At the end of Mass today we will pray an ancient prayer, which asks the Lord to: “Complete within us…the healing work of your mercy, and graciously perfect and sustain us, so that in all things we may please you.”
“Complete within us healing work of God’s mercy.”
Notice the prayer does not ask God to forgive us, but to complete the healing work of his mercy in us. A mercy which will never be complete until it envelops our heart, saturates our souls and makes us love others with the same merciful love with which Jesus loved us from wood of the Cross.
For that’s what makes us pleasing to God, that we might forgive others and he forgives us.
But that’s so hard!
Think, for a moment, about the person who is the hardest to forgive in your life. (pause) the one who can make you so angry you want to spit. Who did that thing…with maliciousness and evil they hurt you in that way, and they knew what they were doing! But they did it anyway!
How could you forgive someone like that? It seems impossible. And it is for us. What is it they say “to err is human, to forgive divine.” Maybe that’s why we need the prayers of the angels and saints and Our Lady Untier of Knots. Did you ever hear of that devotion? It’s an eighteenth century German devotion inspired by the words of Saint Irenaeus: "Eve, by her disobedience, tied the knot of disgrace for the human race; whereas Mary, by her obedience, undid it.”
And what a knot we tie when we refuse to forgive someone. And only God can untie them…But we can help when we do five things: Look, Respect, Listen, Love and only then Forgive.
Five things.
And the first is to seek out my enemy: face to face.
Not Facebook to Facebook, but real fleshy human face to real fleshy human face. Where he can see the tears and the fears in your eyes. It’s like Jesus said: “When your brother* sins [against you], go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.”
First look, then Respect.
Oh, I know, way down deep you want to defeat or humiliate your opponent, but you gain nothing but more enmity from that. Rather we must seek to restore friendship by an expression of unconditional love and a recognition of that which is most lovable, the most admirable in our opponent. Or, as John Paul II wrote:
“Even an enemy ceases to be an enemy for the person who is obliged to love him, to do good to him and to respond to his immediate needs promptly and with no expectation of repayment. The height of this love is to pray for one's enemy. By doing so we achieve harmony with the providential love of God: ‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.’”
Third, Listen. Let go of the hurt and listen in love.
Listening is one of the most loving things I can do for another person. Just recall how many times the Lord Jesus asks a question, expecting a response: “How long has this been happening to him?” “Do you want to be made well?” “What did Moses command you?”
Or remember Jesus with Samaritan the woman at the well. He begins with a question, “Will you give me something to drink?” and then comes the opening up of the deepest pains of her life.
Maybe that’s where the old saying comes from: “Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.”
So you begin the healing by listening….not listening for what you to hear, but listening for what they want to say. Listening with your heart.
And only then, after looking and respecting and listening, so we Speak. Speak with love.
Listen to the advice Saint Paul sent to Timothy:
“Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels. [Rather] be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness. It may be that God will grant them repentance that leads to knowledge of the truth, and that they may return to their senses out of the devil’s snare, where they are entrapped by him, for his will.”
It may be they were repent, but even if they don’t, you still speak with gentleness. Speak the truth, but with kindness. So, listen and then speak. And then repeat. And then repeat…as many times as needed.
Not as many times as needed to hear what you want to hear from them, but as many times as needed to heal the wounds of this interpersonal conflict, so you can get on with the work of loving this brother who had been lost to you.
For only then will we be ready to Forgive.
Forgive like Pope Saint John Paul II did after he was shot by Ali Acga in 1981.
It was two years after Agca has shot him that the Pope went to visit him in his prison cell. He looked him in the eye and shook his hand. Agca kissed the Pope’s hand and the two talked quietly for 21 minutes. John Paul said of the meeting: ‘What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me, I spoke to him as a brother whom I had forgiven, and who had my complete trust.”
After the meeting, the two shook hands and the Pope gave Agca a rosary. The Pope would later write:
‘Real peace is not just a matter of structures and mechanisms. It rests above all on…capacity to forgive from the heart. We all need to be forgiven by others, so we must all be ready to forgive. Asking and granting forgiveness is something profoundly worthy of every one of us.”
And he’s absolutely right.
