Wounded Hearts. You just have to remember to forget

MANILA - I have been prompted to write this one after Charm Dogma's baring her heart out (for details, see her "Letters to and from the Wounded," 17 October 2011, Charm Dogma, blogspot.com).

In the Christian sense, we are all wounded hearts, bleeding reds. Even if we don't know it, our hearts are on public display and they affect even passersby.

I have been editing a book that some people have been trying to come out with for years and years. I will simply refer to it here as The Healing Book. That of course is a misnomer, because the book doesn't heal you, just like The Healing Priest doesn't heal you - only God does.

I don't suppose Charm's case is unique, except in the details. From The Healing Book, I might say that Christian woundedness is the result of a sword thrust upon us by someone, even someone very close to us, that we did not deflect, or did not know how. Any wrong done on us, imagined or not, we keep to ourselves, and not even share it with God, or share it with others but keep the hurt, so that the wound festers for years and years and even up to now.

The Healing Book makes the case that woundedness may go back to childhood and each one of us needs to revisit that past and learn to forgive whoever did us wrong. To forgive, ah, there's the crux of the matter.

I use the word deliberately. Crux means 1, the basic, central, or critical point or feature; 2, a puzzling or apparently insoluble problem (American Heritage Dictionary). The word comes from the Latin crux, for cross, which signifies torment.

Let me put it this way: Obviously, to forgive is to torment oneself first. Someone has done you wrong, so why should you forgive?! And why should you forgive that someone when s/he does not ask for forgiveness in the first place?!

So, it's not surprising that most people cannot forgive, so the wound festers in their hearts. Been there, done that.

In the original manuscript of The Healing Book, one of the suggested prayers goes something like this: "God, grant me the grace to forgive those who have hurt me." I said I don't think that's a proper prayer. You're actually asking God to forgive the other person for you - and you don't have to ask God to do that at all, because God can forgive the other person without your intercession. What you have to do is to bless the other person by forgiving that person, whether s/he asks for forgiveness or not - and in doing so you bless yourself.

How to forgive? It's a God lesson that you have to learn by yourself. You cannot pray, "God, please give me the grace of forgiveness." Actually, God has given you the grace of forgiveness - He has forgiven you. Now, your duty to God is for you to bless that someone with your forgiveness, on your own. It's simply faith; God doesn't need your intercession for Him to forgive someone. What you need to do is to forgive that someone yourself without God's intercession.

And that, my friends, is easier said than done. In fact, it's impossible! That's why, years ago, I said God must be a hedonist - He punishes you by asking you to do the impossible. Yes, but with God, nothing is impossible. If you cannot forgive, if you haven't forgiven, it only means that your faith isn't as big as a mustard seed that God will heal your wounded heart.

My own marriage was on the brink of visually, not only virtually disintegrating when friends invited us, persuaded us, haunted us to join a Marriage Encounter (ME) Weekend Seminar in Tagaytay City in January 1991, sponsored by the Bukás Loób sa Díyos Catholic Covenant Community of Los Baños, Laguna. The ME was a blessed weekend and, yes, the ME saved my marriage.

Did it change the inside of me? Only a little. Oh, let me tell you that I do not, never did womanize, drink or gamble, but I'm far from being an ideal husband and a darling father to my children. Among other things, there was still this unforgiveness and that, I believe, is the meanest sin of all - the meanest to that someone you cannot forgive, the meanest to you who cannot forgive. It's a double-edged sword that you are killing someone along with yourself softly with, because you refuse to let go and let God.

And before I forget, the first person you have to forgive is yourself. My wife tells me to my face, every now and then, up to now - I'm 71 and she's 66 - that she made a mistake in choosing me as her partner in life. And she's not joking! It takes only one to cry, but it takes two to quarrel. I have learned to forgive even if she has not.

You can only forgive by faith, not by reason. You cannot simply say, "Oh, OK, I forgive that someone, because I'm convinced it's good for me too. And for that matter, I forgive myself too." That's not how it works.

You tell God you have forgiven someone and then when you see that someone again, you feel the hurt again. Your temperature rises. You say you have forgiven but not forgotten. If you do not forget, you will always recall the hurt including the details and they continue to eat your soul.

Anthony Buono says, "Letting go of the resentment and anger requires detachment from your belief that you are entitled to protection from pain" (23 February 2011, catholicnewsagency.com). Life is both pain and pleasure. Letting go of the pain is the hard part, the impossible part. I'm not the violent type, and so I just kept my resentment and anger all those times my wife reminded me of my sins of omission and commission. Countless times. How many times do you forgive? 70 times 7 (Matthew 18:22).

My wife is the classic case of not being hysterical but historical - up to now. It took me about 10 years from the first conscious desire to forgive before I really could - today my wife is still historical but my resentment and anger are now history. I now have a glad heart. I can smile at her even as she recites history, and often I make it a joke and repeat her favorite expressions to her children when she's angry, like, "Palibhasa, may pinagmanahan" (freely translated: Stands to reason, you inherited that from someone I know). She makes sure that when she says that, I'm around. It's uncalled for, but she says it anyway. She's serious, but I'm not. She is insulting; I am not insulted. She's hurt, but I'm not. Her burden is heavy, mine is light. That's unforgiveness; that's forgiveness.

Now I know what it means when God says, "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30, New Revised Standard Version). What that means is if you let go and let God, then your yoke is easy and your burden is light!

How did I come to this? I told you it took years and years. You cannot simply say, "God, you are my witness, I forgive." Or, "God, I have forgiven, but I have not forgotten." You don't want to erase the memory. You want to remember - so how can you forgive if you do not forget, if you do not give up the memory of the hurts that you keep counting on the fingers of your hands, including your feet?

What I finally was able to do was to admit that I was not perfect, that I was not the father and husband I should be, and then, I surrendered all my hurts to God, threw them all at the foot of the cross. "God, they're all yours. I can't take it anymore." Was that easy? I told you it took years. My wife kept telling me, "You're a bad example of a father. You're a bad example of a husband." What added to the hurt was that I knew she was right.

You cannot simply surrender your wounds of resentment and anger bottled inside. Sorry, God will not do it for you. It's a DIY, a Do It Yourself thing.

I think that I finally was able to forgive because I tried to practice it every day. Sure, it took years, probably because I forgot many a day, but when I remembered I kept practicing to forgive, to forget. Often, I remembered the hurt. Practice makes perfect. One day, I completely forgot to remember. How sweet that was.

How sweet it is! Your hurts are the sweetest things to forget.