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1、Unit 11 Open the Door to ForgivenessLewis B. SmedesIts surgery of the soul, the loving, healing way to create new beginnings out of past pain.1. Someone hurt you, maybe yesterday, maybe long ago, and you cannot forget it. You did not deserve the hurt and it has lodged itself in your memory, where it
2、 keeps on hurting.2. You are not alone. We all muddle our way through a world where even well-meaning people hurt one another. A friend betrays us; a parent abuses us; a spouse leaves us.3. Philosopher Hannah Arendt believes that the only power that can stop the stream of painful memories is the fac
3、ulty of forgiving . In that spirit, one December day in 1983, Pope John Paul II walked into a cell of Rebibbia prison outside Rome to meet Mehmet Ali Agca. The Pope took the hand of the man who had tried to kill him, and forgave him.4. For most of us, however, it is not easy to forgive. Forgiving se
4、ems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. But in forgiving we canmove from hurting and hating to healing and reconciliation.5. Hate is our natural response to deep and unfair hurts. A woman wishes her former husband would be miserable with his
5、 new wife. A man whose friend has betrayed him hopes the friendwill be fired from his job. Hate is a malignancy that festers and grows, stifling joy and threatening our health. It hurts the hater more than the hated. It must be cut outfor our ownsake.6. How can this be done? How can you let go of a
6、hurt, the way a child opens his hands and frees a trapped butterfly? Here are guidelines to help you begin to forgive:7. Confront your malice. None of us wants to admit that we hate someone, so we hide it from ourselves. But the fury denied rages beneath the surface and infects all our relationships
7、.Admitting our hate compels us to make a decision about the surgery of the soul we callforgiving. We must acknowledge what has happened, face up to the other person and say: You did me wrong.”8. Liz was an assistant professor of biology at a university in California. She was a good teacher, and the
8、chairman of her department promised to ask the dean to promote her. Instead, his report was so critical of her performance that the dean advised her to look for another job.9. Liz hated the chairman for betraying her, but she needed a recommendation from him. Whenhe said how sorry he was that his su
9、pport could not convince the dean, she pretended to believe him. But she could not keep up the duplicity. One day she confronted him. His embarrassed denial enabled Liz to see him for the weak person he was. She began to feel the power she needed to forgive him and, in her decision to do so, was set
10、 free of her hate.10. Separate the wrongdoer from the wrong. The Bible describes, in the ancient drama ofatonement, how God took a bundle of human sins off mans back, tied it to a goat, and sentthe scapegoat to a solitary land ”. Forgiving is finding a new vision of the person who has wronged us, th
11、e person stripped of his sins who really lives beneath the cloak of his wrongdoing.11. The first gift we get when we separate the wrong from the wrongdoer is insight. As we cometo see the deeper truth about people that they are fallible our feelings change. At 16 my adopted daughter, Cathy, was a ho
12、thead who bitterly resented her natural mother for giving her away. Why had she not been worth keeping? Then she found out that her parents had been very young and poor and not married.12. About this time, one of Cathys friends became pregnant and, in fear and doubt, gave up herbaby for adoption. Ca
13、thy shared her friend s conflict, and was sure her decision had been 精品资料she hadright. Gradually she came to feel that her own mother, too, had done the right thinggiven her baby away because she loved her too much to keep her. Cathys new understanding brought her resentment down to forgiving size.1
14、3. Let go of the past. A friend of mine, a beautiful actress, was left crippled by a car accident a few years ago. Her husband stayed with her until she had partially recovered. Then, coldly, he left her.14. She could have mortgaged her future to hate. Instead, she forgave her husband and wished him
15、 well. I was skeptical. Suppose he married a sexy young starlet. Would you wish him to be happy with her? ”15. Yes, I would, she answered.16. This does not mean my friend has entirely forgotten the hurt. In fact, forgetting too soon maybe a dangerous way to escape forgivings inner surgeries. Once we
16、 have forgiven, however,forgetting is a sign of health. We can forget, eventually, because we are healed.17. Don t give up on forgiveness keep working at it. As a boy, the British scholar C. S. Lewis was badly hurt by a bully of a teacher. For most of his life he could not forgive the teacher andthis troubled him. But not long before he died, he wrote to a friend:Only a few weeks ago, Irealize
