Forgiveness..."Upholding innocence"

Forgiveness is a word that some ignore, others try and fail, and others do with such grace it is breathtaking.  I will never forget when the gunman went into the Amish School and gunned down several children.  It wasn’t the evil I’ll magnify in my thoughts and remember.  It was the forgiveness!  The Amish people expressed so much forgiveness and compassion.  Right in the midst of their devastating loss they forgave the shooter and expressed loving kindness towards the man’s mother.  It wasn’t months after the incident, it was practically hours afterwards that they began this process of forgiving. 

When looking up the word “Forgive” there are a lot of definitions such as…‘excuse, condone, pardon…’ These definitions are so lacking and inadequate when it comes to most acts of forgiveness in the simplest forms much less for acts of heinous proportions! How could anyone follow the Master Christian in his command for us all to forgive ‘seventy times seven’¹ when something occurs so large? It may be too hard to contemplate. But then a perfect definition of ‘Forgive’ comes across to us. The definition that states, “to uphold innocence.”

We can do this!  How?  By understanding and seeing Man as God’s child, His Idea—perfect, complete, whole, beloved, loving, free, GOOD—the manifestation and likeness of God’s Selfhood.  Then we realize that we can uphold man’s true innocence as God’s perfect Idea.  This solid foundation of who and what Man really is, the true existence as a child of God, places us where we can take a firm stand and ‘uphold all of man’s true innocence’, including our own.  

Forgiveness isn’t a mortal option but a spiritual activity. The only way we can truly forgive is to lift our views about man from the failing, evil, horrible to the divine, pure, spiritual idea of God.  What God knows about His creation lifts our view from the debase pictures of awful humanity to the glory of God’s creation.  This higher view lifts consciousness and activity. 

Forgiveness is an individual and collective thought and activity.  Jesus couldn’t have healed and brought humanity higher from a low view of mankind. It would have been impossible.  Christ Jesus had to view man from the standpoint of perfection, goodness, God’s beloved.

We too can view man from this standpoint and love enough to forgive, ‘uphold innocence’, and to view each other from a higher caliber of thought, as God’s image and likeness.  We can take each of these challenges to forgive as a spiritual activity instead of a mortal duty.  We can see that by forgiving in this way we are following the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Wouldn’t we want to have others forgive – uphold our innocence – instead of holding a grudge or thinking of us as less than we are, God’s perfect idea?

“Jesus was compassionate, true, faithful to rebuke, ready to forgive. He said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."  "Love one another, as I have loved you." No estrangement, no emulation, no deceit, enters into the heart that loves as Jesus loved.”²

We must see that our duty to ourselves and others is to forgive and leave the punishments and judgments up to God’s highest purpose and thought.  All are corrected by God and His perfect ways of Love.  We need not suffer nor suffer others in our self-beliefs of wrongs.  We are responsible to forgive and can do it gladly and obediently.  We can do this through love for God and His idea Man. 

We can and must forgive.  We might as well start right now and go forward blessing others by forgiving them so that we too may be forgiven. After all, our Lord’s Prayer and instruction contains within it these dutiful and promising words, “And forgive us our debts, AS we forgive our debtors…for if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:”³

Gentle hug


1 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 18 vs. 22
2 Message to the Mother Church, 1902 by Mary Baker Eddy pg 18 lines 12-18
3 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 6 vs. 12, 14