Pints With Aquinas - Forgive Like Christ | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Fr. Pine talks about the theology of forgiveness then gives some practical steps we cant take to be better at forgiving. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F ✝️ Show Sponsor: https://hallow.com/mattfradd 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd We get a small kick back from affiliate links

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. And this is Pines of the Aquinas. In this episode, I'd like to talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of the greatest imaginable gifts that we can receive. It pardons our sins, it reconciles us to God, it begins in us the life of heaven. But it's also a gift that we can give insofar as we can be made instruments of the divine forgiveness. But it's also a gift that we can give insofar as we can be made instruments of the divine forgiveness. And what we come to discover is that by doing so, we are advanced in the spiritual life because it helps us to heal and to grow beyond our present

limitations, and it helps us to become the saints whom God intends us to be. Unforgiveness or resentment or the anger and sadness associated with it can be a great obstacle or hindrance to our progress in the spiritual life. So it's worth taking the bull by the horns and addressing this topic because it's something that we all need. Boom. Here we go. Okay.

So I just want to cover three main points. First, the phenomenon of unforgiveness, like why we're so tempted to unforgiveness, and then second, the phenomenon of unforgiveness, like why we're so tempted to unforgiveness. And then second, the different registers in which unforgiveness lodges in the soul. And then third, just a simple description of how to forgive and then practical steps that you can take to ratify that choice. Okay, so the phenomenon of unforgiveness. Sometimes when you're describing a reality, it's hard to make sense of why

you feel it or why you think about it or why you experience it in the way that you do. So sometimes, like in Christian conversations, people will be like, oh, we'll just forgive or oh, it's like all that you need to do is forgive the person. And you're like, yeah, but I experience it as super difficult. Why is that? Well, for me at least, I don't think it's especially surprising that we find forgiveness to be difficult because it's a response to a sin. Okay, so somebody has sinned against us. There's a guilt with that, right? There's a fault with that. There's an offense with that. And it's something that kind of attacks us. It gets to the core of our being. It makes us feel vulnerable. It makes us feel weak and wounded.

It's the type of thing that gets at our insecurities and destabilizes our kind of identity and mission in the life of the Lord, especially if we feel it really acutely or especially if we feel it really sensitively. And so when that happens, when we're wounded, when we're weakened, we have a tendency to kind of close in on ourselves, to reject others from human communion, right? And to not permit ourselves to be exposed again to that type of treatment. So you can think about this, like, you know, like it's traumatic, right? It can be traumatic to suffer a sin. If you've trusted somebody and they've betrayed that trust, right?

Or if you've asked somebody as it were to accept you and they in turn reject you. Or if, whatever, you just lay yourself open to hurt and the person seizes that opportunity, preys upon that opportunity and leaves you in fact hurt. It's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. So I don't think that we should make trifling or otherwise kind of explaining a way like descriptions of forgiveness because that doesn't do justice to the experience. It's hard. or otherwise explaining a way like descriptions of forgiveness. Because that doesn't do justice to the experience. It's hard. So that you would experience sadness and anger is not surprising.

That you would experience resentment, even a kind of hatred, again, not surprising. And you need not be scandalized by your own reaction. Or that you would have thoughts of vindication or whatever else. Again, not surprising. This is super difficult. It's super tough. So we should treat it with a similar reverence or with a similar respect. Uh, we're kind of treading here on very holy ground in so far as this is a place in which we can stand to be very much beaten up, but it's also a way in which,

or it's also a place in which we can stand to be redeemed with a peculiar efficacy. So it's worthwhile. All right. So there are different registers in which we can stand to be redeemed with a peculiar efficacy. So it's worthwhile. All right. So there are different registers in which we experience unforgiveness. There's a kind of physical register to it. You don't often think about this, but we can retain hurt in our bodies. The way that instinctually if somebody winds up as if they're going to slap you, you recoil. Because you expect it to come, even if you trust the individual, it's instinctual. I had the experience once where I was lost hiking in the

