Sunday is a good day to talk about forgiveness.

Walk into any church on Sunday and you’ll get an earful about forgiveness.  It cuts right to the heart of religious faith.  The reassurance that there is a God who knows us better than we know ourselves and never fails to forgive no matter the offense can be transformative for the believer.

All the same, God or no god, believer or not, forgiveness can be tough.  God may always forgive, but people don’t.  We tend to hold onto our grudges and hurts.  Friends, colleagues, family, the universe let us down, often painfully.  Some wounds cut deep and alter the course of our lives.  In such circumstances, it’s easy to understand why forgiveness is not a consideration.

And then there’s this business of forgiving ourselves.  Guilt and shame can stick to us like a slobbery wad of Big League Chew wedged into every crevice of a shoe tread.  We wallow in our guilt, believing that we are appropriately punishing ourselves.  Engage in this self-flagellation long enough and it can become a convenient excuse for everything that goes wrong.  And it’s almost impossible to genuinely offer forgiveness to anyone else until we let ourselves off the hook.

What makes forgiveness so tough is it requires setting aside our pride.  No matter whether one is the offender or the offended, that’s a tall order.  Our pride often prevents us from looking beyond our well-entrenched sense of self, letting go of our interpretation of events, and how we see the world.

I had an interesting experience with forgiveness recently over lunch with a former colleague.  We worked together successfully for many years, but things became more strained over time.  After I left the company we didn’t speak for five years.

For me it was cathartic to spend time together and talk honestly.  It’s hard to say if we actually resolved all our differences, probably not.  But I’m not sure that was the point.  What counts is that we both made the effort to show up and hear each other out.  That in and of itself is a meaningful gesture of forgiveness.

It would be nice if forgiveness worked like an Etch-a-Sketch, where we could erase the past with a couple of shakes.  Sometimes it comes easy, but more often the experience of forgiveness is a journey.  It takes time, and even when we arrive we are not the same person we were at the start.

As I get older I realize forgiveness is about lightening the load.  Life is already hard enough. Ultimately holding onto our grudges and resentments only weighs us down.  It hampers our movements, diminishes our agility and narrows our vision.  When that happens, we have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we continue to carry around all this emotional baggage.

I’m not suggesting forgiveness gets any easier as we get older.  Pride is tough to set aside at any age.  However, as gravity catches up with us and the weight of our grudges grows heavier, we realize that we are running out of excuses.  The justifications we held close, sometimes for years, why forgiveness wasn’t an option seem less convincing. 

Of course, we can never be sure where a journey of forgiveness will lead us.  This much is clear: it is the best chance we have to ease our burdens and experience much greater joy and fulfillment in our lives.  That is reason enough to take the risk.