Failing to Forgive Yourself May Be Holding You Back from the Freedom God Has for You!

 Failing to Forgive Yourself May Be Holding You Back from the Freedom God Has for You!

I saw this young man out of the corner of my eye while I was meeting and greeting people and signing books after a recent speaking event. I could tell he was waiting till the end of the line in order to speak with me. It had been a long night, but I could tell he had something heavy on his heart and needed to talk, so I was happy to offer him a little time.

“How do I forgive myself?” he asked me. “I’ve done a lotta bad stuff. I’ve been to Confession. I believe God forgives me. But I just can’t forgive myself.” I can relate. In fact, this young man reminded me a lot of myself.

“To forgive myself is to admit way down inside that my lifelong project of self-reliance has been utterly futile”.Christopher West

Why do we often find forgiving ourselves even more difficult than forgiving others? I know it’s necessary to forgive myself for the ways I screw up, break faith with God, hurt myself, and wound others – but something in me resists. For some odd reason, I often prefer to condemn myself rather than forgive myself. Like Javert from Les Miserables, something in me prefers cold justice to mercy, even if it means inflicting it on myself.

My confessor has pointed out to me that I like to think this is a virtue, when in fact it is pure vice. He’s helped me realize that self-condemnation is one of the twin towers of sin in my life. The other is self-reliance. In this regard, I’m a practical atheist. I confess belief in God (and that I’m not he), but, practically speaking, part of me likes to think I don’t need him. I like to think I’m in control of my own life and my own salvation. So I rely on myself to “get it right” and then, when I inevitably fail, I beat myself up for the fact that my self-reliance wasn’t, in fact, reliable.

That, I think, is what really bugs me about forgiving myself: to forgive myself is to admit way down inside that my lifelong project of self-reliance has been utterly futile. And part of me doesn’t want to throw in the towel. Even if my self-judgment is harsher than God’s, part of me prefers to judge myself because it’s still my judgment, and that keeps me in control; that keeps me as the god of my own life. It seems that somewhere inside I want to reserve the ability to condemn myself because logically it’s the flip side of another ability I want to reserve: the ability to save myself. It’s called P-R-I-D-E.

“In the Gospel the very root of sin,” observes theologian Olivier Clement, “is the pretense that we can save ourselves by our own effort.” We have leaned so heavily on our own supposed ability to “please God” that, for “a moment we must lose our balance, must see in a flash of clarity … the ripping apart of our protective covering of happiness or moral virtue.” If we allow ourselves to be stripped in this way, it will draw out of us “a cry of trust and love de profundis, from the depths of the heart.” And from the depths of our heart, we’ll be able to forgive ourselves for wishing we didn’t need God.
Lord, forgive me for not forgiving myself. Teach me to love, understand, and forgive myself so that I can do the same for others.

By Christopher West