Episode 098: How to Forgive

[Music] welcome to godsplaining contemplative preachers contemporary age each week join the dominican friars as they consider all things catholic hello friends and welcome back to god's planing my name is father patrick mary briscoe and i am today's host i always feel a little bit strange about saying that because it makes it sound like there's only one godsplaining host but that would in fact be um not true it would be false because there are many gods fighting hosts well there are five gods planting hosts anyway i'm joined today by my co-host father gregory maria pine also the order of preachers who's staring at the ceiling looking as if an angel is about to descend that would be great has descended past perfect already happened and that angel's name is wait never mind that was about to get boastful um yeah the hosting question is a serious one i feel like we need to address we need to grab the proverbial bull by its horns because if everyone's a host then no one's a guest right it's kind of like the um the syndrome evil villain on incredibles problem uh if everyone's a superhero then no one is right so if you make everyone special then no one's different and then you're really wondering at the end of the day whether or not anyone is special but that's the thing because we all basically do the same thing so maybe we should just own the fact that we're all hosts and we're all guests and we're all uninteresting none of us is a bishop so technically you know our sort of our our rank in the eyes of the church would be the same on that on that platform we would we would be the same we're all in solemn vows the order preachers yeah yeah that's about it father bonaventure father bonaventure is a phd student you're a phd student so you know that makes us less going in those directions yeah father joseph anthony has kura animarum father jacob bertrand and i don't have that he's got care of souls his pajella his faculties are bigger than ours yeah i think at this point we abandoned it if the the the attempt to draw any distinctions among between i wonder you know it's funny because like never mind i'm gonna go down a dark alley yep everyone has one last comment about this father jacob has director in his title yeah that's a great point yeah yeah we i guess it's just the distinction between the director and the assistants to the director because truth be told i mean right all the world's in need of direction and father jacob bertrand's providing it so we are accessories to his active direction that's right the goats he is hurting boom all right but today's episode is not about hosting or about direction or about hierarchy today's episode is i guess when all those things go wrong when things go right today today we thought we'd talk about forgiveness um forgiveness is of course a very difficult thing and uh for a lot of people it can be unclear what what it even means you know people wanting people wanting to forgive um oftentimes struggle for many years with the desires of their heart so we're going to look into that today but i think the first place we should start is the imperatives of the gospel because our starting place has to be as christians the fact that forgiveness is not optional so how do we arrive at that conclusion that immediately out of the gate that forgiveness is for christians a way of life yeah i think um there's this line from sin augustine where he says god give what you command and command what you will so god give what you command in the sense that like all right if you've commanded it that seems to suggest that it's possible not necessarily that it's possible on our own strength but that it's possible by virtue of the grace which you give so god give what you command command what you will so there's the sense that what is being asked of us represents god's perfect plan for our lives or represents god's plan in one way shape or form insofar as it already presumes sin or offense yeah we're talking about something that um is downstream of the fall or something that's post-lab seriously he's a sweet word so maybe i shouldn't insist too heavy-handedly on the fact if it's being perfect but just simply to say god give what you command and command what you will so what we're being asked of uh this evangelical command for forgiveness is something that god wills and which he commands and which he equips us for or which he outfits us for so that's to say we're not just being told try harder we're being told act in accord with the grace that i am giving you by the preaching of the word by the distribution of the sacraments by the faith more broadly so when we read things like for instance you may have heard of a prayer called the our father this little thing yeah you may have said it a time or two right and in that it says forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us so there's this foundational command to forgive upon which the rest of the kind of dispensation of mercy is premised so that you know it's it presumes god's grace because what if you prayed earlier in that prayer you've asked him to give you this day your daily bread well we together have prayed give us this day our daily bread the word there super substantial we're talking about not only the eucharist and just a a kind of straightforward sacramental sense but the whole dispensation of grace like fortify us supply us in the order of grace so that we can do something you know because left to our own devices same time also say like yeah you can make like decent roads