Cheek Turning and Forgiving

Consider Matthew 5:38-39.

Two comments today blended in my mind. A friend of mine was talking about her daughters-in-law who vilify and mistreat her. I don't know them and can't judge them (couldn't even if I knew them) but I know the woman they are talking about and know her to be a kind and gentle woman. She was saying her priest once said to her in connection with the directive from the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek, "It's not necessary, though, to keep going back to get the cheek slapped day after day after day." The other comment was from a taped reading of Emmet Fox's analysis of the Lord's Prayer. It was that the person we hate most in the world is a person we are inexorably bound to with the tightest bond we have to any other person. Only when we forgive that person can we set ourselves free from the chains. Forgive? How can you forgive the person you hate most in the world?

Forgive can mean to excuse for a fault or an offense, to pardon. That feels like it's just letting the person get by with something, that the person will not--cannot--reform because the actions don't lead to the natural consequences. That's the sense of "forgive and forget." It's going back to get the face slapped time and time again. It doesn't make good sense for frightfully wrongful behavior. It benefits nobody. Forgive can also mean to absolve from payment. Again, it can be a disservice to the person being forgiven.

The other meaning of forgive, though, feels right in the context of the Twelve Steps. That is to renounce anger or resentment against. That's what Fox proposes as the means of forgiving those who trespass against us. In a state of prayer and contemplation, we consider the person and release them, let them go. We bless them, cutting the chain so we can move forward in God's will. A person suggested once that I mentally place the offending person in a bubble, state that they are released, bless them, and visualize them either drifting away or speeding away, out of my space.

My friend told me how freeing, how peaceful it is not to be tied to the bickering of the daughters-in-law. She and her husband are there when their sons need them, but the spitefulness on the other side of the relationship doesn't hold them hostage to the pettiness. Their cheeks aren't held out for slapping.