When Someone Breaks Our Trust

Saints may never let us down. But how often do we commit ourselves to saints? Most of us commit ourselves to ordinary people and, sooner or later, discover that ordinary people let us down. Even decent people hurt each other. Sometimes they hurt each other deeply, and unfairly too.

There are pains inside any committed relationship for which there is only one remedy: forgiveness.

There are also pains for which forgiveness is not the right remedy.

We need to know the Difference.

The Sorts Of Things That Need To Be Forgiven

To put up with some things, all we need is a little generosity. A sense of humor. Some tolerance. Call it by its classic name: MAGNANIMITY. It means, literally,"a largeness of spirit." A magnanimous person is broadminded enough, generous enough, to live with failings in people. Quirks and cranks in persons we are committed to annoy us, but they don't kill commitment if we keep a modest measure of generosity in our styles.

Let's say that your husband has a compulsion to tell wornout, boring, maybe crude, stories that embarrass you when he tells them in the presence of your friends. Or that you are a tidiness buff, and your wife doesn't notice that the house is a mess when you are bringing home a guest for dinner. Or that your friend never shows up on time. These are fender benders in the cross town traffic of a committed relationship, annoying things, but not capital offerses.

They are the unwanted annoyances that we can swallow with a spoonful of magnanimity, a little big-mindedness. But we mustn't confuse it with forgiveness. Forgiveness is a more serious mercy. Not for annoyances, but for the deeper wrongs that people do us.

We also need a simple grace to accept bad things for which nobody is responsible. Things we didn't expect, don't want, but things people cannot help. We don't forgive people for them, we accept them and adjust to them. They are the shadow side of any committed relationship.

If a woman's husband becomes impotent because he has prostate cancer, she may feel cheated, and she may have a problem she devoutly wishes would go away.

But she accepts it as a severe handicap and makes the best of it. It is not a problem she can solve by forgiving him. If a man gets married with the dream of having five kids, and he discovers his wife cannot bear a child, he may feel stung by life's unfairness. But he accepts it as a deep disappointment and works around it. One thing he does not do is forgive his wife for what she cannot help.

Making accommodations to nature, living with mystery in the will of God, is sometimes what commitment keeping needs in a world that never quite measures up to our expectations. It asks a lot of us sometimes, and it certainly can seem unfair, especially when miracles don't happen for us. But sometimes making accommodations is the only way to play the game of life in commitment.

Sometimes people keep commitment in the painful spells simply by waiting them out. Waiting is love's less lyrical art. But, now and then, it's the only song we can sing. It is a way of caring when there is nothing else you can do.

Love suffers long. How long? Long. But how long? Just long. Forever? Maybe not forever, but longer than we would wish. Longer than we could wait if we did not care enough.

Waiting paid off. The only way to keep commitments to people, sometimes, is by indulging their failings, accommodating to their limits, is by indulging their failings, accommodating to their limits, and waiting out their neuroses. Because caring is the business of commitment.

But there are other times when only forgiving can do the tricks. These are the times when someone hurts us deeply with a pain that we did not have coming, someone, is responsible for the sting we feels. Forgiving is a gracious way to cope with deep pain that is unfair and for which someone else is to blame.

The toughest pain to heal in a committed relationship is the pain of betrayal-the wound of a broken trust.

When trust is broken, we choke on our commitment. Betrayal builds a wall between us that we cannot bridge. It prevents us from keeping our commitment, because it separates us from the person who hurt us. And in our hearts we know why.

It is because our very selves are invested in a personal commitment. This illustrates the difference between a commitment and a contract: in a commitment we deal with our selves, in a contract we deal with goods and services. Betraying a commitment is infinitely different from not living up to a contract.

If someone breaks a contract, we can go to court to get compensations. But who can compensate for broken trust?

When a friend tells our secrets to someone who could hurt us with them, she betrays us. When someone we trust brutalizes us, with his words or with his hands, he betrays us.

When a partner demeans us and makes us feel less than any human being should feel, she betrays us. When a child we trust steals from us, lies to us, becomes our enemy, he betrays us. These are the offenses that breaks our trust and threaten our commitment.

The deep pain of broken trust has one cure, only one. It is the remedy we call forgiveness.

Forgiving is love's way to heal ourselves of pain we did not deserve, cannot overlook, and cannot forget, a pain for which we hold someone responsible, a pain for which we blame someone.

Let's have a coffee

Hari

Blessings