you can plant some nice-looking vineyards but who cares you know i mean we want to do something a lot more significant i don't know what do you see when you look at that yeah that's right i think that i mean that's that's a great place to start right god is not going to ask the impossible of us he will in fact orient the state uh of life for us and provide for us to be able to fulfill it so we can think of this in uh in terms of our vocations right like you know when you're married when you're in religious vows god will always provide the graces for you to remain faithful in those states uh since you have consecrated yourself rightly in the name of god to them um you know the graces will always be there they will abound and those graces ultimately flow from the cross the heart of all of god's grace all of his mercy it just pours pours forth literally from christ's wounded and pierced side so it's on the cross then that we might think of forgiveness that we might begin to think of forgiveness because jesus says to those who persecuted and tortured him on the cross he says father forgive them they know not what they do um able to even in that moment turn the other cheek another uh command of christ from the gospel so so for for me forgiveness um forgiveness has to be said at the cross which means that it's painful it's messy it involves suffering um but that but that it flows ultimately from god's grace it is not something that we do uh at the end of the day but it is something that god does in through and for us boom i don't know we could take up we could say a couple other bible passages too we could if we knew the bible um i hear sometimes on episodes you make you make fun of me even when i'm not present you know like no someone else knows the scriptures it's like you i wouldn't i wouldn't do that um yeah so i'm so i'm self-conscious now about quoting the scriptures because i don't wanna i don't wanna have that come back around and bite me in an episode on which i'm not present um but i think too this idea that um okay so in the gospel of matthew you hear it said be there for perfect as your heavenly father is perfect the way that that's rendered in the gospel of luke is be therefore merciful as your heavenly father is merciful and you can associate that in your luke and mind with this idea of the good samaritan so who is the good samaritan in this parable lord asks it's the one who shows mercy and then he says go and do likewise so there's the sense that our efforts at forgiving are basically in identity identification with or in conformity to god's so the reason that we can forgive is because god forgives so he pointed this out right on the cross not only do we have a model or an exemplar in our lord jesus christ in the sense of like hey look at that guy over there forgiving that's that's pretty fancy i am impressed by his act of forgiving i feel myself encouraged to forgive as well it's not like something that happens at a distance it's something that christ is actually pouring into our hearts it's something that he's actually doing in and through us and in doing it and through us he draws us to himself he conforms us to himself he makes us like himself so it's a very i mean it's a theological act insofar as it has god for its pattern and it has god for its end it draws someone else into that love by virtue of the forgiveness which is offered but it's a matter of becoming like god everything in the christian life is a matter of becoming like god it's not like forgive so that way you could be morally superior to your peers and then you could lord it over them and say like kind of off hand into condescending things in the hopes that they will thereby desire to be like you equally snooty unto the praise and glory of god it's like no that's not it it's not the point to become like god and to draw others into that yeah and i think that that be that becoming like god we see that another moment right where peter comes to jesus and he says lord how many times must i forgive right what are we what are we called and jesus says seven times 77 times uh which is a lot of times um father humbert kilianowski professor of mathematics here at providence college you can tell us exactly how many times seven times 77 times anyway the point the point is that that it's that this act of forgiveness is abundant like god um even even seemingly endless uh so what are um i want to move now to like what what keeps people from being able to enter into this right like if this is ultimately god's work um where does unforgiveness come from and how do we fight it yeah i mean it's always hard to talk about a sinful state because it's unintelligible because every sinful state has with it a bit of madness right so the lord says forgive them for they know not what they do so there's an element of ignorance but there's also often elements of stirred up passions there's elements of a kind of malicious twist to the will where you feel yourself kind of like clinging to it but but all of those taken together form a kind of black hole so you peer at the mystery of iniquity you appear at the mystery of sin and you don't get straightforward answers because there's nothing there like it's right it's the absence of what ought to be there but i think that we can identify certain like emotional psychological spiritual dimensions of unforgiveness um and it will depend person to person like the characteristic ways in which you yourself feel hurt and then subsequently hurt back but oftentimes i think people will