"When I forgive, it is still the me that is at the center"

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From THE COMPASSION OF THE FATHER by Boris Bobrinskoy

When we hear the words of the priest at the eucharistic liturgy, "Let us lift up our hearts" and the response of the choir, "We lift them up unto the Lord," what happens at that moment? What does it mean "to lift up one's heart to God"? ...[W]hether we like it or not, our heart is a universe. Our heart is wider than the world because it contains it; it knows that the world does not know this mystery it carries within. When are hearts are filled with everything that makes up our existence, our joys, our sorrows, all our loves, all our hatred and sufferings, what can we do? We are not able to tear all this from our hearts. Thus, we can only lift up our hearts to God. Just as we expose the sick part of our body to radiation that can heal it, so do we lift up our sick hearts and ask the Lord to penetrate them; we ask Him to enter into our sick and beseeching hearts with all His power, His grace, His love, with all the presence, the light and the fire of the Spirit to consume what must be, to transform and recreate what must remain for the kingdom.

St. Paul says it well: "The wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God." The very fact of lifting up our hearts implies necessarily a purification, a cauterization, a healing. If we have hatred, it is burned gradually, consumed. It melts like snow in the sun. All the barriers we have created and put up against one another dwindle gradually and disappear.

Thus, when we lift up our hearts, we lift up our joys and our hatreds, our friends and our enemies. Lifting up one's heart is a true baptism of the heart--a baptism in which the heart will die again and rise with everything it contains...

One last point seems important to me. Very often, when I reflect on the manner of forgiving, I discover that when I forgive, I view myself to be at the center of things; it is I who forgive, for it is me who has been wounded. When I forgive, it is always the me that is praised...[But] I am indebted for each moment, every instant of my life where I turn away from God, where I let darkness or hatred enter in me. I am infinitely indebted toward all people; each time I impede the action of the Holy Spirit who works for my sanctification, I introduce a little or much darkness into the entire world. As indebted to all people, would not my real resolution be to ask forgiveness, even before offering forgiveness?...When I forgive, it is still the me that is at the center. Conversely, when I ask for forgiveness, I break this proud me; the forgiveness of the neighbor, or of the one whose neighbor I am, becomes necessary.

The mystery of repentance is the first work of the Holy Spirit, which is to bring us to recognize ourselves as sinners, aliens, and orphans. "Give your blood and receive the Spirit," a patristic adage states. The Spirit descends on the world in tongues of fire, in dew of living water to quench the thirsty, in healing the wounds of sin, in leading the lost sheep to the house of the Father, when I discover myself--and me alone--as a sinner and guilty (1 Tim 1:15). I ask forgiveness from all and each, but above all from God who alone can forgive... (Mk 2:7).

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