Reason to Forgive

To forgive is divine and no one expects you to be divine. Then hate thy neighbor as thyself, recompense evil for evil and make sure the poisonous rancor eats you from inside. If you think that will make you happy, then go ahead.

You don’t care about being divine and you are not a saint, but you care about your happiness. You justify your ill feeling and thirst for revenge because you are human. It is normal, you say.

Yes, for a human being it’s normal to be irrational and self-destructive, but why do you take pride in being like all those other unhappy creatures?

When someone has wronged me, I let him double my wound by thinking about what happened, ruminating about the injury and wishing for him to suffer in return. Why do I make it worse for myself?

Man is not a rational animal. If he were, he wouldn’t be so busy destroying himself.

When someone hurts us, we want to hurt them. When someone kills, we want him killed. The old story is forever repeated: The life of a loved one is taken, and the survivor doesn’t rest until the day of revenge. He goes through hardship and sacrifice to see the killer dead and in the final showdown he gets his revenge. And then what? There’s no joy and no solution. The loved one remains dead and another life is also gone. Still, our animal instincts have been satisfied, and we think it fair. We are unhappy, misery is added to misery, but that’s what we want.

Is it? Of course not. We want to be happy, and forgiveness is the only way to heal ourselves. It’s the rational way. We are not divine; we are human, and we are sometimes rational. For our own sake we need to forgive.