experience it as a loss of control and being hurt and then unforgiveness is a way by which to control the situation so maybe you've had a conversation with somebody whom you think has hurt you and you find them to be unfor kind of unapologetic or unsympathetic in their subsequent presentations and you find like no longer are you trying to fix the problem or troubleshoot it what you're doing is you're building a case against them right so certainly in the 21st century we live in a culture that places great emphasis on victims victim status and victimization some of that is to the good but some of that i think actually makes us seek opportunities to claim our victim status so that way we can build a case against our aggressors so that way the injustice is that we ourselves have suffered become in fact a credit to us as if it were righteousness okay so in the state of unforgiveness we've been dealt um a wound right we've been done an injustice and we hold on to the fact of our having been done in injustice so that we can wield it as what uh as a kind of control as a kind of manipulative high ground or at the very least as just like a sense that if we're not good you know if we're not the hero of the story at least we're the victim because we don't want to have to acknowledge the fact that we may be the enemy you know um there may be something that we're doing that we're contributing which is actually part of the contribution of evil to this particular situation so i mean that's just like a kind of basic sense but sometimes yeah that's right and i think like what's the what's the most common way that we see that play out in people's lives well by ghosting someone right by just ignoring them and leaving leaving it to the other party to figure out exactly how they've wronged us uh or to punish them you know and to allow this to allow the situation to continue to spiral instead of saying to your loved one to your friend like hey this is what you did um you know do you do you even know that you did this to me um so i i i think you're right to say that the the cage that the cage that we find our heart and is ultimately one that we build i can think of a priest who uh the line from a priest who says that that we don't hold grudges grudges hold us that we we allow these parameters to constrain our hearts anger in particular is the kind of thing that that is often experienced here i mean people people just kind of feel a rage right and uh become detached from their reason and want to nourish it anger is like a fire that it's it's pleasant to stoke you know you could just kind of continue to feed little bits and pieces there to it um and when we mull over when we turn over situations um continuing to look at something only from our own perspective only from one perspective and not questioning you know as you're suggesting father gregory not questioning the the fault that we ourselves might have to play um all we're doing is increasing the fire we're feeding that fire of anger so what what can you say about you know the kind of um the the state here because we're talking about two things we're talking about our feelings and about the will anger is one way that this plays out which is both uh emotional and volitional or resentment which can be kind of the same um can you how would you how would you suggest that we swore those things yeah i think that both emotions and affections right so those would be kind of more spiritual movements of the will are present in our response to hurt and then in our subsequent choice whether or not we forgive there has to be movement at both levels or in both registers and i think a good way to summarize it is just to describe it after the manner of the heart right so the heart names that that center of the person it names that seed of choice but it also it kind of gets you both emotion and affection in the process but i think that it's good you know insofar as it's good to distinguish things and in distinguishing them to know them a little bit better and knowing them a little bit better to be able to perhaps speak a little bit more reason into them so i think it's good to distinguish the emotional response and then the volitional response to you know some circumstance or occasion in which a person hurts you uh because on on the one hand there's this there's there's typically uh an initial response and then a subsequent one so it'll depend you know what your temperament is there are some people who are more irascible and just respond very strongly um and almost immediately to a situation and then uh hey why you gotta call me out like that yeah right nice well i'm just here minding my own business yeah so i'm very different i'm melancholic in the sense that something happens and it registers to me is off okay i'm like this is off but i don't know exactly what to say like i'm the type of person that goes back to my room and i think about like you know what exactly happened there all right and then i'm like oh wait i think that was a bad thing and i think that bad thing was done to me so now i'm going to think about that bad thing and sort it out so i think there's a kind of like innocence or surprise to the former right which is very emotional heavy-handedly emotional and oftentimes the the volitional response tends to be a little bit more just as a result is my experience okay so like i think it's a little bit over the top emotionally but then at the volitional level there isn't like a blackness to it there isn't like a broodiness to it there isn't like a i've