I used to think that to forgive someone was to release them from an obligation they had incurred against themselves by wronging me. Such a definition is easy to formulate and fits neatly into certain rather elegant theories about right and wrong. I suppose that idea still has some meaning or usefulness in some spheres of this life. However, I think that the more bewildering is more true: what is most important about forviveness is that we are all, already, under infinite obligation to one another because of that law which says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I’m not saying that our obligation came into being when this law was first spoken as a commandement. The speaking of the command was, I think, more like a witness to a law that already existed because it has to do with what we are. As created beings, we are what we are only relative to other things that are and ultimately to the Uncreated, if we can be said to be anything relative to the Uncreated.

What I am trying to say is that when I forgive my neighbor I am the one under obligation, to suffer wrong rather than to wrong. This is to fulfill the law of Christ, which is love. If my baby, for whom I have cultivated limitless love, becomes angry with me for some baby reason, I would rather he changed his mind and came running into my arms, even if he pulls my hair and screams at me for a few moments, than that he flee from me in order to punish myself and nurture his greivance. I rejoice in the suffering of his rage if he vents it on me instead of on himself. It is better, if messier, than him giving me a dark look and retreating silently into loneliness.

When we ask God to forgive us, there is no obligation on his part. It is improper, I believe, to think of obligation when we are speaking of the Uncreated. Likewise, I don’t think we are asking for something to take place within God. I think we are asking that something be enabled to enter us. The forgiveness actually cures the sin. It absolves it, cleanses us from it, burns it, shames it into nothing. The forgiveness is more real than the sin.

My husband spent some minutes lately looking into an icon. When he returned he told me that sin doesn’t matter. That is a terrifying thing to hear from one’s husband. You think it means he’s going to sin more. Actually, acting as if sin doesn’t matter relative to one’s own pleasure is what is so dangerous. But when you say that sin is ultimately meaningless and nothing after gazing on God, that is a wholly different meaning. I’m not sure how to say what my husband told me, I’m not sure how he even told me. But it’s true. In the Light of God, there is no darkness. Sin is not the defining thing about me there. It vanishes.

This leads me to ask if whether, when we forgive our neighbor, there is not something of this grace that enters them even through us. If we merely release them from an obligation, probably not. In that case the consciousness of the unpaid debt remains forever. But perhaps if forgiveness even between creatures is of another kind - perhaps if it is the opening of my heart to their good, releasing the wrong they have done me and allowing it to vanish as my own sins do when God forgives me - perhaps then they feel some of the same health. I think what I am saying is that true forgiveness is when I see someone else in the light of God’s face. My sins, and their sins alike, are nothing there, and we are only what God has made us to be, the mysterious me and the unique him. And when I do that, maybe the person I have forgiven can know themselves a little as I have know them in that place.

All this sheds some light on a question I have long had - why we must ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. Doesn’t our forgiveness of others proceed from God’s forgiveness of us?

I still think that is true. Nevertheless, refusing to forgive others can lead to God not forgiving us. Stop. Think. Remember that in asking God to forgive us we are not asking for something to happen within God. How could we even think about such a thing? Likewise, when Christ says that God does not forgive us - either for blaspheming the Holy Spirit, or less permanantly, for refusing to forgive others, he is not talking about something that moves or changes withing God.

When I go into God’s light to have my sins washed away, when I seek to know the cleansing power of His Blood; I will see myself without my sins and I will see others in the same way. His light is infinite. It will not settle on me and close others out, no matter how much I may want it to. Either I will know forgiveness - the forgiveness that encompasses me and my bitterest enemy alike - or I will refuse forgiveness. Whether I refuse it for myself or others, I will shut myself out from it just the same.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.