Not letting bitterness embitter our world

It should come as no surprise that there are many, many people in the world who have bitter hearts caused by disappointments, hurts, disillusionments and acrimonious encounters with their fellow human beings.  Moreover, quite a number of these negative encounters may have occurred years or decades ago, and there seems to be a certain unwillingness to let go of these past hurts, leaving the one holding the memory stunted, in pain, wanting some sort of revenge and if the Church was involved, very skeptical and negative toward the community of the Body of Christ.

First of all, nobody ever promised us a perfect Church or community.  We are so broken as individuals and even as a community that it should come as no surprise that there will be experiences of much negativity and perhaps even scandal simply because each of us, though on The Way (an ancient term that referred to Christianity), we are also travelling at different speeds, moving with different motivations and perhaps constantly being distracted by the little side roads and lanes that cause us to deviate from really following The Way of Christ and The Cross.

Secondly, I think we need to realise that the Christian way has a lot to do with living with large and giving hearts.  There would be many who would say that the Christian way is about following Liturgy and getting our Theology right.  While I wouldn’t deny that those are important, what is far more important is transferring all that we pray and study about into a lived experience.  How do we live with heart that are large and are willing to excuse rather than accuse?  How do we become freer and more liberated from our past wounds?  Do we know what it is that makes us want to hold on to our hurts like some prized trophy of life which we put on proud display and often take out and dust and polish them to make sure that the hurt and the pain and anger and unforgiveness shine and gleam even after ten or twenty years?  Are we willing to want to move and grow in the real image of Christ? 

Thirdly, I have come across some Christians who have been hurt by others who have a very negative and strange notion of life and death.  One person I met said to me “Father, I am so unwilling to forgive so-and-so for the hurt he caused my family, and me I am sure I will go to hell after I die”, and this person was no nonchalant about just what hell for eternity was!  While I can commiserate with a person’s feeling of hurt and pain and how terrible the scars of the past must be, I am puzzled to see how being present weekly at receiving Holy Communion and being present at the community’s liturgical prayer can numb one from being aware that one needs to become who one consumes. 

To be truly honest, living large and with a large heart requires much training and practice.  No one get to the point of being a perfect disciple while one is truly “On the Way”.  We take baby steps in the direction of goodness, honesty, truth and forgiveness.  Sometimes these ‘tests’ are small and easy to spot, and rather easy to handle.  But at other times, these ‘tests’ come at a time when our defenses are down and we are caught unawares.  The Church is such a huge organization that we are not always at our best when the lives of our parishioners have needs to be met.  Sometimes we make the mark, and sometimes, we fail.  Asking the question “why did you fail me?” can be a pointless question as there are myriad possibilities that can emerge as answers, and when we have bitterness in our hearts, we are hardly willing to listen or to even give the benefit of the doubt to the injuring party. 

Rather, perhaps the better question to ask ourselves is “why am I so willing to live with an embittered and small heart?”  Part of the answer lies in the fact that most of the time, we are unaware of what Kierkegaard commented once – Jesus is meant to be imitated and not just admired.  What many cynical and embittered people do not realise is that when they hold a grudge against others, they are really handing over their power and gateway to happiness to the very person who they are harbouring a grudge against.  Ironical as it may seem, they have enchained and impoverished themselves from living a truly liberated life as a follower of Christ.  What they think makes them ‘happy’ when they polish their trophies of hurt and past pains so often become instead the very thing that constricts their hearts, preventing them from truly living large.

The wonder of Christianity is that the key towards living freely is to look frequently at the Crucifix, where Jesus paid the ultimate price for our small hearts and sinfulness.  The irony there writ large is that Jesus may have been nailed to that Cross, with no ability to move any limb, becomes through his love of the Father’s will and his largess of heart nurtured through years of intimate communication with the Father, the most free person in all of history, when he mouthed the precious words “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”. 

When we are reminded of the adage “To err is human, to forgive divine”, we are really reminded that each of us baptized in Christ has that divine image and that we need to recover, embolden and show forth this image as disciples of Christ.  Again, I am reminded too of a misconception of forgiveness when I am told, “I can forgive but I cannot forget”.  Since when did forgiveness require dementia?  Unless I have missed something in Scripture, I have not come across Jesus instructing his disciples to pray for forgetfulness.  A hallmark of true forgiveness is when we are willing to see the incident or person who has hurt us as something that happened, without that quickening in the heart that nurses the wounded heart, and decides there and then that one wants to live large, become another Christ, and say with conviction “Father, forgive them for they knew not what they did”. 

No, I know it is not easy.  That is because living this way sometimes opens us up to further opportunities of vulnerability.  But living this way means that we have to often imitate Christ in the way that he too often fell to his knees, imploring the Father to do in us what we can never possibly do for ourselves.