Forgiveness
Can you truly forgive without forgetting?
Dear Alex,
First of all, thank you very much for your question. To answer this: YES, you can truly forgive without forgetting. Indeed, truly forgiving is impossible without remembering.
Remembrance is an essential condition for forgiveness. Where forgetting destroys memory, forgiveness finds its essence in the bridge connecting memory and hope.
Forgiveness is not turning a blind eye to past wrongs, but bravely facing the sharp gaze of haunting memories. It is an act of getting to the root of the breach, getting as close to the bone, leaving no shadow unexplored. Because when we silence the atrocities of the past, burying them so deeply within us that no trace of their existence surfaces, we unwittingly nurture them, paving the way for their re-emergence, a thousand times stronger, in the future. Let me give a example to clarify it:
When a husband and wife quarrel without the guilty party confessing their fault, and one of them always attempts to appease the conflict with flowers, not only will the flower eventually wither over time, but so will the delicate thread between them. If this bond is torn open again, this time the wound will be deeper and ache even more. Despite the beauty of the red flowers, they only echo the silent pain within.
Pretending that there is no wound, screaming peace when there is war, only leads to a fragile moment when silence descends into lucid madness and where evil spirals beyond anyone’s control. Therefore, before forgiveness is possible, the wound must be cleansed.
But cleaning the wound hurts, true forgiveness unveils the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the degradation, and what people fear the most—the painful truth. Forgiving is much rarer than forgetting, no one rushes to expose their deepest vulnerability and their sinfulness. Unlike forgetting, it is not cheap. It demands traversing through the heart of darkness, it cost God the death of His only-begotten Son.
When beloved people around you are killed, when you have breakfast in a civilization that wants to kill you, I think it's in human nature to hate the world. But the problem is if you're going to hate the world, you will hate yourself, and then you are lost.
No one is the poet of their scars, but the forgiver looks these scars straight in the eye, articulates their hatred and then lets them fade away. I believe that true forgiveness is one of the hardest things a person can do, but I also believe that forgiveness is a transformative act of self-liberation. In the act of forgiveness unfolds a possibility wherein a broken soul can spreads its wings again.
So Axel, Yes! you can truly forgive without forgetting. Forgetting is maybe even the damaging part of true forgiveness.
Love,
Coma