Forgive humans

The other day I saw a video by a Lutheran preacher whose ministry revolves around the phrase “forgive assholes.” In the video, she said that forgiveness is about cutting yourself off from whatever it is that the other person did to you, telling them, “what you did to me is so bad, I refuse to be connected to it anymore.” I see a problem with that statement. Not so much in the disconnect, but in backhanded way that it reinforces the other person’s “badness.”

The phrase “forgive assholes” is toxic (especially for Christians), and here’s why:

It perpetuates hurt on both sides by attaching the “asshole” to the behavior you choose to define them by.

You can’t forgive someone if you’re still intent on labeling them. If I say I forgive my brother for lying to me, but then insist on calling him a liar for the rest of our lives, have I really forgiven him? No. I’m holding on to the way he hurt me, refusing to let myself heal from it, and refusing to give him every opportunity to leave that mistake behind. If I “forgive” my brother yet still insist on reminding both of us of what he did to me, I haven’t forgiven at all.

Forgiveness is about letting go of your resentment, your hurt, and your anger. Letting it go. Breathing it out. Because guess what? You are just as flawed.

Maybe some find it hard to forgive others sometimes because they find it hard to forgive themselves. But I think most of us suffer from a different problem: we can’t forgive because we need something to validate ourselves by. Some measuring stick that we can hold our own behavior up to and say “this is so obviously wrong, and there’s no way I’d ever do something so horrible.” We want to believe that there’s someone out there who is worse than we are and less deserving of our forgiveness, because that makes it easier to justify our own sins. So we pretend to forgive. We say “I forgive you, but I won’t forget what you did to me.” We say “I’m cutting toxic people out of my life,” instead of realizing: we are all toxic, and therefore equally deserving of each other’s forgiveness.

I hate to play the dictionary card on this one, but here’s the definition of toxic taken straight from the internet: adj. very bad, unpleasant, or harmful.

Hmmm. By that definition, we are all guilty of some degree of occasional toxicity.

Everyone has hurt someone—even if the person you hurt is yourself. And if you were to cut all the “toxic” people out of your life—all the people who have ever made your life worse or more difficult—you would be left with no one, not even you.

I think a more appropriate phrase would be “forgive humans.” Humanity, by definition, is flawed and generally undeserving of unconditional forgiveness—but we don’t forgive because the other person “deserves it.” We forgive because no one deserves it.