Category: FORGIVENESS & REPENTANCE

  • When you forgive someone, you stop punishing them in your mind. It means that you stop rehearsing in your mind how much they hurt you.

    —Fr. Michael Gillis

  • “Refusing to forgive is a way of clinging to my rights and getting my due now because I really do not believe that God can do better for me. If I truly trust that God can and will bring good out of every situation, then I am free to let go and forgive with a peaceful heart.”

    All That I Have Is Yours: 100 Meditations with St. Pope Kyrillos VI on the Spiritual Life
    Fr. Kyrillos Ibrahim

  • This virtue is related to the opening up of our heart, to an increase in its capacity. Other people’s faults have to find room, there has to be space for whatever they’ve done to our detriment, even their excuses, never mind whether we find these sufficient or true. All their weaknesses have to fit in.

    It’s often such a struggle to accept others as they are. Because we demand that they be as we want them to be. But it’s not like that. They’ve done us some harm, wittingly or unwittingly, They’ve got some strange habit or other.

    They may have been brought up differently from us, they may have certain external habits which jar, certain weaknesses, certain expressions of fallen, sinful human nature, just as we most certainly have, too. So God calls upon us to open our heart and to put our fellow human beings inside, as they are, so that we can love them as our brothers and sisters.—

    —Metropolitan Nikolaos (Hatzinikolaou) of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki

  • Even if our mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or friend couldn’t love us in every way we might have liked, Père Thomas began to show me that each one did reflect an aspect of God’s love, and when taken together they reflected the fullness of God in a way I had often missed in focusing on what each one was not able to offer.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

    However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.

    —Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Remember people’s love for you and their good past with you, whenever you are fought by doubts of their sincerity and whenever you see them erring against you, for then their past love will intercede for them and your anger will subside.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

    I felt miserable because I had failed so many times in the past to respond to her help, to accept the warmth and love she tried to give me. Another wave of loneliness overcame me as I considered the times when I fought her, hated her, and pushed her away from me.

    …

    This was my mother; the word “mother” brings on a flow of feeling and past experiences and years of living together, loving together, and hating, too. The fighting and conflicts do not seem important anymore, the arguments and intense pains and emotions that clouded the relationship have evaporated. This was my mother, and I realize the uniqueness of our relationship.

    …

    In her dying, I was able to become open to myself and to my mother, to claim our relationship, to look back upon the past in quick moments while at her bedside and realize the times she did give me warmth and love, and the times when pain and emotional conflict blocked the giving and the receiving.

    —Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

    Even if some people are foul and have reached the extremes of evil, often they have done one or two or three good things…. We ought to suspect the same also in the case of good people. Just as the most worthless people often do something good, so those who are earnest and virtuous often fail completely in some other respect.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

  • It is very wrong that you do not love your mother, and harbor this feeling of suspicion against her. Pray for the strength, the courage, the goodness, to forgive. You must stop these endless recriminations, this reverting to this endless dwelling on-her mistaken attitude to you in the past. Accept that past as part of God’s pattern for your life, and forget your grudge. Forget it all. In keeping keen within you this hostility to your past and to the tools that shaped it, you are only waging war against the will of God. What folly!

    Besides, you cannot honestly consider your fate to be a hard one. There have been bitter moments, I know. But, surely, the right thing to do is to forget them and train yourself to think of no one as their author, of no one as the one person responsible for them. Seen from on high, men are nought but instruments in the hand of God.

    LETTERS OF ELDER MACARIUS OF OPTINA

  • “Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.”

    —Robert Brault

  • “I tried never to go to sleep while I kept a grievance against anyone. Nor did I let anyone go to sleep while he had a grievance against me.”

    —Agatho

    The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
    Benedicta Ward

  • We want to collect debts [that we think others owe us] because we do not believe that our debt hasn’t been fully canceled [by the Lord].

    Begin to stop trying to collect debts [of all kinds] from others. Your damaged emotions are making you get revenge. Release the debt. Release the debt the same way God has released your debt – you do not need to pay Him back.

    —Fr. Paul Girguis

  • I have seen people flaring up madly and vomiting their long-stored malice, who by their very passion were delivered from passion, and who have obtained from their offender either penitence or an explanation of the long standing grievance. I have seen others who seemed to show a brute patience, but who were nourishing resentment within them under the cover of silence.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “Forgive me for all the things I did, but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

    —Donna Tartt, The Secret History