not yet ready to forgive
Not Yet Ready to Forgive
Recently, while reading The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World by Desmond Tutu, this prayer about the struggle to forgive leapt off the page and it is too good not share. It is such an honest prayer, such an intimate and vulnerable prayer, that needs to be honored. It is simply called, “The Prayer Before the Prayer.”
I want to be willing to forgive but I dare not ask for the will to forgive.
In case you give it to me and I’m not yet ready.
I’m not yet ready for my heart to soften.
I’m not yet ready to be vulnerable again.
Not yet ready to see that there is humanity in my tormentor’s eyes or that the one who hurt me may also have cried.
I’m not yet ready for the journey.
I’m not yet interested in the path.
I am at the prayer before the prayer of forgiveness.
Grant me the will to want to forgive.
Grant it to me,
Not yet but soon.
Can I even form the words?
Forgive me?
Dare I even look?
Do I dare to see the hurt I have caused?
I can glimpse all the shattered pieces of that fragile thing.
That soul trying to rise on the broken wings of hope but only out of the corner of my eye.
I am afraid of it and if I am afraid to see how can I not be afraid to say forgive me?
Is there a place where we can meet?
You and me.
The place in the middle where we straddle the lines.
Where you are right and I am right too.
And both of us are wrong and wronged.
Can we meet there and look for the place where the path begins?
The path that ends when we forgive.
As the title of the book indicates, healing for ourselves and the world are inseparably linked. Archbishop Tutu knew well the awful pain and unspeakable betrayals and evil that our human bodies can inflict and absorb. He also learned the freedom of forgiveness. As he says elsewhere, “Without forgiveness, there’s no future.” This obviously echoes Jesus’ teaching on prayer from Matthew 6:12 “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Maybe we set out to forgive the other and discover that we are the one set free.
Who comes to mind as your “tormentor”? Is that person from your past or present or is it the dear soul that you see when you look in the mirror? Do you want to risk this prayer and the honesty of “not yet”, which indicates that there may be one day when “not yet” becomes a clumsy and awkward “now”? Who can safely hear the honesty of our struggle to see and to imagine what “the broken wings of hope” for the fragile soul could be?
Kurt Zuiderveen joined The Barnabas Center in 2008. Kurt earned his bachelor’s from Grand Valley State in Michigan and his master’s in counseling in 2004 from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He is married to April and they have three children.
Kurt divides his time between our main office in Charlotte and our office in Davidson.
