How many times do we have to forgive?
It's not about forgiving a person who continually offends, rather about forgiving repeatedly in our heart. True forgiveness, the one that makes you feel free, usually happens gradually. It is not a feeling, it is not forgetting: it is the wise choice that the person can make, not only when the offense is repeated, but also every time it comes back to mind. This is why we need to forgive repeatedly.
Chiara Lubich reminds us that we must behave in this way at home, at work, at school or in our community. He wrote: «You know how we often want to compensate with an act, with a corresponding word, for the offense suffered. You know how there are lacks of love due to differences in character, or nervousness, or other causes
frequent among people who live together. Well remember that only an attitude of forgiveness, always renewed, can maintain peace and unity between brothers and sisters. You will always have the tendency to think about the defects of your brothers, to remember their past, to want them to be different from what they are... You need to get into the habit of seeing them with new eyes and new ones themselves, always accepting them immediately and to the end, even if they don't regret it.[1]».
There are situations in which it is not easy to forgive, events that derive from political, social and economic conditions in which forgiveness can take on a community dimension. There are many examples of women and men who have managed to forgive even in the harshest contexts, helped by the community that supported them.
Osvaldo is Colombian. He was threatened with death and saw his brother killed. Today he is the head of a peasant association where he deals with the recovery of people who
had been directly involved in his country's armed conflict. “It would have been easy to respond to revenge with more violence, but I said no,” explains Osvaldo. "Learning the art of forgiveness is very, very difficult, but weapons or war are never an option to transform life. The path to transformation is another, it is being able to touch the human soul of the other and to do this you do not need pride or any power: humility is needed, which is the most difficult virtue to build"[2].
[1] C. Lubich, Word of Life October 1981, in eadem, Words of Life, edited by Fabio Ciardi (Works of Chiara Lubich 5; Città Nuova, Rome 2017), p. 219.
[2] Unity is the name of peace: Chiara Lubich's strategy, edited by Maddalena Maltese, Città Nuova, Rome, 2020, p.37.