To Forgive is Divine

It’s easy to hold on to a grudge. After all, we’ve been wronged. Isn’t it simple justice that the offending party should suffer our eternal scorn? We can just curl up with our righteous anger as if it were a hot water bottle, and nurse our hurt feelings into perpetuity.

Of course, that’s not how it really works. Pretty soon, the grudge starts to eat away at us. It circles us, buzzing in and out of our consciousness like a lone mosquito in a dark, empty room. Pretty soon we can’t enjoy or think of anything else. 

Nelson Mandela once said that: “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping it kills the other person.” It would sound like a platitude, except for that 27 years in prison and leading a national reconciliation movement thing he did. 

But even if you want to forgive someone, how do you go about it? Paradoxically, the first step is sometimes to forgive yourself. Often we cling to grudges because they shield us from thoughts we’d just as soon ignore. Did those words sting so much because they were partly true? Did they do this to me because I let them? Because I deserved it? It doesn’t matter if none of it was your fault--the human capacity for guilt, shame and self-doubt in the face of conflict is not constrained by logic. By holding a grudge, we focus our pain outward, so we don’t have to look within. 

We tell ourselves that we don’t want to forgive someone because that would let them off the hook. But who’s the one left dangling? Don’t forgive because they deserve it, forgive because you do. You deserve to put down that rock you’ve been carrying so long. You could keep throwing it at them, but it’s tied around your neck, so it’s just going to bounce back and hit you in the face.