Spring is a season of new beginnings. If you were going to pray and work for a new beginning with people in your life, what would be key actions to take and attitudes to cultivate?
I’ve found that forgiveness is central to the season of spring in my relationships. I resist forgiveness though. I either don’t take it seriously enough, or I don’t want to admit that I did something wrong and need to make amends.
I’ve always appreciated Kierkegaard’s take on Christianity and forgiveness – he puts it in a way that startles me and even rattles me. He doesn’t let me settle with platitudes about living out my faith – he challenges me to re-examine my assumptions and habits.
Maybe he can do that for you too – even better, re-inspire us to keep learning how to forgive and love as Christ does for us, and the world.
“Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness which you give, you receive, not contrariwise, that you give the forgiveness for which you receive.”
“It is as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the forgiveness, then observe yourself. If honestly before God you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember that if you do, God sees it), then you dare hope also for your forgiveness, for it is one and the same.”
“God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive your trespasses. It is only an illusion to imagine that one himself has forgiveness, although one is slack in forgiving others.”
“It is also conceit to believe in one’s own forgiveness when one will not forgive, for how in truth should one believe in forgiveness if his own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness!”
“For, Christianly understood, to love human beings is to love God and to love God is to love human beings; what you do unto men you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto men God does unto you.”
“If you are embittered towards men who do you wrong, you are really embittered towards God, for ultimately it is still God who permits wrong to be done to you. If, however, you gratefully take the wrongs from God’s hand ‘as a good and perfect gift,’ you do not become embittered towards men either.”
“If you will not forgive, you essentially want something else, you want to make God hard-hearted, that he should not forgive, either: how, then should this hard-hearted God forgive you? If you cannot bear the offenses of men against you, how should God be able to bear your sins against him?”
“If you have never been solitary, you have also never discovered that God exists. But if you have been truly solitary, then you also learned that everything you say to and do to other human beings God simply repeats; he repeats it with the intensification of infinity. The word of blessing or judgment which you express concerning someone else, God repeats; he says the same word about you, and this same word is blessing or judgment over you.”
“Such a person will certainly avoid speaking to God about the wrongs of others towards him, about the speck in his brother’s eye, for such a person will rather speak to God only about grace, lest this fateful word of justice lose everything for him through what he himself has called forth, the rigorous like-for-like.”
Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p348-353
May these curing words of Kierkegaard impart a fresh perspective on the breaches of love in your life.