This is the week preceding the beginning of Lent, whose advent is marked by what I used to jokingly refer to as “Identify a Catholic Day,” Ash Wednesday. As an Anglican, I now somewhat resent my former self for that oversimplification—there are many, many traditions within the Christian Church that mark the entrance into the journey of Lent with the imposition of ashes and the humbling words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Traditionally, the week before Lent is a time to think about forgiveness—our own, and offering it to others who have harmed us, but I haven’t needed tradition to have forgiveness on my mind. God’s been bringing it up left, right and center.
And, frankly, I haven’t appreciated it one bit.
Forgiveness is a tough thing to talk about, especially because the process of forgiveness is often reduced to a simple formula: get over it and get on with it.
While God does tell us to forgive one another, the journey to forgiveness is often a long and winding road—one that leads through thickets of skin-catching bitterness and expanses of anger and denial before we find ourselves at the baptizing river of Life.
That’s why I’m grateful for writers like Janet Hagberg, who go well beyond the “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” and provide us a map for the journey into our own hearts of darkness, and out the other side into forgiveness and healing.
As she writes on her blog, At River’s Edge,
Forgiving may be the most difficult task in our lives. To forgive, we have to let go of our resentments, our need to be right or to be vindicated or to see justice done. Forgiveness moves us from justice to mercy. But once we have been wronged, our hurt urges us to seek revenge, or at least vindication. It is the human response. Only when we approach forgiveness as a calling, as a holy process that heals our souls, do we find an approach that really heals us.
In her wonderful reflection, which is worth reading in its entirety here, she talks about some of the signposts on the way:
• Telling our stories, but not getting stuck in them
• Taking responsibility for our part in the story
• Moving forward through the challenges of forgiveness
• Remembering not to forgive too soon
I know that I’m still in the middle of the long journey of forgiveness, but I feel God nudging me to move beyond telling my story to safe people, forward into taking responsibility and moving forward to find those healing waters that He has in store for me.
I don’t think that I’ll have this all together by the start of Lent this week, and I can feel myself trying to squirm away and sit in my own self-righteousness rather than doing the dark work of seeing my own sin in my story, but I’m sharing this with you not only to offer the resource, but to say that I don’t want to sit there any more. I want to be on the journey.
Maybe I’ll meet you there.