I’ve always been puzzled by Jesus’ response to being asked how many times we have to forgive someone. Seven times? No, says Jesus, “ seventy times seven.” WHAT? Four hundred and ninety times I have to let someone do the same thing to me, without remorse, without shame, and each time, knowing she’ll surely do it again, say, “Oh, OK, I forgive you?”

In recent years I’ve led several retreats about forgiveness. I’ve also been doing a lot of inner work, which leads inexorably to the need to forgive old hurts, long- held resentments, and my own ample failings. What I’ve been finding is that as I keep at this inner work, as I dig into deeper layers of myself, some old hurts and wrongs I’m quite sure I’ve already forgiven show up again, buried in those deeper layers, where they require a deeper letting go. Without this forgiveness there is no healing.

This truth came out in the first “forgiveness” retreat I led a few years ago. Someone mentioned that we seem to keep coming back to the same material of our lives as we grow, but at a different level of understanding. And we have to forgive the same incident, the same person, the same failure of a parent to love us, a teacher to teach us, a friend to be true, or ourselves for some irreparable wrong we know we have done and cannot ever undo. Suddenly forgiving “ seventy times seven” took on new meaning.

You see, I do not believe that continuing to forgive means we must allow someone to keep harming us. We can protect ourselves as best we can in the circumstances — by distance, separation, or not allowing the person the power he’s had over us, and by growing ourselves. We can know that the behavior will probably continue but keep ourselves from its harm. We can sometimes even continue to love.

And the forgiving? Perhaps we learn something about what causes another to hurt us, or that the harm may not be about us so much as about the other. We may even be able to realize compassion for the other. Most important, perhaps, we might see in ourselves a deeper layer of woundedness than we’ve dealt with previously, and begin to heal it.

For Christians Lent is a season of letting go. What do I need to let go of this season? Heavy winter clothes; hardness of snow crust; hardness of heart. Hangings-on to old hurts, old ways of seeing an incident or relationship, barriers against the reality that we are all one in what is called different things by people of different faiths, by Jesus the Kingdom of God. I think of it as the cosmos swimming in the great mystery at the heart of life.

The Rev. Karen Lewis Foley is a Unitarian Universalist spiritual director, retreat leader and writer, and member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick. She can be reached at revklfoley@comcast.net

Clergy column: Local clergy wishing to write should contact Lois Hart at lhart@gwi.net. Lay ministers as well as ordained clergy may contribute.

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