Forgiveness is difficult, complicated, time consuming and at least at some level painful. That's probably why we're so awful at it. There is virtually no chance that anyone reading this (and certainly the writer) has mastered forgiveness. At least I've never met anyone who has.
Interestingly, I've never met anyone who actually acknowledged having a problem with forgiveness. I've met people who have been betrayed by family, spouses, and business associates not to mention Republicans, Democrats and the Illuminati. Point being that feelings of betrayal and other general forms of hurt span time and distance and even transcend reality. Still, try as I might I can find no human being that struggles with forgiveness.
I met a guy once who had found a theologian he really liked. The guy liked the theologian because the theologian had "discovered" that when Christ gave his sermons, he was only speaking to Jews. That meant that according to the theologian (and by extension the guy), the things that Christ said about forgiveness only applied to Jews. Paul was "the one" who was "anointed" to speak to gentiles. Therefore, we as gentiles only had to do things that Paul said. Apparently, Paul didn't say as much about forgiveness as Jesus did. I ignored that last bit (which is pretty wrong and wildly irrelevant) and asked him, "How does that help you?" He said, "That means I don't have to forgive Adolph Hitler who killed members of my family." His wife whisked him off at this point. This vaguely reminded me of my wife operating in similar context. My next question to him would have been, "How does hating Adolph Hitler help you?"
There are a lot of other examples of failed forgiveness. I've got some for almost everyone I know. If I don't have an example for someone, it's probably because I haven't learned it yet. Not because it isn't there.
All this raises the question, "Why can't we see our own problems with forgiveness?" I think the answer to this is pretty simple. The answer is this: Unforgiveness is invisible. Well technically, it's not invisible. Rather, the thing that unforgiveness is attached to is invisible, namely, the Incredible Vanishing log.
Jesus taught all manner of things about forgiveness...to everyone. One thing he taught on this subject was a comparison about an individual's issues vs. his neighbor's issues. This all is found in his question about a beam (or log) and a speck. To paraphrase, "Why do you fret and accuse your brother of having an itsy bitsy speck in his eye when there's a giant Redwood log in your eye?"
I think we have a perspective extending from a churchianity culture of convenience that renders our respective Redwoods invisible. We don't see them because individually we don't want to acknowledge them and socially we don't bear each other's issues well. It's better if we just shut our eyes...which is hard of course when you've got a huge thing in it. What's fascinating is that we can still see everyone else's issues while remaining oblivious to our own.
This particular question Jesus asked grabbed me a long time ago. Over the years, I've noticed a couple things about it. One is that this is in part a matter of perspective. The thing in your own eye is a lot bigger, in part at least, because it's a lot closer. You can't run away from it because wherever you go you take it with you. The other is that any foreign object in your own eye is bound to distort what you see. Something in someone else's eye distorts nothing in yours. Distortion leads to all kinds of other things...bad theology is one example of "other things."
I confess that I don't see my own log well at all. I've gotten better over the years but it still needs considerable pruning...chainsawing actually. I tell people about it from time to time. The response is usually either a bit of pique that I could be so fallen and barbaric as to harbor unforgiveness, or a look that I have come to refer to as "the look of the stunned Mullet." That's OK though. Those are responses I've learned to forgive.
I have some areas I've managed to look at and recognize for the mammoth growth they represent. Even so, a number of these have gotten much smaller over time and now only crop up occasionally if at all. There are almost certainly some I still don't see. I'm looking forward to discovering them. Seems like where I live there are always tress to cut.