actually been assassinating you and my thoughts element to it so it's just chesterton describes like the innocence of anger and surprise and i think that there's there's something to that which is nice whereas my case you know the melancholic case um i i want to hold back on my initial response because i'm unsure exactly as to how one would respond but then the more i spend with it i can actually ratchet myself up in the volitional level and i can be like this person this person is bad this person is the enemy and then i'm building my case right i'm building my case but i'm doing that in the absence of the other person right i'm doing that absent my friend and then i present that to my friend subscribing like brother i have this thing this very serious thing that i want to talk to you about and if if i'm that other person receiving that correction i'm like why did you like think about this for so long without me you know it's like we could have we could have troubleshot it presuming goodwill you know what you could typically do with friends um so i think it's good to be cognizant of like how you respond emotionally and then how you respond volitionally obviously they're going to be interwoven but there's there's a temptation right um to yeah there's a temptation to like make more of your anger in a way that can ultimately be unhealthy that can be resentful it can be unforgiving and then that's when we find ourselves in the situation where the evangelical mandate really really applies good well uh that's a packed first half of this episode when we get back we haven't really talked about what forgiveness is or how to do it yet which we will when we come back after the break so hang tight and we'll be right back with you [Music] you are listening to godsplaining visit us at godsplaining.org to listen to our episodes shop our store and donate to our podcast all gifts go to improving the podcast and bringing the gospel to more listeners thanks for your support well friends we've been talking about forgiveness well actually we've been talking about the gospels mandate to forgive and the challenges to forgiveness namely the kind of emotional and volitional states we find in our own hearts typically that have more to do with unforgiveness than forgiveness actually uh but when we when we talk about forgiveness uh father gregory just give us a simple definition what what do you think forgiveness is yeah i think forgiveness is the choice to love someone again yeah i think it's just that so like you know continued commitment to willing the good of the other yeah yeah yeah and but but just like downstream of an offense so you've been hurt what are you gonna do are you gonna reinvent the wheel and come up with some new way to be friends no you're gonna try to rekindle what was lost and you're gonna do it in a new way just like christ rekindled what was lost but did it in a wildly much better way and it just means you know the choice to the choice to continue to love someone and uh that's super hard i don't know if you have some some initial thoughts on the matter um i think that uh i think that one thing that we need to clarify um is that forgiveness is ultimately in the will it's like love that it's impacted of course by our our emotional state by this the setting and horizon of life so sometimes there are external factors that might that would make something make a particular situation very difficult to forgive in that moment and sometimes some of those uh some of those external factors i'm thinking like setting um or obligation you know like the nature of work you know maybe maybe a project has to end before you can forgive this teammate um so sometimes these settings can impact that but but ultimately forgiveness is in the will and it's a decision that that we make um that we make so it stems from the heart in that sense um so yes external and emotional factors can make it very difficult um and sometimes some of those have to change before we can truly begin to make that active will but but it's a conscious act a conscience thing that we do a decision that we make in our heart that can be fixed so forgiveness forgiveness is the kind of thing that is done um so it's aided by grace of course uh and by many by many other ancillary virtues maybe those are some of what we could dive into so what what kinds of things you know if you're if you're trying to make this act of the will father gregory what what helps you to do so so yeah maybe just describe it a little bit kind of after the matter of experience and then crystallize those thoughts with some virtues but i think i think uh in unforgiveness we've made a choice to harden our heart to another person we've made a choice to kind of give the uh less flattering or the less sympathetic read of their subsequent actions it's like this person's hurt me okay i see that and now i'm kind of bracing myself because i expect them to continue to act in such like manner unless they show by very evident or manifest signs that they're heartbroken over it that they're very repentant and then i'm more inclined to receive them back but if i don't necessarily see that i thought if i don't see an adequate recognition of the fact of my having been hurt then i'm just going to harden myself to that individual because i mean we're animals right so if you're a turtle you you retreating to your shell if you're a porcupine you put your quills out i mean it's just it's just what we do as animals we're not going to continue to expose ourselves invulnerability to a