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Lessons learned from Isaac, the protagonist of Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black. I highly recommend reading Don’t Cry for Me, the first book in this series about a family struggling to heal from generational abuse and dysfunction, before tackling the sequel because of how many references and retellings there are of previous events.
So, what did I learn from Isaac:
1) Forgiveness is different for everyone and does not automatically include reconciliation which is not something I was necessarily taught in church growing up. Too often, they’d expect people to forget what happened and welcome the person that hurt them back into their lives without any evidence that the person who harmed them had actually changed. You can forgive and invite someone back into your life perhaps with very strong boundaries and only after genuine, longterm evidence of change on the transgressor’s part this time. You can also forgive but never interact with that person again. There are many different options.
2) The future is an open book. You could be surprised by a bend in the road five minutes or five weeks or five months from now, so never assume your current circumstances are going to last forever.
3) It takes immense emotional strength to end harmful relationship patterns and cycles which is something outsiders may often overlook or downplay when they’re taking note of what you’ve accomplished in your life. Isaac was far from perfect, but I loved seeing his personal growth as he recovered from the negative aspects of his childhood and built a good life for himself as an adult.
Did I know some of this already? Yes, of course, but some lessons need to be repeated over and over again in many different ways in order to sink in.
All great lessons. The forgiveness thing… I grew up Catholic, and we were taught that you forgive no matter what. You forgive everything and accept those back who you’ve forgiven. Now, as an atheist, and a realist (often to my own detriment) I believe forgiveness should be for you, to ease your own suffering, and it by no way means that you should automatically allow those you choose to forgive back in your life or to take up any space in your brain. I loved reading this, Lydia!
Thank you, George. I’m glad we’re on the same page.
I keep going on about this…in the Bible forgiveness, especially the kind we want from God, *does* involve reconciliation. We want to forgive and be forgiven the way the Prodigal Son was forgiven. He didn’t even get a chance to make his apology before his father was ordering a big celebration of reconciliation!
But that can’t happen unless the person repents. What if the person doesn’t repent? What if he intends to do the same thing again? What if you need to press criminal charges to protect other people? Then, for your own sake, you do what I’d call releasing the emotion. You tell yourself that the person is in God’s hands, and leave him alone, or press charges, or whatever may be necessary. Nobody should waste the rest of per life endlessly chewing over old anger. Nobody should pretend that the harm someone did to you can be swept under a magic carpet called “forgiveness.” At some point even the father of the Prodigal Son might have had to say goodbye and leave everything to the other son.
I don’t think it’s helpful to confuse that with what I think of as forgiveness. I think some people might find it easier to release the emotion if they didn’t tell themselves they had to forgive the person when the process of real forgiveness, which begins with repentance, is impossible.