If We Forgive, Should We Go Back?

The first person to benefit from forgiving is always the person who forgives. We purge our heart of the poison someone meanly put there. We lift ourselves from the bilge of hate and dance to the melody of inner healing.

We set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was us. We create a new beginning for ourselves by unlocking the shackles that otherwise would hold us tight inside a painful past. Forgiving is for the offended, first. Later, for the offender.

Let us suppose, then, that we have forgiven someone to whom we never committed. The critical question is, should we renew our commitment to someone who betrayed our trust? Or is it better, sometimes, to forgive and say good-bye?

Take adultery, for example. Can commitment survive adultery?

Adultery slices so fiercely into the tender tissues of trust that we can go on with our commitment only after our injured spirit agrees to the soul surgery we call forgiveness.

But even if we forgive, we need not always be reconciled.

It may be better, sometimes, to forgive and, having healed ourselves, take our leave.

It all depends.

For one thing, married people make wayward love for many reasons, and with many motives. So we need to know what he or she was up to.

Take Chad, for instance; he was married to an utterly committed woman named Ginger for five years and for three of the five maneuvered himself into three separate love affairs on the side.

What is more, he made very little effort to hide his philandering. Why would he leave letters lying open in his dresser drawer? Why would he charge local motel bills to his MasterCard? Did he want Ginger to know?

Making love to other women had nothing to do with loving them, and everything to do with hurting Ginger. He never missed a chance to tell her that she was overweight, stupid, and lousy housekeeper, not at all what he had wanted in a wife, and certainly not what he deserved.

Naturally, he hinted, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, anyone stuck with an unsatisfactory woman had the right to look for a little satisfaction outside the bonds.

Chad killed both components of personal commitment: he was oinconsistent and he did not care.

What Chad told Ginger was basically what she had heard from her own parents anyway. She "knew" early on that she was an unsatisfactory person. She swallowed whole the depressing proposition that she deserved the misery Chad made her feel.

Finally, though she went to a counselor recommended by a woman she had met at her hairdresser's. And she harvested enough insight from him to see the truth.

The turning point of her illumination was this: Chad was the the culprit of the piece, not she, and she should not let him get away with it anymore.

But suppose that Ginger had slowly found the grace to slowly forgive Chad. Would the fact that she forgive him give her reason to renew the lease on her commitment to him?

If forgiving obligated Ginger to go back to Chad, then forgiving would not be good idea. But forgiving does not turn forgivers into doormats; if it did, we would be better off leaving it to priests. Forgivers are not fools who suffer gladly. They may forgive but they do not go back to ask for more.

Chad killed Ginger's commitment; it is dead. Covenants can be broken so badly in human relationships that they cannot be revived. Not even forgiveness can bring them back to life. And forgiving doesn't obligate us to try.

Let's compare Ginger's situation to someone else's, Harry's, for example. Harry's wife, Janice, made love to one another man. But Janice was committed to Harry, and to their marriage.

Recently Janice had been hired as a writer for an advertising agency in Des Moines, Iowa, where she and Harry live; Harry himself had urged her to try her writing wings there. After all she had written a column for the Cole College Chimes, and being a lively campus reporter was the first thing about her that had caught Harry's fancy.

Then Luke Simmons, over at the agency that ran ads for Harry's Honda dealership, mentioned that he was looking for a commercial writer-Janice chance.

Her boss recognized real, if raw, talent when he saw it, and financed a weekend for Janice at a writers workshop in Los Angeles.

There she was, alone, where nobody knew her, when at the very first session she met one of the workshop speakers, a professional writer, with wily charms the like of which she had never had to cope with his Des Moines, a man who actually wrote for films in Hollywood, the big time.

She saw him again at poolside, accepted his invitation for a little tennis before dinner, after which she sipped a little Chablis with him, which she wasn't used to because she and Harry had never gotten into wine at home.

Anyway, before she realized what was happening, she felt a fever rising such as she had now and then fantasized, but with which Harry had never infected her. Ere the workshop had run its course, Janice found herself in bed with a genuine Hollywood screenwriter.

Saint Paul once said that people are sometimes "overtaken in a fault," which hints that good people may now and then act out of character; what they do is inconsistent with a commitment, but does not destroy it.

Janice fell into a fault because she did not look where she was going. But she is not an honest-to-goodness adulteress any more than a woman who fixes a dripping faucet is a plumber. She was inconsistent, but she still cared.

When the Sunday morning sun rose high over the California coast, she recalled how, back home, she and Harry would at that very moment be on their way, hand in hand, to the second service at First Baptist, and she was trodden by the Four Horsemen of guilt.

She told her workshop lover to go away and not come back, and vowed then and there to tell Harry what had happened and beg him to forgive her even though she knew she was less worthy of mercy than the chief of sinners.

She changed her reservation, packed, and left that morning, before the last plenary session, during which examples of the best workshop writing would be read aloud; she left even though she knew that one of her pieces had been chosen to be read.

Once she got home and was settled in, and after Harry had watched "Sixty Minutes," Janice told him, trembling as she went, just what had happened. Harry couldn't believe it was real, but, finally bowing to the truth, he bolted for the bathroom, where he vomited.

Then he got in the Accord and drove around Des Moines for an hour, stopped for a cup of coffee, couldn't think of anywhere else to go, drove home, and went to bed alone on the davenport in the study.

Next day Harry went back to the Honda dealership, Janice went back to the ad agency. She waited alone in her private emotional wasteland to see what Harry would do.

After three weeks of Harry's stiff-upper-lip silence, Janice broke down and begged him to take her back into his life. Actually, Harry had been crawling a yard or two a day down the mercy road of forgiveness anyway.

So when Janice begged, he told her he had already forgiven her, confessing that he himself had lusted now and then when he took an attractive woman for a test drive in one of his Hondas.

That night Harry and Janice made love with a zeal such as they had not known in the days of Janice's innocence. And they began their love again a few steps farther along on the path of kept commitment.

Forgiveness for Harry, was a return-trip ticket back to the commitment he and Janice had made to each other.

The forgiving we do to heal the wounds in our memory has no strings attached. But reconciliation does: it needs truthfulness as the fulfillment of our forgiving.

Let's learn from the difference of Chad and Ginger; Harry and Janice.

Let's have a Coffee

Hari

Blessings