wilderness and there was a lot of snow and I didn't have snow shoes and I was postholing where your feet plunged through the snow. In this particular instance, I ended up in the hospital because I got frostbite and when I was falling asleep in my hospital bed, I kept jolting myself awake because I was having these memories in my dreams of postholing. And when we suffer sin, there can be a similar memory, as it were, of the trauma, right? Of the pain. And so there might be even a physical reaction, and it's going to take time for that to go away. Okay, so next, there's an emotional dimension, too. So the emotions are, you know, things that we share with the animals. Obviously they take on a new life or a new aspect in our rational existence because they're

called up to something higher. But still they can be super vehement, right? And they can be super vociferous, which is to say, yeah, they can chat a lot. So we'll say that your blood boils, right? Or we'll say that your heart turned cold, or we'll say that all kinds of things to describe the very physical reactions that we experience to these types of things. And the emotions aren't something over which we have total control. Okay, we can shape them, we can form them with the life of virtue, right? But they're still going to at times assert themselves somewhat in somewhat unruly fashion. in somewhat unruly fashion. Okay, so there's that.

Then the next would be psychological. So in this register, we know that we have well-blazed neural pathways through our mind. And that might be to our advantage, or it might be to our disadvantage. When it comes to forgiveness, for instance, we might have discovered that there's a kind of psychological advantage to not forgiving.

You might find that your victim status actually becomes a bargaining chip in the public square, and that if you can show how hurt you are, or you can show how pained you've been, then you exercise a kind of power. And so, it can become an attachment of sorts. And then you can think in these ways, and reason in these ways, such that it's harder and harder to dislodge. Okay? But, when it comes to all these things, you might think, oh my gosh, how much control

do I have over that? Not a ton. Some. You have some control. And you can work with professionals who are competent in these matters to work through some of those things. But getting to the next highest register, which is to say the highest register of all, there's a spiritual dimension to all this.

Which dimension hinges on choice? And over that, you do have competence, because the God who has made you for choice gives you competence over your choice. He has placed your life in your hands because He entrusts you with it, because He wants to see what you'll do with it, and He knows that you can do good with it.

And among the greatest goods which you can do, one of them is, in fact, forgiveness. So we're going to focus over, we're going to focus focus on this spiritual dimension, not in the sense that I have control over it or I can manipulate it. But this is where God has bestowed upon me the dignity as a human person, as made to his image and likeness, to pardon others as a way by which of channeling his pardon, as a way by which of becoming like him. Over that I have some modicum of control by his grace and with that choice, the things

below, which is to say the psychological and the emotional and the physical, they'll come in turn or they'll come in time. Please God. Okay. So then let's in this last piece just describe forgiveness a little bit with the remaining minutes that we have. Basically what is forgiveness? Okay. It's not some like magic magic occult mental act, right?

You haven't yet discovered how to forgive because you can't conceive of what forgiveness in fact is. Forgiveness is just the choice for love where there was formerly hatred or aversion or repulsion or hurt or woundedness and weakness or whatever else, okay? It's the choice for love. It's the choice to reconstitute a kind of communion. Now that doesn't mean that you need to reconstitute the relationship as it was. Let's

say that you were in a romantic relationship with somebody who hurt you very grievously, let's say sexually. You don't have to take up residence with that person again. You don't have to start going out again or get back together. You can distance yourself. That's totally consonant with prudence, with being a well-adjusted human being. But you do have to forgive that person, which means that you do have to seek to reconstitute some kind of communion, even if the communion is more distant than it formerly was, but still a genuine communion. Because ultimately it's possible to have communion with all those who are in the Lord, or who are potentially in the Lord

Which is to say this You need at very least to desire the good for that individual Which is that they might know love and serve God in this life and enjoy him in the next You want to choose that for them? All right, even if it means never seeing that individual again Okay, you need to desire at least that kind of communion, which is a real communion, a thick communion, a not nothing communion, okay. So it's, it's the choice for love. Whereas formerly there was hatred or something else besides.

