Welcome to the final week of our message series, “Baggage.” This is a good series to start the year off with because at the beginning of a new year we want to start fresh, but if we don’t deal with the past, if we are holding onto a bunch of baggage from other seasons of life then it is very difficult to move forward. However, we can go further faster if we are willing to deal with the baggage of the past. Dealing effectively with the past often comes down to forgiveness. It is canceling a debt that someone owes us, or perhaps we owe ourselves.

In the first week of this series I asked you to think of one person who owes you a debt, and then to evaluate what stage were you at in forgiving them. The first stage is denial; we either try to pretend that the person does not owe us a debt by making excuses for them, or we refuse to forgive and hold on to our anger and hurt. The second stage is recognizing the need to forgive the person, but you have not done it yet perhaps because you are not sure how to. The third stage is to actually forgive the person.

Two weeks ago, for the Baptism of the Lord, I mentioned that forgiveness is not natural, rather it is supernatural. I reflected on how we are all born with baggage, which the Church calls Original Sin. So we are all born in need of forgiveness to restore us to the life of sanctifying grace. This is done through our baptism, which cleanses us from Original Sin, and any personal sin we might have.

Last weekend the deacons took this need for each of us to receive forgiveness a bit further. While Original Sin is forgiven through baptism, it still leaves us weakened. We can have a disordering of our desires, a dimming of our intellect and a weakening of our will which can result in our not obeying God. In other words we sin. Yet we should not despair; for God so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the debt for all of our sins. Through Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection we are forgiven, and that is the best news.

Now that we have been forgiven, it is our turn to do the forgiving. We were created to live in a world of total love and support, but as we all know, the world is not perfect. We can’t go through life without getting beaten up and hurt by others. Sometimes it was intentionally and with malice and sometimes unintentionally. It is how we choose to deal with that hurt that is important.

In today’s second reading, St. Paul is writing to the Christians in Corinth to encourage them to forgive; “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and in the same purpose” (1 Cor. 1:10). The source of the hurt and pain in that early Christian community is one that all of us have probably experienced: rivalries.

A few years ago I attended a parish mission where the priest told a remarkable story. He mentioned that when he was a young priest he was assigned to a parish in southern Illinois. It was there that he met “Alice,” one of your typical church ladies: about 70 years old, always at daily Mass, helped clean the church, just a real nice lady.

One ministry that this priest had was being the chaplain at the local public university. Each month he would take a group of students to the federal prison that was nearby. This prison had a minimum security side, where he took the students to visit the prisoners, and it house a maximum security side which housed some of the most violent criminals in the US. 

Each month, Alice would bring the priest a package, and asked him to give it to one of the guards, for it was for a prisoner in the maximum security side. After doing this for a few months, the priest just could not imagine who Alice would know in the maximum security prison, so he asked her. Alice said, “the man who raped and murdered my daughter.” Father had to hear this story, so he and Alice went for coffee.

She told him that about 30 years ago, her daughter was an undergraduate at the university. At the time there was a series of coeds who were raped and murdered, and her daughter was one of the victims. The man was eventually caught, and he was convicted of all the crimes. Alice had lobbied hard for him to get the death penalty, but the federal death penalty had been recently repealed, so he received life without parole.

Alice told Father that for over 10 years she was so filled with angry, rage and hurt. She wanted this man dead. Her bitterness completely filled her life. It destroyed several of her friendships. She said it was only because her husband was a saint that he stayed with her. Her health was even effected.

Finally Alice knew that she could not continue living with such anger and hurt, but what could she do? Her husband told her that she needed to forgive the man. She thought the idea crazy. This man didn’t deserve forgiveness, but really do any of us? Yet Jesus forgave all our sins. The man had not expressed any remorse, had never apologized to the families, but forgiveness is not about the other person, it is about us.

Alice decided to write the man a letter. It was a long one. She expressed her anger and hurt, but she ended by saying that she thought that she needed to forgive him, so that she could move on, but she did not know how. A few weeks later she received a letter from the prisoner in which he said that he thought he needed to be forgiven.

What followed was a series of letters between Alice and the prisoner. She described the debt he owed her in detail: all the birthdays and Christmases he had taken from her. Seeing her daughter as a bride walking down the aisle, the grandchildren she never had. Finally Alice knew it was time to do it, to forgive him. Good Friday was coming, and she wrote a letter to the prisoner, again spelling out what he had taken from her and all the hurt he had caused, but she ended by saying, “As Jesus Christ has forgiven me all my sins, so now I forgive you. Your debt is paid in full.” Alice sent the letter to the prisoner, but on Good Friday she took a copy of the letter and laid at the foot of the cross.

Alice’s story outlines the steps of how to forgive someone. The first step is to name who you need to forgive and how they hurt you. Alice new this man’s name, and prison number. He had murdered her baby.

Second step, decide or name what has been taken from you. Banks know exactly how much you owe them on your mortgage or car loan. In order to really forgive or cancel the debt 

of the person who have hurt you, you need to name exactly what they owe you or what they have taken from you. Alice did all that: the missed birthdays, vacations, grandchildren. Forgiveness won’t be meaningful to you, it won’t be from your heart, if you don’t name the debt specifically.

Third, you cancel the debt. Do this in some way that is real and concrete. You talk to an empty chair. You write a note that you don’t’ send. You write down the offense and burn it or bury it. You say something along the lines of, “Because through Jesus’ death on the cross I have been forgiven, I am now forgiving you unconditionally. You owe me (name specifically) but now I am canceling the debt. You don’t owe me any more.”

Forgiveness is an act of the will. It can take a long time. After over 10 years of being in stage 1, denial of forgiveness, Alice finally made it to stage 2, acknowledging that she needed to forgive this man but not knowing how. It took her nearly a year of corresponding with him to finally get to stage 3, actually forgiving.

There is one more thing I should mention that forgiveness is not; it is not reconciliation. Reconciliation is establishing or re-establishing a relationship with the person who hurt you. This is a wonderful goal, but if the person has not changed, for example they are still the abusive ex- that you left, you might need to forgive them so that you can move on with your life, but you do not need to go back to an abusive person.

Alice’s story, however, did take that extra step. About 5 years after Alice forgave him, and she continued to write to him, the prisoner told Alice that being forgiven by her had led him to start to read the Bible and go visit the prison chaplain. He had decided that he wanted to become a Catholic, and he wondered if she would be his sponsor. It took some paperwork to get the OK from the warden, but at the Easter Mass in the prison, for the first time since seeing him at the trial, Alice saw the man who murdered her baby. And she put her hand on his shoulder as the priest poured water on his head, baptizing him in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was born again in Christ, a new creation. And Alice now had a son. 

Forgiveness is setting a prisoner free and discovering the prisoner was you.