musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is it only in pardoning that we are pardoned?


The longer I live, the more emotional debts and the more decisions about perceived transgressions, I seem to accumulate. Some, undoubtedly I forget, but some still fester if I happen upon them again. I cannot always forgive; it is often easier merely to attempt to ignore rather than poking the hornet’s nest in my thoughts.

Sometimes, however, there is a yearning for peace in the attempt to forgive, but the peace remains out of reach and I am left with metaphors, not reconciliation.[i] I am not sure what to do with them. I do not wish punishment or revenge, although sometimes I think I would not refuse the actions of a vengeful god to make amends; surely I cannot be held responsible for that -none of us control Karma  -the perpetrator must face that on their own…

Forgiveness faces its own dangers, its own detours: it’s how we heal. But reconciliation -from the Latin conciliare: bring together (again)- may not always be wise; if the reason that forgiveness was requested was the guilt of domestic violence, say, it may well begin again without some help.

And anyway, ‘Forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation.[ii] At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship.’

Still, forgiveness is hard work; it forces us to confront feelings that ‘may often be perceived as negative, such as stress, anger or sadness… not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill-will toward an offender, engaging in intrapersonal forgiveness… Removing expectations from people by identifying that we are not likely to get what we want can ease the burden of past transgressions’ and ‘decide whether to continue to expend the emotional energy it takes to stay angry with someone.’

And of course, reconciliation may be ill-advised, especially if the offender has not expressed remorse or commitment to any type of meaningful change. You cannot expect reconciliation with an angry bear. ‘When we recognize that we are not going to get what we wanted from someone – trust, safety, love – it can feel a lot like grief. Someone may pass through the same stages, including denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before they can accept and forgive within themselves, without the burden of reconciliation.’

But there are other modalities that offend which may not have occurred to most of us: I have always wondered if you can only forgive someone -or some thing– that has agency. The type of damage being done to you by recalcitrant things belong to a different Magisterium; it’s still damage, and yet no blame can be assigned. You cannot blame a pot for boiling over -that’s your responsibility- or a dog for digging a hole in the garden -which is not: they play  by different rules (or at least don’t understand ours)…

I’ve often wondered if blame is sometimes merely the offloading of responsibility, and forgiveness is an acknowledgment of that: a clearer understanding of how enmeshed we were in whatever happened. Is forgiveness merely the recognition of our linkage to the role we’ve played, if only inadvertently? Or even more bizarrely, are blame and forgiveness just descriptions -like adjectives or maybe even adverbs are- to attempt to explain the story of the event, a story in which we feel we have to clarify our roles? It seems to me that both blame and forgiveness are members of the same family.

Way back in my undergrad days (and still, I suppose) dating was rare, and usually happened only if somebody arranged it for me. I didn’t have many friends who cared enough to do that for me. I’m not certain of the reason; perhaps shyness played a role, but it was more likely to avoid sharing my thoughts with someone who, once accepted into my personal zone, might betray my trust and fracture my carefully arranged sense of who I thought I was. After all my years, fragments of that still cling to me, I suspect

One summer day when I was young, I remember sitting on a bench by the ocean. There was a strong onshore wind from the bay, and huge waves sometimes spread droplets across the page of the book I was reading. I was on the seawall of Vancouver’s Stanley Park so although many were out  enjoying the day, few were sitting on the wet benches. Only one stopped: a rather unkempt woman with windblown hair. She was about my age and wearing wet torn and dirty jeans, a stained grey tee shirt, and carrying a backpack. She glanced at me, then sat at the far end of the bench and began rummaged through her pack all the while trying to ignore me.

After an apparently unsuccessful search of her pack, she noticed me staring at her. “Isn’t it a bit wet and windy for you to sit here pretending to read?” she said shaking her head at my stupidity, then went back to searching her pack, as if she were simply itemizing its contents. Evidently she did not really expect me to answer.

I nodded, then smiled more at her search than her question. “Well, the bench isn’t too wet for you to join me here is it…?” It was meant as a clever repartee, but in retrospect, I suppose it was rather rude, and wasted on the situation.

She suddenly stared at me with angry eyes. “What do you mean? I’m not joining you!!”

“I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“You people are all the same,” she sputtered, angry almost beyond words. “You just don’t care, do you? What do you think I am?”

She suddenly stood, zipped up her backpack, then grabbed my book and tossed it over the seawall far out into the roiling sea. Before I could react she ran away, pack in hand.

It was a hard-to-find paperback anthology of the poems of Robert Frost that I had discovered in a used book store, and I had been looking forward to exploring it. I quickly got to my feet and glanced over the seawall at the angry waves, but I couldn’t see the book and the chances of retrieving it were next to nil, even if the weather changed.

Did I provoke the woman? Had I been too dismissive; too angry at her intrusion into my personal zone? Or, had I been disrespectful? Judging by her appearance she was likely homeless; so did she resent my apparent rejection of someone like her sharing my bench? I was angry at losing my book, yes, but it was an anger suffused with guilt.

In retrospect, the need was not forgiveness on my part: I would likely never see her, or my book, again. No, there was more an urgent need for introspection. Things happen; Fate is Fate.

I’d like to think that the incident was a teaching moment; I’ve never forgotten it, at any rate. As Frost said in the last stanza of my favourite poem:

 I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I hope it has…

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2024/09/06/i-am-the-bouquet/

[ii] https://theconversation.com/what-we-get-wrong-about-forgiveness-a-counseling-professor-unpacks-the-difference-between-letting-go-and-making-up-273317

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