the last hour being spoon fed pabulum. What do I say to a forty year old woman who's been in long-term therapy unable to grow past the fume of being raped by her father while her mother turned away? 

Forgiveness scarcely begins with a philosophical lecture swiftly delivered to ourselves. For concrete change in our lives, to go the distance, forgiveness must come from off the corner; drive down the street through one's viscera; throw on its blinding brights where we live; and shout a truth so powerful and profound that we're stopped cold, and all one can say is, "I believe it!"

How do you and I forgive the deepest pains this world dog-piles upon us?  How do we transcend the intense emotional crises of child abuse, abandonment, acts of murder and terrorism, unrequited love – and, what of the promise that God will always take care of us, which flies in the face of war, massive homelessness and starvation, and natural disaster?

During the sixties and seventies, Bob Dylan's composition, 'Masters of War', screeched vitriolic lyrics and searing vocals infuriating a nationalistic fifties generation with his stinging accusation of a government that has "…thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled, the fear to bring children into this world."  In the new millennium, the call to wrath doesn't cease with the latest suicide bombings; a mother lost her son, and a husband his wife.

Regardless of political ideologies or social strata, and crossing all geographical boundaries, being alive at this time in history, we awaken to our days overwhelmed by  insecurity and free-floating vulnerability. Or, we seethe over trust invested in our churches and public leaders. We need a jumping off point in the tempest of our existence where you and I initiate a solid understanding of what forgiveness is not; forgiveness is not an altruistic act of forgetting or compromise.

Knowing that clemency does not depend on altruism allows us an anger escape valve. We are furious, but will rise above it because the gift of pardon is not a selfless process of denial; this is step one. With this, we begin a slight loosening of the white-knuckle hold on a brutalized ego.

We brave the next step in the storm by understanding that to live unforgiving

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