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The pain and necessity of forgiveness

Simon Smart

Sweet Revenge

When I was a teenager I went through a stage of loving Charles Bronson movies. Each plot had an appealing simplicity. A heinous, violent crime committed by merciless thugs against helpless (usually) female victims was followed by inevitable retribution carried out with cold efficiency by a steely and mostly silent Bronson. It’s a time-honoured narrative that remains popular with audiences who relish the salacious bloodbath that we all know will come to the evil perpetrators. As viewers we cheer along with the spectacle. 

Yet revenge fantasies are not exclusively the domain of hormonally deranged high school boys. Fay Weldon’s novel, The life and loves of a She-Devil, in which a jilted wife gains a slow, meticulously planned, less violent but equally devastating retribution on her philandering husband has been a BBC TV drama and twice been adapted to film.     

It seems the desire for revenge comes naturally to us and taps into a deep-seated urge to want to see harm come to those who hurt us. It’s a common enough story that is played out across the world every day between countries and tribes, among families and former friends—careless or deliberate harm done, leading to fulfilled promises of revenge and retribution.

There are plenty of people willing to explicitly defend the desire for revenge. In her book Wild Justice, Susan Jacoby argues that revenge stems from, “a need to restore ‘something missing’ – a sense of physical and emotional integrity that is shattered by violence.”1 For Jacoby, revenge is natural and self-satisfying, and needs to be acknowledged as the legitimate response of the victim. To suggest otherwise is to rob the victim of their dignity. Philosopher and law professor, Jeffrey Murphy writes, “I think that most typical, decent, mentally healthy people have a kind of common sense approval of some righteous hatred and revenge.2 		 
  There are plenty of people willing to explicitly defend the desire for revenge  

The harder path

Revenge may well be natural, but is it desirable? Might it not be the case that in the act of revenge both parties are in some way diminished? Or, as Miroslav Volf argues, revenge, far from being a release, actually enslaves us.3  Martin Luther King Jnr., who must have known injustice and hatred better than most said:

  Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
 

For King, the answer to breaking the cycle of destruction lay not in seeking revenge, but in love and, importantly, forgiveness. True forgiveness is complex and rare. It might even sound quaint and absurd to mention the word in the face of high stakes where terrible wrongs have been committed. But it might also be a force of great good, both at a personal and societal level.

Friedrich Nietzsche thought forgiveness was a sign of the weak making a virtue out of necessity. It’s important to be clear on what forgiveness is and what it is not. Forgiveness is not condoning, excusing or forgetting. It is rarely a single act but more like a process. It involves an honest confronting of wrongs committed and, finding ways to overcome attitudes of resentment and anger felt in response to injury and wrongdoing.4  

All around us is evidence of the benefit of forgiveness. Experts point to the poison of unforgiveness in creating long-term psychological damage and even find links with physiological problems like cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and cancer. Forgiveness, when people can manage to do it, restores broken relationships, and heals damaged communities.

As hard as it might be to let go of resentment and anger, when we are victims of wrongdoing we do ourselves no favours in the long term by harbouring and fostering destructive emotions. ‘The first, and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness, says Lewis Smedes, ‘is the person who does the forgiving … when we genuinely forgive we set a prisoner and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.’5
  Forgiveness is not condoning, excusing or forgetting   
 

Cont.

P 1| 2| 3

1. Quoted in Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, (Abingdon Press USA 1996), page 123.
2. Quoted in Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge, (Routledge USA, 2002), page 3.
3. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, (Abingdon Press USA 1996), page 120.
4. ibid. p viii
5. Lewis Smedes quoted in Philip Yancey, What’s so amazing about grace, (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 1997), page 99-100