Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Why Not "Forgive"?

• Dear Dell: Your Divorce Recovery Workshop fails to mention forgiveness in the curriculum you outline.

As the pastor of a 700-member church (most happily married, never divorced), I have conducted an exhaustive investigation of divorce information toward the end of placing our own educational forum here to address divorce in my congregation.

Why is the importance of forgiveness after divorce not clear to you?

• Dear Pastor: I don't believe that I'm unclear about forgiveness.

Nor did I "fail" to include it. It's never been a part of my basic divorce programming. This is by design.

First off, among the some 500+ individuals I've helped professionally, I've seen a lot of folks who aren't ready for the concept at this point. I don't prematurely highlight "dating" here for the same reason.

Second, as you may have read in Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, Volume 39 (2003), "Interpersonal forgiveness can be defined as an unjustly hurt person's act of giving up resentment toward an offender while fostering the undeserved qualities of beneficence and compassion toward that offender...."

A lot of people are tempted by this view of forgiveness.

But it undermines the work we all must do in looking at our own roles in the breakdown of marriages in which we were (or should have been) intimate partners.

At this stage of divorce recovery, any emblem of "forgiver" vis-à-vis a spouse labeled "offender" risks beating plowshares into swords — if you can forgive my misquote of Isaiah 2:4 here, Pastor.

—posted by Dell Deaton @11:34 PM EST 3/9/2005 [250]

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