source of of trauma of pain of whatever betrayal things like that so i think that when when it comes to forgiving we have to work against this kind of evolutionary biological tendency because it's going to make us retreat right it's going to make us fear the other or treat the other as enemy as predator as aggressor as whatever um so i think that you know like you said forgiveness is an act of the will it's a choice it's a choice that needs to be continually ratified it's not just a one-time only choice it's a continual ongoing choice of love right to act in love towards the other person if only in a kind of basic way like i will this person knows love and serves god and enjoys him in the next right i don't want the bad for this person i want the good for this person i think there can be definitive moments though i don't want to exclude that like there could be a moment where someone reaches the point right where they can begin to make that choice um you know so just to say that someone can decide to forgive and it can be a kind of it can be a kind of ultimate thing you know to let to let go and to allow god's grace to enter a very old a very difficult wound um i think so there are two really key virtues and then other lots of other ones that i think immediately impact um forgiveness for saint thomas aquinas meekness which is the moderation of our anger and clemency which is the mitigation of punishment so meekness is you know the cold water that's thrown over the fires of anger and sometimes our hearts look like mount doom and it's very difficult to pour any amount of water in there to to quench those fires um and uh clemency you know sometimes we want the most extreme punishment for someone you know we're going to exact um an eye for an eye which of course the gospel um deters us from but we still want it you know like father gregory was describing that you know the the inner porcupine-ness of the human heart um so what do you what what makes us more meek um we're not meek just to inherit the land um we're not uh we're not meek for meekness's sake we're not clement um well some of us are clements shout out to father clement dickey um we're not we're not we're not clement because we are weak um we don't mitigate punishments because we're we're soft in that way um so what can what can you say to father gregory about meekness and clemency yeah i think you know everyone's seen these movies made in the late 90s early 2000s about the cold war and you know some misunderstanding causes one nation to you know put their military kind of outposts on high alert and then all of a sudden warheads are being activated and all of a sudden everyone's about to push the button and then they don't so i think that anger is like that situation it's like escalation towards mutually assured destruction because there's no like anger doesn't dial itself down right because what anger says is anger says all right there's an injustice that's been done and this needs to be vindicated so it needs to it's needs to have adequate redress but we on account of the fact that we're falling and we're not yet perfectly reintegrated in virtue well we're we're just by disposition by temperament by tendency always going to overplay our anger and when everyone's in the habit of overplaying his or her anger then it just mounts it just mounts towards mutually assured destruction and then you find yourself sad and alone and justified in your own mind which is a terrible place to be so when it comes to clemency there's a kind of principle of self-doubt that you introduce and you say like okay i'm angry but chances are my anger is unjustified because as far as i can tell there's only been one person who's been perfectly righteous in his anger that's jesus christ i can assume that the blessed mother were she to exhibit anger would also be righteous in such like things but we just don't have gospel testimony of it it's just like i it's just hard to do well it's super hard to do well and as a result of which we should be a little bit skeptical of our ability to carry it off because when you're in the midst of anger you feel very confident about that your anger is justified but then afterwards you're a little bit embarrassed you're like yikes so i think that we need to like import some of that embarrassment and say like all right i am not as justifiedly angry as i think myself to be in the moment lord quench the fires of my anger and i think it just means going to the lord and saying lord take this from me if it is not just take this from me if there's nothing that i can do with it because you know getting upset at the news cycle for instance is not something with which you can actually you know uh furnish some useful end for the sake of humanity like what is it what does it help you to know that silly people did silly things who cares okay just live your life so i think with respect to meekness doubt the validity of one's anger and then ask god to remove from it what is excessive and then with respect to clemency i think this is you know the movement whereby we soften our heart towards the other right we've hardened our hearts we've kind of braced for contact or braced for impact and here's the point at which we choose to soften our heart toward the other i think of this hymn that comes up in the bravery it's to the tune of king's west and i forget the name maybe in his own image or blah blah blah but there's this line there jesus broke the circle of repeated sin so left to its own devices sin will just lather rinse repeat