Forgiveness surrenders the fantasy that another person’s suffering will heal me. I can seek truth, protection, accountability, and repair without making someone else’s destruction my salvation.
His yoke of forgiveness is so much easier, and His burden of reconciliation is so much lighter than the righteous indignation, the resentments, the anger, and the old hurts He asks us to let go of in exchange.
“The practice of love offers no place of safety,” but safety was never the promise on offer anyway. The promise was and is still finding life, finding our lives in this precarious world with all these risky people. The promise was and is still love rung out and quite unsafe.
*the quotation is from bell hooks
Friends, if you ask about the grace that’s on offer in the sacraments of baptism and our Holy Eucharist, it’s that in them we present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to the same divine life-giving energies that those faithful human midwives lived by.