Forgiveness

FORGIVENESS 

Beverly Virues 

“Let us forgive each other - only then will we live in peace”
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

         For a long time I was carrying all this weight around. Anger, pain, and remorse were all large rocks heaped up on my back. To forgive another is a difficult thing, to forgive a friend perhaps more so. It is fall 2001 and I am sitting in my math class, on yet another unremarkable day. The class is rowdy; the teacher took a day off so there is a substitute taking attendance. There is no work to do and we are all bored and talking when the door opens. We all turn to see who it is, and find that it is an unfamiliar face.

         We were the best of friends, Claudia and I. We did everything together, since the day we first met in math. We kept no secrets from one another and spent most of our free time hanging out or on the phone. When the eighth grade dance came, we shopped for dresses, shoes and accessories together; it was as big a deal as prom.

         We started high school and she seemed to change a bit over the summer. We had little contact since she had been out of town for a good portion of the summer, so I thought it was natural. By the end of our freshman year, we were still close but not like before.  It was in this way we began our second year in high school. By Christmas we barely spoke to each other.

         By the end of that school year, she was spreading lies and rumors about me, many of which were private and I had only shared with her. My other friends said to ignore her, that if I did she would eventually stop. She did not and soon she was telling everyone things I had confided in her over the past few years.

         She told everyone about the boy I went to the dance with. He wasn’t the one I wanted to go with, but he was the one that asked, so I said yes. I told her about this. I told her whom I wished would have asked and then she told everyone. The boy found out; I felt so bad for him. He was so nice and a good friend of mine, I would never want him to get hurt. He wouldn’t talk to me or even so much as look at me in the hall or at lunch, it made me feel awful. He was humiliated, and I know people taunted him for what she had said. She not only hurt me but my friends as well. I started wishing I had never told her anything; I wish I had kept more to myself and now I felt guilty for what the poor boy was going through.

         I felt hurt and betrayed. My secrets were no longer secrets and some people ridiculed me for them. In the end, we both got hurt and never spoke to each other. She transferred to another school at the end of the year for a magnet program and I stayed where I was. She had hurt me, I had trusted in her and she betrayed me. I was lying to myself, every time I said, “I don’t care anymore.” I did care, I was still, hurt, she had been my closest friend for several years and she betrayed me quite easily.

For the next month or so after she transferred, all my friends made a point to talk bad about her and I would join in. I thought I was free of her, now that she had transferred, but it took me a while to figure out I was not.

That summer, every time someone mentioned her name, I would begin to talk bad about her. I think it is because I felt hurt and wanted in some way to get back at her for what she had done. It was during one of these times that I realized, that we were still connected. I was tethered to her through my anger and my pain. I realized that the only way to really free myself is to forgive her. I will not say it was easy, because it wasn’t it was hard. I think it is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. A friend is someone you trust and share secrets to, their betrayal or their actions will usually hurt someone more than an enemy could.

         But I did at one point. At one point I was able to think of her and not feel anger towards her. I was able to mention her name without the need to say something negative about her. Before I was able to do those things I had been feeling bogged down, but now I finally felt free; I had thrown away the heavy rocks I had been carrying around.

         I believe forgiveness sets you free. Until you forgive you are tied to that other person. You will feel weighed down by these feelings and until you forgive you will not be free of them. I know forgiving is not easy, especially forgiving a friend, but it is necessary in order to set you free from your own rocks and from the person who hurt you. As Lewis Smede once said “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”