I talk about water a lot. Especially the water in Montana. There, in Western Montana, the water defined existence for me as a young man. The town I grew up in is at the nexus of three rivers, all with their own personalities. You mention one of them and I’m flooded with memories of a particular type: Blackfoot- turbulent, clean, fresh- Bitterroot, low, slow, meandering…cows. Clark Fork- runs right through town…my playground. Each with its own identity but still, combined, like veins, carrying knowledge and serenity to the heart of my soul. Recently, a crafter friend of mine was planning to make a ceramic mug for me. She asked me what my favorite color was and I showed her the following picture:
There’s a secret spot for me on one of these rivers where the current narrows and deepens. The surface looks calm from the bank—slick, dark glass—but step in and you feel it tug your calves, your hips, the whole of you. It’s where the trout hold, where oxygen and food ride the seam, and where a person who isn’t paying attention can lose his footing fast.
I have gone to that spot for many years. At first, when I was a child, I was taken there. Then, when I was big enough I made a point to get myself there. Sometimes I would go just to sit. Not knowing why. Sometimes I would go with friends. I have taken my son there many times, though he does not know its specific relevance to me, I believe that just by exposing him to it he will come to understand its importance. I have cried there and wrestled with the big problems in life.
These days, I think forgiveness lives there for me—on that hidden seam, below the surface. It looks gentle from a distance. Up close, it asks more of you than you expect.
I’ve never been someone who prized forgiveness. In fact, I’ve often dismissed it with a shrug—what’s the point? It seemed abstract, sentimental, or even naïve. And yet, to my surprise, I find myself circling back to it. Against my own instincts, I want to forgive. I don’t fully understand why. Maybe because resentment is exhausting. Maybe because I see what bitterness does when it calcifies. Maybe because I want more space inside my own chest. Maybe forgiveness isn’t a selfless act, but rather, incredibly selfish…a way to release yourself from the anguish brought on by the actions of another. It’s messy.
Still, I need to say this clearly: on some things, I’m not sure I’m ready to move toward forgiveness yet. The pull is there, but so is the hesitation. Everything else I’m writing here feels true. But readiness—that’s still a seam I’m standing at the edge of, unsure if I’ll step in.
I used to think forgiveness was a transaction. You confess. I absolve. We shake hands, resume the old arrangement, and pretend the missing years were a misunderstanding. Or else delivered with magnanimity like a wrapped gift—“no hard feelings”—and you do with it what you will. That story is easy to tell at a distance. It’s tidy. It’s also wrong, or at least incomplete.
It’s also far more complex if the other party involved refuses to participate in any kind of conversation. You are left to your own devices to…to sort out what there is to forgive, if anything at all. What if they don’t give a damn about your forgiveness? Or are convinced, in their self-righteousness and indignation that you’re the one who needs forgiving?
Lately, I’ve been trying to understand forgiveness as something quieter and truer. Less performance, more practice. Not a return to what was, but a release into what might be next.
I don’t believe that forgiveness is an eraser… It doesn’t revise the past or smudge out the harm.
My body remembers emotional injuries, intentional damage. The long seasons of silence. It remembers the way shame can be folded into a gift and handed to you with a smile. It remembers trying to hold the line while being told the line itself was cruelty. These memories don’t become less intense with time, but they’ve become less frequent. No apology can reach back and unmake those things. Forgiveness doesn’t ask me to pretend otherwise.
Forgiveness also isn’t amnesia. I don’t want to forget. I think that to forget to quickly makes one run the risk of becoming reckless with a sense of well being. “Look at me, I’ve healed!”
Boundaries—those quiet fences I’ve been criticized for building—were not erected to punish anyone. They were built to keep my home standing when the weather turned. That they held is not a reason to tear them down.
So if it is not erasure and not forgetting, what is forgiveness?
A letting go, I think—but not of accountability. A letting go of the hope that the past will ever finally make sense. A letting go of the argument I keep having in the shower, on my bike ride to work,—me winning, me losing, me explaining my heart to a jury that never convenes. A letting go of my turn to convince. A letting go of my turn to be convinced.
It’s not resignation. It’s choosing to set down a weight that will only drag me under. It is stepping out of that deep seam to the gravel bar and breathing again.
A memory: this past summer, on the shore of a lake far from a cell signal, my son and I waded out to a shallow sandbar at dusk, fishing gear in hand. The light went from gold to bronze. A hatch started and the lake made that soft, lipping sound—fish feeding, everywhere at once. My son whispered “Listen,” though we were already listening. You could hear the echo of the rises off the surrounding hills.
Later, around the campfire, he asked if forgiving means letting people back in. I told him sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it means wishing someone well from the other side of a sturdy gate. Sometimes it means keeping your distance precisely because you’ve decided to love your life enough to protect it.
He nodded the way a young man nods when he’s filing something for later. We’ll see what he does with that one.
Forgiveness demands space for truth. Not the courtroom kind with exhibits and countersuits, but the kind that lets both sorrow and clarity sit down at the same table. The truth in my life includes gratitude for what was given freely—friends who showed up, a partner who leads with care—and sorrow for what was withheld or weaponized. Both are real. Both deserve a place in the room. They’re there whether or not I want them to be. That is truth.