until until what i don't know i guess if you use a shampoo image you can't make it so that your end game is very devastatingly disastrous it's like you're gonna lather rinse repeat until your hair is completely stripped of oil it's like oh my gosh not that um right so uh there's no end to it there's just no end to it until christ puts an end to it and so by clemency we participate in christ's putting an end to the cycle of repeated sin because he has promised to do as much in us yeah so i think that those are i mean as much as i ever say anything practical those are some practical things yeah and i think that leads us to that leads us to the last um to the last thing that we could discuss on the episode what does forgiveness look like in a settled state um i think because forgiveness is an act of um the will which is you know ultimately it's charities we've been saying it's the it's the movement of loving um of continuing to love someone as father gregory said downstream are wrong after having been wronged so in a in a settled state what does it look like well we might apply to the state of forgiveness all of the all of the fruits all of the the kinds of things that accompany that accompany love i mean the promise of forgiveness is the promise of peace of joy um you know the kinds of things that the kinds of things that are part and parcel to the life that jesus promises us um so the so the why the the why part of forgiveness why forgive is to get to this state where where the tumult where the turbulence is gone um what do you have to say about that yeah i think i mean you brought up the beatitude pertinent to uh uh meekness as it were so meekness the meek inherit the earth what does it mean to inherit the earth i think here of uh we're getting the land yeah exactly we're coming into possession but truth be told we are coming into possession in the sense that like okay i think of that movie remember the titans which gosh that's kind of been like 20 years ago now 24 years ago it is a great movie but i think about julius campbell when he's first confronted by gary bertier about the way that he's playing defense and he says i'm going to look out for myself and i'm going to get mine and i think that that's the logic of anger is i'm going to look out for myself and i'm going to get mine but once anger gives way to clemency once the grace of god becomes operative and a human heart softens it towards the other and makes this kind of move towards forgiveness then you then you look out for god and get gods as it were so you come into possession of something that's far more far more vast far more embracing far more wonderful indeed and i think that it's in that disposition that we can talk about the land because in ancient israel the land is everything you can only really offer true worship in the lands to the extent the bewildering extent that when israel is exiled in babylon they bring with them soil from the temple mount so that in standing on it they can offer upright worship so it's a very local thing but christ says you know in john 4 you'll neither worship here on mount gerizim nor on mount zion your worship in spirit and truth which points back to john 1 which is an identification of the word incarnate which is an identification of himself so christ takes that land imagery and imports it you know kind of like attributes it to his own flesh like we worship in christ we have our possession in christ what we possess is christ and in having christ one has everything and when you think about that like anger dispossesses you of christ because you're so i don't know hell bent on holding on to your unforgiveness your resentment whatever your frustration that you lose hold of the christ who wants to give you everything it is his which truth be told is everything um so i think that that's a possession of a far more rich grand wonderful sort if you're struggling to forgive i counsel you to take the advice of pope francis who says first pray for the desire for forgiveness he says the holy father recommends that we that we pray to want to forgive so we should say in our heart of hearts lord help me to want to forgive this person to desire goodness and charity for them to even want those things to first seek the kind of peace that that we've been here talking about so i so i commend that to you as a just kind of final salvo about where do we even start and and uh what can it look like in one's life so pray for those who have persecuted you this is the gospel imperative uh pray for us too as we continue our work here on god's planning we're grateful to all of you who support the podcast who like and share our episodes on social media our youtube comment commentators uh we love you guys if you are looking to offer further support check out our merch that's accessible on the website and we look forward to sharing many more future episodes and projects with you all right god bless thanks for listening to god's planning a work of the dominican friars of the province of saint joseph follow us on facebook twitter and instagram leave a review on your podcast app and visit us at godsplaining.org [Music]

Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 1,106

Rating: 4.9629631 out of 5

Keywords: catholic, dominican friars, theology, philosophy, religion, faith, order of preachers, godsplaining, seekers, Truth, preaching, questions, searching, prayer, meditation, forgiveness, fr Gregory Pine

Id: hkq_AsyqnaY

Length: 32min 22sec (1942 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021