Category: FORGIVENESS & REPENTANCE

  • Forgive yourself. Even if everyone else forgives you, it wouldn’t matter.

    You will not move forward until you forgive yourself. This is when healing begins.

    There Are No Regrets In This Life, Only Lessons
    By Natalie Madeline

  • The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

    —Douglas Kennedy, The Pursuit of Happiness

  • And all we say is, “So-and-so has offended me straight through the heart; this cannot be forgiven!”  How can we not forgive, when we are the same as they are?  How many times have we offended our fellow men? 

    —Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives

  • Humility is, when the other person is at fault, for us to do a metanoia (prostration) to him and say, ‘Forgive me, my brother, I am sorry!’ before he has time to seek forgiveness.

    —Saint Joseph the Hesychast

  • Forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting…A wounded person cannot – indeed, should not – think that a faded memory can provide an expiation of the past. To forgive, one must remember the past, put it into perspective, and move beyond it. Without remembrance, no wound can be transcended.

    —Beverly Flanigan

  • So, fathers, brothers, sisters: let us forgive one another. Let us not think about why. There is enough to think about. Let us do it. 

    —Fr. Alexander Schmemann

  • When you love much, you are forgiven much-and when you are forgiven much, you love much.

    —Søren Kierkegaard, But One Who Is Forgiven Little Loves Little Luke 7:47

  • This was precisely St. Thérèse’s insight: It is easier to love people in the abstract than to tolerate the person at your table, the one who makes funny noises when she eats or who scrapes his knife on the plate in an annoying way. It is such trials that refine our capacity for love. For we learn forgiveness only when there is something to forgive; we learn patience when our patience is sorely tested.

    The Saint’s Guide to Happiness
    Robert Ellsberg

  • “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

    ―C.S. Lewis,The Weight of Glory

  • For the humble, the severity of the offense and the existence of an apology are extraneous factors in terms of one’s willingness to forgive. This new perspective on forgiveness offers freedom (a favorite theme of Dostoevsky) in that the one offended has the power to forgive in each and every circumstance and is not constrained by such factors as the severity of the offense or the presence of an apology. It is a freedom based on knowing who we are, what God has done for us, and what we desire to give Him in return. Always aware of the ten thousand talents that we owe God, always aware that He has forgiven us with His grace and loving kindness, always aware that all of us will stand together one day before our Maker, we come to understand what ultimately matters is not so much what was said to us or done to us, but our faithfulness to Christ’s love, our imitation of His forgiveness, and our humility before the weaknesses of others.

    Fr. Alexis (Trader)
    Less Injustice or More Humility: Two Perspectives on Forgiveness