Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings with me and others on this subject. It seems to get deep fast if done correctly. If forgiveness is an automatic need jerk reaction for someone, a reflex because one "should do it" then it is in name only.
This is why I am set against the cheapening of something as powerful as forgiveness. Even if you look at the word itself. For (before/front) give (gift).
I was taught by a kind Christian lady who was my BFF's mom to forgive someone who had done something minor and wrong and was lying about it. It was this very same woman who taught me how Christian forgiveness works, in which you turn the other cheek, believe and give the benefit of the doubt, take the high road, etc. that allowed the pedo and his pedo adult daughter after prison to live with them and both abused their 4 children and also my sibling and I in their home and my home.
My point is that one can understand and practice forgiveness and in so doing give permission. The Bible said the opposite, I believe, that we should not simply forgive so that evil may abound. That is what she did.
Her children hold anger and resentment toward their parents for their naive and forgiving natures. They forgave the pedoes so entirely that they opened up their home and left them alone with their preverbal children.
You may say this is not normal, but I say that it is an exaggeration of the everyday forgiveness that is culturally endowed as fact by religious authority and tradition.
If forgiveness is to have any meaning in my life, to me, it has to purify itself as something real and something that is an agent of good consequence not bad.
