The Art of Forgiving -- Introduction

Introduction from
Lewis B. Smedes

One of God's better jokes on us was to give the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the table of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality. And it comforts us little to know that not even God can undo what has been done.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Edward Fitzgerald

It would give us some comfort if we could only forget a past that we cannot change. But the ability to remember becomes an inability to forget when our memory is clogged with pain inflicted by people who did us wrong. If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from their pain. But the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory.

The only way to remove the nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness. It is not as though forgiving were the remedy of choice among other options, less effective but still useful. It is the only remedy.

The remedy has existed since the first wrong done one human being by another. Yet, people still punish themselves with the pains of a past long gone. Or punish others in a futile apssion to get revenge. Tribes slaughter tribes, ethnic groups slaughter other ethnic groups, and gangs shoot up other gangs. Couples break their narriages and divide their families into weeping pieces. All because they will not make use of the one means given to us for recovering from the insults and injuries of a past that never should have been.

Why do people surrender their tomorrows to the unfair pain of their yesterdays? The total anser lies buried somewhere in our primitive need to protect our pride, in our trembling fear of feeling weak, and in our moral instincts for justice, all migled together as a raw passion to see he who wounded us wounded in equal measure. But I believe that the answer is also tangled in a web of misunderstandings about forgiveness itself.

More than ten years ago, moved by the discovery that forgiving is a gift God has given us for healing ourselves before we are ready to help anyone else, I wrote a book called Forgive and Forget. Now, after ten years of further thought and scores of conversations with some of the half million and more people who read the first book, I find there is more to say.

In my earlier book I wanted to motivate people to forgive. In this one I want to answer their questions. In the first book, I wanted to share a discovery. In this one, I want to help people use it more effectively. If the earlier book was for inspiration, this one is for understanding. If the first offered a menu, this one shares a recipe.

Forgiving, when you come down to it, is an art, a practical art, maybe the most neglected of all the healing arts. It is the art of healing inner wounds inflicted by other people's wrongs.

We also need to clear up some false notions about forgiving. Like the notion that if we forgive someone we are virtually inviting them to wallop us again. Or that if we forgive what he did we are implying that what happened was not all that bad. Or that if we forgive someone for doing us wrong we are exempting him from the demands of justice. Or that if we forgive we are expected to go back into the old relationship that he ruined.

These are things that every wounded person needs to know when he or she practices the art of forgiving. They are the sorts of things The Art of Forgiving is about.

--Lewis Smedes