(Photo © Scott P. Richert)
Every newly married couple has been offered this piece of advice: "Do not go to bed angry." Or, in the more elegant words of Saint Paul, "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath" (Ephesians 4:26). Saint Paul, of course, wasn't speaking just to spouses but to the entire Christian community at Ephesus. It's a bit easier (though it may not always feel that way) to "kiss and make up" with your husband or wife before falling asleep than it is to forgive the others in our lives who have aroused our anger.
Even more, it's easier to forgive than to forget. Or at least it seems easier. But the failure to forget, to put behind us the injuries we have suffered at the hands of others, means that our forgiveness of them is incomplete. And that not only injures our relationship with others but brings a halt to our spiritual progress.
As the sixth-century Eastern Christian monk St. John Climacus writes in The Ladder of Divine Ascent:
Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sins, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind, shame of prayer, cessation of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasureless feeling cherished in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice.
Those are tough words to hear when we've been hurt, but they are what we need to hear if we are truly going to forgive, for others' sake and ours. Only then can we move beyond the obstacles that block our path to Heaven. For if the remembrance of wrongs is spiritual poison, "The forgetting of wrongs," Saint John writes, "is a sign of true repentance."
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As someone who has worked with severely abused people, I beg to differ. Forgiveness — to the point where there is no emotional upsurge when the wrongs are remembered — is essential. But to “forget” is to disallow yourself the ability to learn from past mistakes and build ways to appropriately protect yourself from interpersonal manipulation and destructive relationships.
Blocking out the past is never a good way to enter the future.
Beth, we can, of course, never truly forget traumatic events. But the “forgetting of wrongs” is something different—it’s the decision no longer to dwell on the wrong done to us, to stop replaying it in our minds, to quit reviving our anger at it. That does not preclude learning from past mistakes; in fact, it may be the best way to learn from past mistakes, because we’re no longer emotionally compromised as we examine them.
I think erasing is a very good way to cope. This is the value of recitation, prayer or what you might call your rosary. It gives the mind something to hold rather than re-experience trauma. It’s so much better to feel positive and happy then to dwell to what has gone wrong. I know people who have suffered horrible abuse who agree better to be happy than to remember the past evils. To dwell on the divine and is a much needed comfort for many.