Jessica Dore on forgiveness

Jessica Dore

Refusing the need to reconcile what is too late to change or take back, forgiveness makes way for “the only possible future” that can come of it. And though it’s often taken up with some amount of hesitation, forgiveness always entails “a stance of openness toward the future,” from which a “refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be.”

In accepting “that what has been lost cannot be restored,” forgiveness “aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong.”

Theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts has called forgiveness more akin to “mourning than miracle.¹” Forgiveness is not about feelings. But if it were, it might be more closely related to lament than relief.