Seventy Times Seven

A rambling reflection on wrestling with forgiveness.

Photo by Bailey Burton on Unsplash

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Matthew‬ ‭18‬:‭21‬-‭22‬ ‭

I’m beginning to wonder if this conversation between Peter and Jesus was about forgiving seventy-seven separate offenses (some versions say “seventy times seven”) or having to forgive the same offense that many times, because you can’t let it go.

Sometimes, the hurt is like a boomerang. You keep trying to hurl it away from you, but it keeps flying back at you and smacking you in the head.

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The Desert

I’m not holding a grudge about what happened to me in the church. I’m trying to let it go. I learned the hard way that feelings must be felt to be resolved. It is a cycle: feel-release-forgive, feel-release-forgive. Each time the hurt returns, I feel it, and I find a way to release and forgive again. But forgiveness doesn’t restore trust, guarantee reconciliation, or repair the damage. The pain returns repeatedly, reclaiming its torturous rent-free residence in my psyche and demanding to be felt, and then evicted, again and again.

Forgiveness is often equated with healing, especially in Christian circles. As a young adult seeking guidance on following Jesus, I was taught that healing would naturally result from forgiveness, and that forgiveness must be an immediate decision. I admit I am wrestling with this now, and I could be wrong, but I think they got it backwards. You can decide to forgive, but that decision is not truly fulfilled until healing is fully embodied and your heart is resolved. How can we truly forgive from the heart, if our hearts are burdened with unresolved pain we still carry in our bodies?

When the church made forgiveness a requirement for baptism, and baptism a requirement for salvation, there was no space allowed for processing the pain of my childhood. For being seen and heard by a compassionate witness. For questioning and lamenting and wrestling and screaming. Just suck it up and move on. And, of course, they rushed and pressured me through those pre-baptism Bible studies for the sake of their baptism stats (if you know, you know). There was no acknowledgement of the necessary middle ground between injury and repair. No desert to traverse between Egypt and the Promised Land.

But you can’t skip the desert. You can’t sweep all of that sand under the rug, because it’s voluminous and lumpy, and you’ll keep tripping over it. Spiritual bypassing is hazardous to your health.

I’m nearly 60 years old, and until a few years ago, I never had the opportunity to truly heal from my childhood of abuse and emotional neglect. You can’t heal what you don’t let yourself feel, and I wasn’t allowed to feel it. I had to paste on a smile, force myself to “forgive,” and convince myself I was ok, not realizing that forced forgiveness isn’t really forgiveness at all. It’s not self denial; it’s self betrayal. It doesn’t bring healing; it circumvents it. It sets you up to trip over those lumps under the rug time and time again, scrambling quickly to your feet each time so that you don’t incur the wrath of God or the rebuke of judgmental Christian onlookers who don’t know your story and don’t care to understand. Eventually, you get so good at sidestepping those lumps of sand, you forget they’re even there.

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Joseph and His Brothers

When talking about forgiveness, Christians often point to Joseph, the son of Jacob who forgave his brothers for plotting to kill him and then selling him into slavery instead. That’s a serious betrayal, for sure, and his willingness to forgive is admirable. But people speak of it as though his decision to forgive was made in an instant. They very quickly jump to Genesis 50:19-22, where he says, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” But I don’t hear many people considering the internal experiences that brought Joseph to that moment. They don’t contemplate the desert between betrayal and pardon.

But I have contemplated it. A lot. The Bible says God was with Joseph, and that Potiphar trusted him and was pleased with his service, at least until he was falsely accused of impropriety. But it’s not uncommon for people of good character to work diligently even while wrestling with or harboring negative feelings they keep to themselves. How many of us have worked diligently at a job we secretly hated? I wonder how Joseph felt about being enslaved, about being falsely accused, and about being forgotten in prison, all because he was despised and betrayed by his own flesh and blood. What was he thinking and feeling about the great dreams he once had for his life? Thirteen years passed between the time he was forcibly carried off to a foreign land and the time he was put in charge of it. At least two of those years were spent in prison, although it could have conceivably been longer than that. For the rest of that time, he was enslaved. After his release from prison, there were seven years of prosperity in Egypt before the famine started. They were two years into that famine when Joseph revealed his identity to his brothers. (Gen. 45:6).

