In a week that’s seen both the murder of Sarah Everard and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the shootings at Dunblane Primary School, I’ve found myself musing on the question of forgiveness. It’s one of the central concepts in Christianity, a touchstone of our faith. If we don’t forgive others, how can we hope to be forgiven ourselves (Mk 11:25)? We are enjoined to forgive ‘not seven times, but seventy times seven’ (Mt 18:22) – that is, time without number. Even on the cross, Jesus prays for those who put him there: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ (Lk 23:34).

Sometimes, however, forgiving is easier said than done (and sometimes we may suspect that perpetrators know exactly what they are doing, which is what makes their transgressions so hard to forgive). The recent ‘Mending’ exercise offered in the Diocesan ‘Contemplative Toolkit’ has given me some moments of doubt, for while there are offences that can be put aside in five minutes with a stone in your hand, I wonder how many real hurts can be resolved that easily. I think we are in danger of promoting a kind of ‘cheap grace’ which reinforces the view that Christians are too nice, naive about life’s tougher realities.

There are shining examples of people who have won through into new life by meeting the need for forgiveness head-on: Jo Berry, for example, whose father Sir Anthony Berry was killed in the Brighton Bombings of 1984, met the IRA bomber Patrick Magee in 2000 (after he had been released from jail) and formed an unlikely friendship with him. Farid Ahmed, whose wife was killed in the Christchurch shootings in 2019, declared publicly that he forgave the gunman. Terry Waite, the Archbishop’s Special Envoy in the Middle East, who was held captive in Beirut for four years, told the BBC after his release in 1991, ‘If you are bitter, it will eat you up and do more damage to you than the people who have hurt you.’

But they are the exceptions. When the Revd Julie Nicholson’s daughter was killed in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, she resigned from her post as a parish priest, unable to forgive the suicide bomber who had murdered her daughter. Sometimes the question of forgiveness simply has to be bracketed out, in order to survive. A moving documentary on ITV this week about the events at Dunblane never actually named the gunman, but focussed on the way the parents threw themselves into lobbying against the possession of handguns, as a result of which the UK now has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl famously wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1959) that the only way to survive the systematic sadism of the camps was to identify a purpose in life to feel positive about: ‘Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.’ Which perhaps we might restate as the life-giving power of hope.

The situations we’ve considered so far might reasonably be considered exceptional: either one-off crimes, or else the aberrations of cruel regimes. But there are many, smaller ‘offences’ on the domestic scale which nevertheless blight the lives of those affected, from systematic forms of abuse, to the everyday betrayals of deceit and casual unkindness. After her divorce, a friend quoted Psalm 55 on the wretchedness of finding that the person who has done the dirty on you was meant to be your best friend: ‘It is not adversaries who deal insolently with me – I could hide from them/ But it is you, my equal, my familiar friend, with whom I kept pleasant company…’

So if forgiveness isn’t an option – perhaps not ever, but certainly not now – what might an authentically Christian response look like? Particularly if looking for ‘the beam in your own eye’, taking the fault on yourself, simply feels like complicity?

First and foremost, I think we need to place our hope in the justice of God, which will come, even if we can’t imagine how that might work. A belief in universalism doesn’t mean that justice is overridden in favour of a general amnesty. (More ‘cheap grace’.)  Purgatory as a concept is not much used these days, but it might nevertheless be a helpful way of expressing that truth, that everyone needs to acknowledge their offences before reconciliation with God is possible. And as ‘victims’ we must feel capable of handing over our desire for punishment to God. ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I shall repay.’ (Romans 12:19)

Secondly, I think we need to place our trust in God’s love for us - especially if we’ve been made to feel unacceptable, contaminated, contemptible. Believing that whatever anyone else may say, we are all precious to God, beloved children, the hundredth sheep whom the shepherd will go to any lengths to seek out. Believing that God sees our hurts and holds us through them all.  As Julian of Norwich tells us, ‘The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God, knowing that that goodness can reach right down to our lowest depths of need.’

Thirdly, we need to believe in the healing power of God, which is sometimes (perhaps even very often) mediated through other people. It’s no good waiting for God to intervene directly, and overlooking the helping hand offered by the people around you. And as Terry Waite observed, it’s important to recognize that by not letting go of your hurt, or sense of outrage, you’re ultimately damaging yourself, and giving the person who harmed you even more power.

Finally we need to acknowledge that difficult things rarely happen all at once. (If they did, I’d be a concert pianist by now!) We may just have to accept that sometimes it’s simply too hard to forgive, especially if the person who harmed you has never shown any remorse. I find it liberating to recognize that we can pray about not being capable of prayer. So we might begin by praying to want to forgive. Or even by praying that we might want to pray to want to forgive… As we all know, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Forgiveness isn’t necessarily linear. Sometimes the same ground has to be gone over again and again. Sometimes we have the sense of falling back as well as moving forward. We thought we’d learnt to forgive something, and here it is, biting us in the backside once again.

O guard my life, and deliver me; do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.

May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.   (Psalm 25:20-21)