The healing power of forgiveness

From Parliamentary Prayer Breakfasts to post-apartheid South Africa and fourth-century desert monks, Julie Canlis explores the benefits of relentlessly pursuing forgiveness.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

Eastern Orthodox icon depict the Prodigal Son displayed on Forgiveness Sunday

Last week, the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast convened with a focus on the power of the F-word in public life. In our cultural moment, we prefer score settling and retribution to what was once a cherished value: Forgiveness. Can the Christian story offer anything to an era which is caught in endless cycles of violence, conflict, injustice, and vengeance?

In our lifetime, we have seen the experiment of what happens when a whole country dedicates itself to forgiveness. In South Africa, overcoming the trauma of apartheid did not mean forgetting but choosing to remember collectively. Evil was named. But could this kind of truth set one free? There were no shortcuts to forgiveness. There was no quick wiping the slate clean that avoided the truth. Instead, perpetrators were faced with real people and stories of what they had done. Victims recounted their trauma, but in a new way that enabled them to stop being the victim of what had happened to them. In South Africa, forgiveness was not religiously sanctioned denial. It offered the victims agency, and release from the cycle of vengeance.

From South Africa, we learned the power in sharing trauma stories. We discovered the importance of looking for underlying causes and ideologies that are contributing factors. But that was not the end. We also watched the power of restorative narratives, testifying to the beautiful fragility and hope of reconciliation. Without forgiveness, no relationship on a personal or national scale can be sustained. What would it look like to begin to create a forgiveness culture amid a culture of hate?

In the fourth century, there were communities of Christians who fled the Roman empire and set up shop in the desert. They gave their life to prayer and forgiveness because they found that despite fleeing from the “sins” of Rome, they could not escape themselves. They were in the desert with a handful of other people, and yet their hearts still contained hatred. They did not have muscle memory oriented toward forgiveness.

For others, hearing that they are forgiven forty times finally cracks through a self-defeating wall.

And so, they relentlessly practiced forgiveness. They practiced it by stopping the incessant outward glance at other peoples’ faults. They asked forgiveness constantly, in a bold attempt to own their own culpability and blindness. And they ritualized this practice in a once-yearly “Forgiveness Sunday” which makes many of us squirm just to think of it. The Sunday before Lent, everyone in the community would extend a word of forgiveness to each person, and beg their forgiveness in turn.

Forgiveness Sunday is still practiced annually in Eastern Christian churches (often Greek or Russian) where you can still wander in on the Sunday before Lent, and work on your F-word muscle memory. In case you find yourself in one of these churches, the script goes something like this:

Person 1: Forgive me, sister.

Person 2: God forgives you. And so do I. Forgive me brother.

Person 1: God forgives you. And I forgive you.

Of course, this exchange can be rote. But for some for whom there has been anything amiss, eyes well up with tears. Perhaps it is the letting go of an exhausting grudge. For others, hearing that they are forgiven forty times finally cracks through a self-defeating wall. And for everyone, it is a commitment to not constantly ruminate on the wrongs of others, reliving incidents to keep the anger going. If done rightly, it allows for the recognition of wrong, while not allowing it to perpetuate itself in you. In essence, it is the cheapest mental health shortcut, available at a church near you.

Back in the fourth century, Forgiveness Sunday arose as a circumstantial necessity because these desert dwellers would retreat even further into the desert for Lent. Call it a detox camp. Call it a therapeutic immersion. Call it a technology fast. Regardless, due to the dangers of the desert (wild animals and a hostile environment), these Christians wanted to receive the forgiveness of their brothers and sisters (and offer it) in case they did not return to the community to celebrate Easter. For us, a modern equivalent might be simply to enter the liturgical time of confession and forgiveness on a regular Sunday. And to lean more deeply into the well-worn phrase to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” Would it be possible to treat these words with a whole new level of personal responsibility and vulnerability?

Forgiveness Sunday is the humble declaration that we are both victims and perpetrators.

Forgiveness, when taken seriously, is a process that takes time. Forgiveness involves great courage, but also the great humble realisation that we could have just as easily done the very act that needed forgiving, under different circumstances. Forgiveness involves neither appeasement nor grovelling. For the church, the ritualised understanding of Forgiveness Sunday is the humble declaration that we are both victims and perpetrators. And that, somehow, Christ accompanies us in the grief of both.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus founded his new order upon forgiveness. Jesus knew that the unforgiving heart is closed to not just giving forgiveness but to receiving it – it is sealed up like a tomb. That those who are least forgiving also live daily with the fiercest critic – themselves. In other sayings, Jesus highlights that forgiveness is not merely an interior disposition, but also one honours the integrity of the process of working through an injury. And finally, Christians believe that Jesus practiced what he preached: he forgave his enemies (and died for them) to secure divine forgiveness for everyone. For his followers, they had no choice but to forgive – and many of them ended up founding communities of forgiveness.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

15 March 2024

6 min read

Temperance: neurotic vice or self-control for future benefit?

We’re better at bravery than temperance, just when we need that self-control more than ever.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A casually dressed man perches on railing balancing, clasping his hands and looking around.

Jed Villejo on Unsplash.

The 21st century is witnessing a crisis of temperance, self-discipline, and self-control. Lent is one way to combat this.