My point is, Joseph had over 20 years to be angry, to lament and feel all of the emotions of betrayal, to wrestle with bitterness, to cry out to God. We don’t know what he endured psychologically or emotionally, because the Bible does not describe that. But he was just as human as you and me. Humans experience pain when they are stabbed in the back. Like many of us, he may have had to forgive several times before he finally wrestled his way to some sort of internal peace. Seventy times seven, or maybe more. When he woke up every morning in a reality that he did not choose, did he have to struggle to forgive all over again? Though God also granted him favor with the prison warden, if Joseph never pierced the darkness of his cell with his anguished cries, I wonder if his story is just a myth. I wonder if the Lord‘s favor would have been with Joseph like it was, had he been dishonest with God and himself about his pain. I wonder how complete his forgiveness really was when his brothers came to Egypt seeking assistance, since he then put them through a series of harrowing tests, eventually causing them to feel remorse and fear of the consequences of what they had done to him.

Why do people assume resolved forgiveness was a simple matter for Joseph? Why do they flippantly point to his eventual pardon as an example for others to follow, without honoring their need for time and space to wrestle with and work through their own pain and grief? A childhood of abuse can take a lifetime to heal. Why do they expect survivors to have an instant internal change of heart, just because they point to a narrative that only describes the external parts of the story? And why do they skim over the fact that Joseph essentially punished his brothers and made them prove themselves before he forgave them? If his healing wasn’t fully embodied by the time he uttered those words of forgiveness, I have my doubts about how genuine or healthy that forgiveness was. I don’t think this conclusion is too far fetched when you consider that Joseph’s proclamation of forgiveness ultimately led not to freedom, but to all of Israel eventually meeting the same fate he had: enslavement in Egypt.

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My Dilemma

Because forgiveness was presented to me as a simple matter of making an instant decision, I attempted to shut out the unresolved emotions that tried to well up inside of me. I was taught to ignore them, not how to release them, so they stayed buried. Things that are buried don’t just go away. Often, they grow roots. Denying my reality became a subconscious habit that continued for nearly thirty years, at great cost to my mental and physical wellbeing. When it finally all became too much and I could no longer contain it, I admit it wasn’t pretty. But I don’t believe I deserved to be shut out by people in the church that had previously demanded my allegiance. Those individuals weren’t the same ones who had twisted my arm to deny my reality; that had happened 20-30 years ago. But they were my current church “family” (in the same church system) when life events uprooted all of that buried pain. When I desperately sought their support, I found rejection instead. And of course I didn’t handle that well, either. I’m only human, and I was a hurting one, at that. I needed understanding, not judgment. In the end, I walked away. I could not bear the ironic unfairness of having denied my own healing, and then being punished for it by members of the same entity that had demanded I deny it in the first place.

So, in addition to healing from what happened in my family of origin, I have had to heal from what happened in the church where I had sought healing. I guess my problem is that I have trouble believing that forgiveness can be complete unless it’s felt as a result of embodied healing. Each time the boomerang of pain returns, I feel its impact throughout my nervous system, and the cycle begins again: feel-release-forgive. And honestly, it’s been harder than healing from the abuse of my childhood. Maybe it’s because it’s a fresher wound. Or maybe it’s because of broken trust.

As a child, I knew I was hated. My mother made it abundantly clear. It’s hard to misinterpret physical abuse and screams of, “I hate you! I wish you had never been born! You’re worthless! You ruin everything!” A child’s self image is shaped through the mirror held up by the adults in her life. Her developing brain forms around that image, no matter how warped it may be. There was no escape; I had no choice but to submit to abuse and internalize her words as true.

But as an adult, I let myself believe I was loved. I willingly chose to trust people who said, “We love you. This church is your family. You are part of God‘s household now.” It’s easier to heal from honest hate than from smiling deception and surprise rejection. I had trusted them with some of my deepest pain. After realizing that trust was misplaced, it’s hard to let go and choose to trust anyone again, including myself and my own discernment about who is trustworthy. It’s what keeps me at home on Sunday mornings now, not feeling safe enough to start over in a new church.

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“Forgive and Forget” - Is That Even Possible?

I’m not unforgiving - quite the opposite. I have had to forgive the same betrayal, repeatedly. I know how to forgive. I’ve done it at least seventy-seven times. Probably even seventy times seven.

But resolved, embodied healing that allows the offense to be forgotten and brings permanent forgiveness? That’s harder. My nervous system can’t forget. The boomerang keeps rebounding, reminding me not to let my guard down too much. Several months ago, I wrote a poem about the myth of “forgive and forget,” so I will close with it here.

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Don't Forget

Some words go together, 
so it would seem, 
like soap and water, 
or coffee and cream.

Law and order, 
cause and effect, 
bread and butter, 
but not forgive and forget. 

Forgive and forget 
is a phrase people use 
to bypass the pain 
of another’s abuse. 

Forgiveness may come, 
but forgetting, not so.
The memory remains 
like etching on stone. 

Though perhaps deeply buried, 
it remains to defend, 
for forgiveness can’t promise 
it won’t happen again.

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