This is good reasoning. From what you have written - the offer of forgiveness is always there. This makes sense. However, it comes with a condition? In that, we do not withhold forgiveness but if a person does not want our forgiveness and is not open to repairing the relationship, the offer of forgiveness is on offer but in order to obtain it the other party has certain obligations?
Is that what you are saying?
I am glad you posted because my perception of forgiveness was we were expected to be doormats.
Pretty nearly. I might change the wording slightly: I would say that there are two distinct things here - forgiveness and reconciliation. This is where it becomes obvious that I’m involved in academia - I am very nearly incapable of giving a short answer. Here goes though:
Forgiveness, I think, entails primarily a desire for the best for the other person, and a hope that whatever wrong they did does not ultimately harm them. Note that this is not the same as hoping that they or letting them “get away with it” - what is truly best for the relative who steals from you for drug money, for example, is that he learn in no uncertain terms that stealing is bad, and that he looses access to both drug money and drugs. What is best may not be what the other wants, and going to prison or similar may very well be what is best.
In this way, by forgiveness you retain or recover your good will towards this person, and should this person reciprocate then you have been
reconciled - there is no longer “bad blood” between you, as it were.
So I would not say so much that we are offering forgiveness, as that we are offering the possibility of reconciliation, and the mere act of offering this possibility
is forgiveness. (It seems that some people use these words slightly differently, but I will try to make clear what I mean by them.)
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I have to expand a little here, since you mention the doormat thing (that is an unfortunately common misconception about forgiveness): when I say reconciliation, I don’t necessarily mean a return to a close friendly relationship. I simply mean that each person desires good for the other. If two people realize that they drive each other up the wall and keep on offending each other meet one more time, shake hands, sincerely wish each other well (whatever “well” actually is in their case) and never see each other again, that, by my use of the word, counts as reconciliation.
If someone causes you grave harm, and is clearly not going to stop, and you wish him the best (keeping in mind that this does not mean “immediate success in what he is trying to do”), and move to the other side of the country and never speak to him again, that counts as forgiveness. If that person later admits his fault and also wishes you the best then that, by my use of the term and whether you ever know about it or not, counts as reconciliation.
In ideal circumstances, we can work to bring about this reconciliation, try to help them restore their goodwill towards us and generally make things happy again. This is what God does for us - He doesn’t just decide that He won’t hold something against us, but also actively seeks to bring our relationship with Him to be as intimate and close as it can be. And when we can do this with each other, that is awesome.
And in normal circumstances, we may even have a duty to seek this deeper, more meaningful reconciliation, to actively try to restore a good relationship between the other and ourselves. But we also have a duty to protect ourselves and others, and it may be that trying to do this will not only obviously fail, but will cause harm to ourselves, the one who wronged us, and even others in the process. And in such cases we are not bound to do so, and doing so is definitely not inherently part of forgiveness.
**Note: **I poked around a little on the internet to make sure I wasn’t totally off base in my use of the words, and it seems as though what I’m saying is pretty close to everything else I could find (in 5 minutes of googling, anyway) -
except that some people use a stronger notion of reconciliation (become friends again, more or less) and so say that that is not always desirable. It seems to amount to the same thing though - wish them the best - whatever that might be - but keep your distance if you must. Here’s a link:
aggiecatholic.org/index.cfm?load=page&page=231. And here’s another, though they use the word “reconciliation” differently as just mentioned:
catholic.org/hf/faith/story.php?id=26940.
