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Hey Rev!

I know God can forgive all our sins. But how do we forgive ourselves?

– Drew

Dear Drew:

What if God’s forgiveness is a big part of the way that we forgive ourselves?

I heard Gene Robison speak a couple of years ago. In his talk he reflected on an especially hard time in his life. In the stress and the pain of those days, Robinson went to see his spiritual director. She advised him to take up a practice in which he spent five or 10 minutes a day picturing God’s love washing over him like gloriously warm water. Feel God’s love holding you, she told him: know that God loves you entirely and without condition.

Robinson said that he made that practice a regular part of his prayer life. And he said that doing so was transformational — that it gave him the strength to set aside his fear and his loneliness and his anger. That it allowed him to live fully and bravely and generously and abundantly.

I’ve shared that story in this column before. And I’m more or less cutting and pasting it today, Drew, because I think that it’s an important story for you to hear. What Robinson’s story reminds us is that finding what we may variously call peace or wholeness or reconciliation or forgiveness isn’t something that we do by ourselves. Rather, it something that we do with God’s help. To put that thought another way, we are able to love ourselves because God has loved us first. We are able to forgive ourselves because God has forgiven us first.

Now, I don’t want to imply that forgiving yourself — even with God’s help — is an easy matter. I’m 42 years old, and I still have memories from high school, memories of things that I did or left undone, that make me wince. (Maybe there are folks out there who feel 100 percent OK with their past. But, with the possible exception of a few of my friends who have found deep peace in their dying, I don’t know that I have ever met one of them.) What a prayer practice such as Robinson’s encourages us to do, rather, is to hold our painful memories lightly, to hold the destructive narrative that often accompanies them lightly. To remember that these hurts are smaller than God’s love for us.

Kent Hoffman, when he encounters a draining story about himself, says, “Of course.” Of course these memories are running through my head. Of course Wormwood is whispering in my ear. An “of course” like that allows us to understand the mistakes of our past and the feelings that we have about them not so much as adversaries but, rather, as teachers. It might even allow us to laugh at them.

Remember, Drew, that even Jesus hurt other people. He hurt his parents when he dismissed their concerns at the temple. He hurt Mary and Martha horribly when he didn’t show up in time for Lazarus’s death. He hurt the Canaanite woman when he likened her to a dog. He hurt Peter when he couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. We know Jesus felt the pain of inflicting pain on others. How did he forgive himself?

Well, I suspect that Jesus forgave himself in the same way that he forgave others, by drawing on the reality that he is love. Being love is harder for you and for me. But the more that we can step into love, that more the more that we can participate in love, the more that we can let love wash over us, the easier it becomes to forgive.

The Gospel says that a day will come when everything, our deepest and ugliest secrets included, will be shouted from the rooftops. I’m not sure if those are the most troubling words in the Bible or if they are the most liberating. But I am cautiously leaning towards the latter. That’s because they come within the bigger promise of the Bible. The promise that, even when our most selfish actions are out in the light, God will still be ready to forgive us.

Try out Robinson’s practice, Drew. Let God tell you how much God loves you. Let that love wash over you like water. And as you do, open yourself up to the possibility that, if God is able to forgive you, then you might just be able to forgive yourself.