Matthew 18:32-33. "Then his lord summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?'"

This parable of the servant who has his massive debt forgiven by his master, but then refuses to forgive his fellow servant's much lesser debt, is so on point for today! Today's Gospel was Matthew 6:7-15 in which Jesus teaches us the Lord's Prayer, stressing at the end "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

I have been struggling a lot with forgiveness over the last few years. I want to forgive, and I think that I have, but then I still feel hurt, and I feel tense and anxious around those who have hurt me, causing me to avoid them. This makes me wonder if I have really forgiven them. But I am learning that forgiveness does not mean I have to reestablish the same relationships with the people who have hurt me. That might happen, eventually, if they ever realize what they've done, but for now they don't, and so there is every chance that their hurtful behavior will continue, which is why I feel tense around them. I am allowed to protect myself, and my own feelings, even while still forgiving them.

What forgiveness does mean is letting go of any feelings of animosity or resentment I have towards them and praying for their well-being. It means that if God was the D.A. and asked me if I wanted to press charges, I would say no. It means seeing Jesus in them always, and realizing that He is hanging on the Cross in their place, just as He is in mine.

A priest friend of mine recommended a forgiveness exercise which I have found very helpful. He said to get a piece of paper and write at the top "Lord Jesus Christ, in your name, I forgive (the name of the person) for:" and then to sit quietly, looking inside myself, and write down everything I can think of - every way the person has hurt me, from the biggest to the smallest. It is OK if this list takes more than one sitting to complete, in fact it may take a long time. When I did this, I was surprised at how cathartic and instructive writing these things down was. Seeing the words on paper felt like being "seen" and thus having my pain validated, even though I was the one who wrote them down, because I was being seen, by Jesus, to whom I was offering my forgiveness. I was actually giving the pain of these offenses to Jesus by offering forgiveness in His name. I was expelling any resentment from myself and laying it at the foot of His Cross. And while there at the foot of the Cross, I saw an awful lot of my own sins in the same place, begging for His forgiveness. The instructive part of this process was that the list I wrote contained a lot of things I myself had done.

Ultimately, all of our sins are forgiven by God since He is really the one we offend by them. If I have brought my own sins to Him and asked Him for forgiveness, I also must let go of those of others to which I might be clinging. If I hold on to them, it does not mean that God will not forgive them, it just means that I will still suffer under their weight. But if I lay their sins that have hurt me on top of my own sins, and ask God to forgive us all, then I am doing what Jesus asked - I am forgiving others as I ask God to forgive me. Then I am truly free. The wicked servant ended up in prison for not forgiving his fellow servant. He lost his freedom by clinging to another's debt. This is what we do when we fail to forgive.