But truth without tenderness calcifies into judgment, and I don’t want to live there. Tenderness without truth becomes denial, and I’ve already lived there, too. I think maybe forgiveness, when it’s working, braids the two. It says: yes, this happened. And yes, I choose not to keep reliving it in my chest like a script I can’t stop rehearsing. It says: I will remember and I will not return to the conditions that harmed me. It says: I wish you well over there while I tend to here.
There’s a theological version of this I heard in my youth- and I’m a little surprised at myself that I’m going to quote the Bible here though I am not a Christian…but given my families ecclesiastical history, it’s relevant- and these are the stories that were shared with me growing up. There are two passages that are coming to my mind now
First is Matthew 18:21-22:
“Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
And this one:
Matthew 5: 23-24
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.”
Those sentiments would not need to come from the Bible- of course….the Bible is just a handy compendium of moralizations. There are others. I know, for instance that Yom Kippur emphasizes reconciliation…and that Islam links forgiveness of others to nothing less than divine forgiveness- similar to the second passage above: God saying - “Don’t come to me until you’ve reconciled with your brother or sister.” One is not worthy of God unless their practice is forgiveness. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Sikhism…they all echo these sentiments.
It sure begins to look as though the search for the ability to forgive is baked into the human existence. And that’s just finding the ability to forgive- never mind the actual practice of forgiveness itself. How do we do it? At least these religions all though it was important enough that they should attempt to lay guideposts.
I’d like to think that I honor those teachings. But I also know they’ve been wielded as cudgels.
Reconciliation without repentance is theater. Forgiveness that requires self-erasure is not righteousness; it’s surrender of the self. I will not teach my son that love means swallowing yourself.
Another memory: I recently had cause to speak with an archivist about the process and purpose of looking after important documents. The archivist said, almost casually, something to the effect of “Our task is to preserve the integrity of what we’re given.” I think about that line all the time. It applies to paper. It applies to people. The work is to honor what is true, to keep it from being handled with oily fingers, to situate it where it belongs. Forgiveness belongs inside that work—not as a stamp that says “case closed,” but as a posture that says “I will not contaminate what I carry with bitterness.”
And bitterness is tempting. It is efficient fuel; it burns hot and bright and makes you feel powerful in the short term. It also leaves the campsite scorched. I’ve seen what resentment does across decades. I see it in families like mine that prefer the fog of righteousness to the hard, clear air of remorse. I do not want that poison in my pack.
What helps?
Small rituals help. Making coffee in the quiet. My piano. Writing before the day has a chance to lie to me. Saying the names of people I love out loud, whether they’re in the next room, or thousands of miles away. Returning to water. Casting a line that may or may not tighten. Breathing until the breath is the only sentence I need.
Telling the truth helps, even when my voice shakes. Naming my part when I miss the mark. Answering my son’s questions without recruiting him to my side. Loving him in a way that requires nothing from him but his presence.
And this, too: imagining a future I don’t control. Maybe one day an email will arrive that isn’t a grenade. Maybe there will be a conversation where the words “I’m sorry” are not shaped like accusations. Maybe not. My forgiveness cannot depend on those contingencies. It has to be my practice now—my way of not letting the worst parts of the story write the ending. Even if I’m not fully ready to practice it, I can at least imagine the possibility of it.
The shape of this, for me, is simple when I draw it on paper and complicated when I live it: a circle and a gate. Inside the circle: my son, my partner, my friends, my work, the small joys that are somehow the biggest. The gate is unlocked. If you come to it with humility and honesty, I will meet you there. I will listen. I will own what is mine to own. I will hold your hand if you hold mine back. If you arrive with terms, with threat, with rehearsed certainty, the gate stays closed. That is not punishment. That is stewardship.
Maybe forgiveness is, finally, a way of paying attention to what deserves to be kept. To the river colors that keep showing up in my life—the deep greens and bruised maroons, the butterscotch of sap, the purple of huckleberries on my son’s lips. To the sound of fish rising at dusk. To the people who answer with gentleness when I call.
I don’t forgive to be noble, or to earn anyone’s admiration, or to fulfill a verse stitched on a banner from my childhood. I forgive—or I will forgive, when I’m ready—because I want my life back. I forgive because carrying the ledger is making my hands too full to hold what is good. I forgive because the water is moving and I want to move with it—not be dragged by it.
And here is the conclusion I think is worth writing down, for myself if no one else: forgiveness does not reopen the burned bridge. It lets me stop standing in the smoke. It is not a surrender to what hurt me; it is a recommitment to what heals me. It is permission—granted by me, to me—to walk the gravel bar toward camp, where a boy I love is already counting satellites and the coffee tastes, somehow, like ambrosia.
The seam will always be there—narrow, strong, a tug at the calves. I don’t have to live in it. I can wade to shore. I can build a small fire. I can feel my hands again.
That, today, is what forgiveness means—or at least, what it might mean when I finally step toward it.
No comments:
Post a Comment