Forgiving does not erase the past.
Nor is it meant to.
A healed memory is not a deleted memory.
Forgiving what we cannot forget
creates a new way to remember.
Forgiving will change the pain of the past
into a hope for the future,
not an absence of part of our history. -
(Forgiveness Guy on Facebook)
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(from Grace not Law on facebook)
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From "Between Noon and Three (Romance, the law, and the Outrage of Grace)"
by Robert Capon.
[ Robert Capon has just told a story in which Vito has been killed for disloyalty
to the mob. Robert is looking at Vito's remembrance of his Earthly life
from the perspective he has, seated with Christ in Heaven.
(If you don't get it, that's ok, i'm probably writing this to myself,
as I hope you realise, all of this blog is, in the wash up !) ]
"And as Christ holds us risen in Himself, the deadness of
our own human minds - yours, mine, Vito's, anybody's -
works the same way.
All the horrible alteration, perversion and contradiction
in Vito's knowledge, for example - the one and only root
of all the evil in his life - is absolved. dissolved, in his death.
Because in his death he loses everything that was his,
good and bad. And when he comes out of his death into
the power of Christ's resurrection, he comes out with the
full knowledge of everything in his life, good and bad,
restored to him from the hand of God - held by Him
as it is in the risen mind of Christ.
He sees it all with a knowing untainted
by alteration, perversion or contradiction
(because the mind that knew it that way is dead forever);
and he grasps it no longer as the evil it tried to be
but as the desire for the Highest Good
it always was, in the offering of the Word to the Father.
If our Fall was our recognition, our re-knowing of the good as evil,
then our reconciliation is our recognition in Christ -
our re-knowing in the risen humanity of the Word -
of evil as the good, He has made it to be.
And there finally stood the wharf, clearly visible.
The grand image of it all, turned out to be
nothing other than the great sacrament of the reconciliation itself,
the Eucharistic Offering :
"Do this in remembrance of me ... as often as you eat
of this bread and drink of this cup, you do show the Lord's death
till He come." Do this, He says, for my anamnesis, for a remembering,
a recognition, a re-knowing, a re-presenting of my death.
Take He commands us, the worst thing you ever did to Me -
that most disastrous of all the disastrous alterations in your knowledge -
and see it now, face it now, accept it now, as I see it in My resurrection:
as the best thing that ever happened to you.
Take this worst of all the world's Fridays in thankful anamnesis
and recognize it now, celebrate it now as the Good
I always meant and saw - and that you meant, too,
but could never achieve in your contradiction.
By the grace of my unaltered risen knowledge, see,
even the disasters of your history as the inexorable desire
for the Highest Good I always knew them to be.
Nothing, therefore, is lost.
Not a scrap of history.
Not the smallest white lie or the genocidal holocaust.
It is all held in a re-newed knowledge -
in an anamnesis, in a re-membering, a recognition
by the Grace that raises those, whom death has absolved.
The lethal imagery of the black hole was finally out of the way.
What God effects in the reconciliation does the work of forgetting
without the danger of forgetting.
He does better than forget ; He remembers our evil in Grace
as the only real thing it ever could have been.
He takes away the flaming sword between us and our self-knowledge
and brings us home to ourselves .....
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