So it's a choice, which is to say it's a free act. You deliberate upon it, right? You intend it and then you make it, but then you have to hold fast to it. And I think that this is a piece that a lot of people lose sight of because they'll think about choice as a one-time event, as if there's a switch in your mind which is between unforgiveness and forgiveness and you toggle that switch each time you change the setting. That's not the case. What we're talking about is a switch that has an inevitable tendency towards unforgiveness. There's a kind of heaviness to it. There's a kind of weight to it, a kind of inertia to it. It's always going

to continue to tend in the direction of the psychological, the emotional, and the physical trauma and the memory thereof. And so if we're going to choose for forgiveness, we need to choose it today and tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month and next year. All right. The Lord's mercies are renewed each morning like the dew on the ground. So too, our choice for forgiveness has to be renewed and ratified each morning You might even incorporate it into your morning offering and say simply Lord Jesus Christ I offer you this day all of its joys and sorrows all of its successes and failures I offer it to you for the praise of your glory. I choose you I choose to forgive

I choose to seek your face in the sacraments in the life of faith and all those things that you have Kind of strewn along the way now. I'm getting too long, but you get it. Okay, you have to choose forgiveness because otherwise we will drift as if by inertia back into an inevitable regression, because that's what original sin does. It has a way of undoing our lives, of unworking our conversion, and we need to continue to assert by the grace of God that we are laying claim to God's forgiveness, and in laying claim to it we're choosing to perpetuate it in the here and now by extending it to those who have offended us. All right, so it's a kind of fight on a spiritual treadmill. It's going to take an immense effort,

okay? But it's an effort which God will accomplish in you and through you by His power, by His grace. So there's the spiritual choice upon which we can focus or over which we have some control. Now what are you going to do about the psychological, the emotional and the physical? Not too much. Again, you can consult a professional and you can get good advice, good counsel and other things besides to help address that. But it's not necessarily going to become easy as of a sudden or as if by magic. Those things may come in turn, but if so, they're probably going to limp along.

They're going to take time. But if you feel the resurgence of the psychological attachment or the emotional turmoil or even the physical hurt, that doesn't mean that you haven't forgiven. That doesn't mean that you haven't forgiven. It's an indication of the fact that the memory of it still remains in your body and in your emotions and in your mind, okay? But that you have chosen healing and growth. You have chosen ongoing conversion. You have chosen the Lord for this individual and for yourself and a communion on the basis of which you believe it's possible, you hope it's possible, you love in its possibility.

So when that comes up, don't be scandalized. Don't think, oh, it means nothing. Oh, I can't possibly progress. It is possible. All right. And it might mean waking up every morning and asking for it before the Lord for months on end, but it's worthwhile. Okay. Because you might come to discover as if by surprise that you have a breakthrough, that God grants a signal grace to heal some aspect of your life, which formerly was in disarray or was formerly in chaos. It's not going to be by clear and measurable progress.

It's not like you can plot it or chart it and it's like exponential or logarithmic. It's often by logic the Lord alone knows. But still, we believe that it is possible, okay? Because it is. So we can hope and we can love through it and in it, okay? So here are some practicals. Ask God for the grace of forgiveness and ask God also for a cleansing of your memory, your physical memory, your emotional memory, your psychological memory.

