Injustice CollectionWe have a complicated relationship with the grudges we hold. We get obsessed and aggravated by the many slights that befall us, but we're ever reluctant to bury our pain and move on. Like an illicit affair, our beloved grudges usually end up creating misery for all involved.
The tendency to itemize every unfair knock we've ever suffered is known as injustice collecting. Sometimes the injustices are personal. At other times, the catalogued outrages lead to overwrought generalizations, such as, this is too unfair. This type of thinking leads to hopelessness and rage.
Enough grudge holding and soon you'll see more iniquity than actually exists. The injustice collector becomes a trigger-happy perceiver. If you walk down the street recounting the affronts you've suffered lately, you'll kick up quite a cloud of dejection.
Injustice collecting springs from a sensible motive: the monitoring of fairness as a form of self-protection, an impulse that evolved among social creatures who depended on one another.
ForgivenessAnyone who has ever been victimized must decide whether or not to forgive the perpetrator. There can be no middle ground to this decision: either you decide to forgive the person who hurt you, or you hold on to bitterness and anger.
Holding on to bitterness and anger can cause problems of their own, so if you have ever been victimized, being able to forgive your victimizer is a crucial part of your healing.
Forgiveness, however, can be a problem for many people simply because they are not clear about what forgiveness really is. All too often forgiveness gets confused with reconciliation, a larger process of which forgiveness is but one part.
Forgiveness by itself is still psychologically preferable to holding a grudge. Why? Because the bitterness of a grudge works like a mental poison that doesn’t hurt anyone but yourself. Seeking revenge or wishing harm to another will, at the minimum, deplete your strength and prevent your wounds from healing. In the worst case, the cold hunger for revenge will make you into a victimizer yourself. Lacking forgiveness, you and your victimizer will be locked together in the hell of eternal revenge.
ReconciliationIf one person is injured by another, we could say that the two persons are “pushed apart” by the injury, and so, if they are to become friendly again, this gap between them must be repaired—they must be reconciled. Reconciliation comes from the Latin words re-, meaning “again,” and conciliare, which means “to bring together,” so reconciliation means “to bring together—or to make friendly—again.”
The act of reconciliation involves two parts: forgiveness and penance. Since the present discussion is about understanding forgiveness, let’s go on then to define penance.
PenanceFirst is the act of confession: admitting the act. The act has to be admitted, aloud, to the person offended, or the entire process stops and no one gets anywhere. If one doesn’t know what to confess to, they are powerless in the process. If the offense is withheld from the offender, the person offended displays an ownership and thereby admits to their need to hold the grudge.
Second is the act of repentance: asking for forgiveness (“We’re sorry”). For what again?
And third is the act of penalty: accepting the punishment (“OK”).
Punishment has been going on for a very long time
All is well and by for now
Santa Cruz Boardwalk 1979
