For Lent this year, I’m trying forgiveness. Forgiveness of others.
I’m trying to say it every day: “I forgive you,” as I picture someone who has harmed me, someone against whom I have hatred.
Bob Ellis
Now, I know we’re not supposed to “hate” people — our very Christian parents hammered that into us, so that we learned never to use that word and even to imagine that we never did it. But “hatred” is a real word that doesn’t need parsing: it’s any shred of that feeling of contempt, anger, belligerence, self-righteous pity, vengefulness and all the rest we of course sometimes feel for other people. It’s hatred — and we may as well use the word.
After trying this practice for a couple of weeks, something surprising is occurring (unpleasantly surprising, to be honest). Yesterday as I pictured the person I hold most guilty for the deep pain I’ve been feeling off and on for about five years now, even without saying the forgiveness words, I thought of that person as a human being. A startling revelation. I had not realized I had reduced that person to non-human status, but of course I had. (How could I not have noticed that before? Sub-human. I love assuming that’s what this person is — below any shred of compassion.)
Oh, to be sure, I’ve been able to pity this person for imbecility. That’s a part of the game of hatred. But if this person is human, then they are just like me. I hate that almost as much as I hate the person. Just like me. Now, I may be more spiritually mature than this person is (surely the case). I may be more compassionate (has to be). And of course I’m smarter (certainly). But those are at best only millimeters on the scale of being. Tiny blips of insignificant space debris. We — the two of us — breathe the same atmosphere. We lie down at night on beds of the same measurement. We are 99.9% exactly the same: We are both human.
And here’s the trick of the Divine: not leaving me in my perfectly delicious hatred, nudging me to feeling in my bones that my hatred is too expensive, even unnecessary, not at all nourishing. Too depleting of the very essence of the lifeblood I live on. (Not that the Divine attacks the folly of my hatred straight on. God is too good a student of psychology for that — getting at my sin much more sneakily.)
When I see it — see that the hated one is merely human, and just as startlingly that I am simply human, too — then the two of us stand side by side in front of God, just the same: stuff from dirt, headed back to dirt. I’m working on forgiving this person for being dirty. Maybe I can some day even forgive that I am merely dirt, too.
Bob Ellis is former dean of Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University. This post originally appeared on his personal blog, An Ever-flowing Stream.