Ask him to genuinely forgive and not just hold on to memories of the past so that you can wield them in the future and use them against the other individual as a kind of spiritual ammunition. That's not the point. The point is genuinely to forgive, to reconstitute the relationship in a way that's just and a way that's appropriate given the hurt that has been visited, but still real in some way, shape, or form, even if only in the way that I described earlier. All right? I would say, if those thoughts continue to recur, bring them to prayer. Just entrust them to the Lord and don't

try to do too much with them, all right? Because we can't do too much with them. We're relying upon the Lord to do with them what he will. Okay, I would say if you have good people with whom you can chat it through, okay family friends professional Perhaps even the person himself the one who offended you if you think that's possible at this stage Okay, it's worthwhile to talk it through because talking helps And if you can't approach the person who wounded you or hurt you, okay because talking helps. And if you can't approach the person who wounded you or hurt you, okay, maybe not today, but maybe tomorrow, ask for the grace, the eyes to see, okay, the heart to receive that opportunity and in turn to seize upon it as the Lord would have you do. Next thing I would say is nip ideation in the bud. Sometimes you'll find yourself ideating

about revenge or about vindication or about what you'll say next time or how the person will be proved wrong in the public square and about how everyone will rally to your side and how nobody will, you know, be on the side of the person who, no, that's just not, that's not healthy. All right, so you got a nip ideation in the bud, which is to say when you find yourself tending in that direction, chasing that thought, discipline that thought, okay? And I would say another thing in that instance is to cover yourself in the Lord's most precious blood because unforgiveness is a place in which demons lodge, okay? The diabolical or the demonic influence over unforgiveness

and resentment is significant. Okay, so we need to heal from sin and vice, specifically the sin of unforgiveness, which can become a sin in its own. All right, we need to heal from sin and vice and in the healing gets dislodged this diabolical demonic influence. So we should be conscious of it that our fight is not just with flesh and blood. It's with powers and principalities and call the precious

Blood of our Lord Jesus down upon us Lord Jesus Christ I cover myself in your most precious blood and I bind and send at the foot of the cross the spirit of unforgiveness That you might do with it there what you will Lord Jesus Christ I cover myself in your most precious blood and I bind and send at the foot of the cross the spirit of unforgiveness that you May do with it there what you will Last couple things is simply to say sometimes we're just gonna have to wait on the Lord we're gonna have to suffer God's timing because this timing is good and because we have to trust that he is growing us okay that he's maturing us that he is ultimately like purifying

cleansing and healing us unto a higher state a higher love a higher perfection because he wants intimacy with us a sublime and perfect intimacy and he's using this unforgiveness or he's using the sin which was visited upon us as a means whereby, not in that he will the sin, God doesn't will sin, but in that he permitted it to happen because he knows he can draw good even out of that to make of your life, your story, something more dramatic and even more textured. So we don't want to be flipping about that type of explanation, but we have to admit its possibility.

Okay? And I would say also, we can pray for the pertinent virtues, the virtues of love, you know, charity, the virtues of mercy, virtue of clemency, the virtue of meekness, so clemency moderates punishment, meekness moderates virtue. Those are all things for which we can pray and we can read about them. And I mean, our Lord identifies himself as one who is meek and humble of heart. So if we're going to have conformity with him and, you know, like identity with him, it's going to be by that.

And what we'll find is that the Lord kind of will give his breakthroughs or give his advances, his progress in his good time and by his good providence. But we can trust it, you know, because it's real, because it's really real. Okay. So that's what I intended to say about forgiveness. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell and get other email updates when things come out.

Also check out God's Plaining. We've actually had episodes about forgiveness, which I found to be helpful. So you too might profit from the same. As it concerns God's Plaining in particular, we've got a young adult retreat coming up in Malvern, Pennsylvania, November 3rd through 5th. So you'll find information about that at godsplaining.org. Hope to see you there. It's for everybody 21 through 33. And then lastly, we have the Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage coming up on September 30th. And that's in Washington, DC at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. You can

find out details about that at rosarypilgrimage.org. I'll be giving a couple talks. We'll have adoration, confessions, lunch break, fervorino by Father Lawrence Liu, and then a vigil mass, recitation of the rosary, all kinds of cool things. So hope to see you there, to meet you there, to pray with you there. Boom, know of my prayers for you, please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time

on Pines with Aquinas.