According to the international Leader Character framework, there are eleven “character strengths” important for human wellbeing and good leadership. These include virtues like justice, accountability, courage, and good judgment. Researchers have used this framework to perform thousands of studies on teams and groups of people around the world. These studies show that, almost without exception, temperance is the weakest virtue in every team everywhere. (Not quite every person – each team has one or two members with strong temperance, but temperance is still weakest on average for a group).

The modern world is not only intemperate: it actively encourages the opposite: immediate gratification of desires. Every day we are bombarded with online ads, posters, and TV commercials that tell us to ‘Indulge yourself’; ‘treat yourself’, ‘look after yourself’, along with images of sensually pleasing people and objects. It is a rare advert that appeals to your calm rationality and long-term thinking. The advertising industry knows that it can make much more money from people who lack self-control. If it targets your basic animal impulses, then you are more likely to buy things you don’t need and wouldn’t have thought of without ad’s enticing promise.

Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on.

Worse still, there are elements of Western thought that praise intemperance as a virtue and pathologize restraint as a psychological disorder. Elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, popularised in the media, suggest that you do damage to your mental health if you suppress your desires or try to hide them. It is far healthier to give free rein – to sexual desire first of all, but to all desires in the end. Temperance is no longer a virtue to be admired, but a neurotic vice that fills your subconscious with envy, bitterness, and psychological problems.

What is temperance anyway and why is it a problem if we lack it?

Temperance is self-control. It is acquired by self-discipline. Its purpose is to organise and order your many desires, giving priority to the ones that matter most to you. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you also want to eat that doughnut you can see in the shop window. Or you want to save money to buy a house, but you also want that new and larger TV screen. Those are competing desires. Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to choose: it simply gives you control over your desires so you rule over them instead of them ruling you.

What does lack of temperance look like? Whenever you keep doing something you wish you didn’t keep doing, you are being intemperate. I don’t mean one-time actions that you later regret. I mean things you know you’ll regret even before you do them, yet you still do them. Things like: smoking (for most people), eating too much, browsing Instagram or TikTok instead of working, failing to show up for gym class. It can also mean any kind of procrastination: avoiding doing a task you know you have to do but don’t want to do ‘now’. In sum, it reveals a disorganisation in your priorities and goals, so a lesser priority subverts a higher priority because it’s more immediately available and enjoyable.

We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going

The problem with lacking temperance is that it undermines your own goals for your life and makes your future self a helpless victim of your present self. It leads to a downward spiral of the heart of intemperance is that some desire, some pleasure, some indulgence, has gained so much power over our life that we no longer have control over it. It is in the driving seat, not us. Intemperance is also a cause of self-hatred and low self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to set long term goals and stick to them. It makes you feel like you’re heading somewhere good.

By contrast, the heart of temperance is to subordinate everything we think, feel, and enjoy to our will, our clear-headed decisions about the kind of person we want to be in the long-term. We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going. Temperance is even needed for worldly success. Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Why is temperance so lacking in our own time? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, we are one of the wealthiest societies ever to exist. Wealth may have benefits, but it also enables us to get what we want, when we want it. Wealthy people are less used to having their desires unsatisfied than poor people. Unfulfilled longing is a less common occurrence for the rich, so there is little natural opportunity to exercise the muscle of self-denial.

Secondly, we are one of the least religious societies ever to have existed. In contrast to secularism, religion has always had practical tools to cultivate temperance. All major world religions have ritual practices of fasting and feasting designed to exercise and strengthen self-discipline. Every year Muslims endure the gruelling discipline of Ramadan. Orthodox Christians restrict themselves to a vegan diet during the forty days of lent, and many other Christians give up some indulgence. Both rich and poor share alike in this voluntary self-denial. Now that these practices are eroding away, they are being replaced not by other self-discipline practices, but by the worship of I-want-it-here-and-now. This is shown most poignantly in the 2000 movie Chocolat, which explicitly puts up sensual indulgence in competition to traditional religion and abstinence – and indulgence wins.

But the decline of religion has done more than this: it has also undermined the sense of transcendent purpose in many people’s lives – which was what motivated them to look beyond their physical desires. Without hope and without a larger sense of meaning to life, people have less reason to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the sake of longer-term goals.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance.

I don’t mean that short-term pleasures are always bad, or that sensual desire is evil in itself. The whole point of temperance is that it involves the right amount, and not too much, of something good. That is what makes it so tricky. If eating a doughnut was like stealing or violence, we would have a stronger voice telling us not to do it. But because it’s not bad in itself, we find it harder to resist. We need temperance to say no to something good when we’ve already taken enough of it, so we don’t take too much.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance. A father who spends too long in the office and not enough time with his children is being intemperate. He is sacrificing the long-term goal of healthy family relationships for the short-term goal of career success. We lack the self-control to express our anger in the right place at the right time.

Temperance is needed for so many of the other virtues to function. If you’re not temperate, then you will be late for meetings, fail to deliver work on time, or makes too many commitments that you can’t keep. You’ll be a liability to your friends and colleagues.

Temperance doesn’t tell you what you should aim for in life. But no matter what you aim for, you won’t get it without temperance. So, what are you giving up for lent?