You know what I find amazing? How quick everyone is to run to Christ when they sin, yet offer a litany of reasons why they cannot forgive someone who wronged them. Did they not seek out your forgiveness? 

This person usually offers about seventeen hundred caveats about why they feel unready, that is, unprepared to forgive. There is some truth to it; we are fallen creatures not yet perfected.

One of the most basic commands the Lord sets upon us is to forgive those who trespass against us. So many people will pay it lip service. They will say it at mass, pray it, yet refuse to live it out daily. Some even go so far as to lord forgiveness over another, withholding it materially for some transactional purpose. We all do it with our husbands, wives, family, and friends. 

Call me misogynistic, but I think women have a more challenging time grappling with this than men. Or at least those men who had to sit in suspension with a kid they got into a fistfight at school. The former because their emotions seem like an ocean swell. They need to feel what they will feel and then return to them once the storm has subsided. Regarding the latter, so many men today have never had to process that kind of thing at that level.

The Lord preserves his wounds for us so we may look at them, a reality that sin causes real and actual harm, but he holds us with his pierced hands. As Catholics, we worship Christ crucified. We are called to do some of the heaviest lifting a Christian can do. Whereas most Christians avoid mentioning suffering, we are called to embrace it. Why do you think that is? Are we doing that?

For all the theology traditionally-minded Catholics talk about—the complaining we do about this evil world, the ins and outs of suffering, and how to live a good Christian life in the disordered modern world— we do not talk a lot about forgiveness.

So, must we forgive and forget? Does this mean you must ignore your feelings and forgive others, even when they are not sorry? Then, completely forget about how they wronged you? The question is much more complicated than that, and as Catholics, we ought to give it much deeper consideration and thought. 

As Advent approaches, let us consider why we are so unprepared to forgive. Why is this? Let us explore why we grapple with one of our faith’s most enduring (yet often ignored) noble truths: The first step to loving and forgiving as God does is to recognize that we cannot do it apart from Christ.