To forgive is…impossible?

My friend Rocky once suggested to me, “Forgive and forget”, since ‘to err is human; to forgive, divine’. The point was moot; there was nothing to forgive, since what needed to be forgiven was forgotten and divinity, irrelevant. But it raised an issue worth thinking about – what can be forgiven and what lingers as ‘unforgivable’, like a festering wound?

A child (assume it is a girl) inevitably makes mistakes, breaks rules and so torments her caregivers, particularly her mother. There are almost always subsequent moments of stress so intense that they find expression in a scolding, even a slap or two, a time of mutually antagonistic silence. The mother forgives her daughter; the girl takes a little longer to get over it, but the incident passes into oblivion, to the realm where it doesn’t matter.

As the child grows up, she starts understanding what is forgiven easily, what needs a little more work and what can never be pardoned. She learns her rules, exploring, discovering and testing her limits, foreseeing what her mother will accept. And in that, she develops her own wisdom, in the process creating a framework within which she will judge herself and other people, lifelong. As she matures, she finds herself in a position to watch, experience, adjust and adjudicate, deciding whether she will forgive, whom and for what.

By the time the woman is in a position to pass on her rules to the next generation, she has her own ideas of what forgiveness means. She knows, for instance, that violation of her emotional privacy, shattering of the trust that is the basic element in any relationship and deliberate deafness to her expressed needs of love, support and companionship are not easy to get past. And, while she may be willing to forgive once, twice, even three times, beyond that, she finds it more healthy to forget.

Forget what? That those who broke the rules gave her existence? That they once were more than mere seatmates on the flight called ‘life’? That they allowed her the power to judge? That they were human and she, hardly divine?