ANDREW LANG WAS A CELEBRATED Victorian Scottish man of letters who once published a very kind review of a book by a new young author. Not long afterward, this same young writer repaid him for his generous words with a bitter and insulting attack. Three years later, Lang was staying with his friend Robert Bridges, poet laureate of the United Kingdom. One day Bridges noticed that Lang was reading a book by the same young man who had so mercilessly excorticated him. Bridges said to Lang, “Why, that is another book by that young cub who behaved so shamelessly to you!” To his astonishment, Bridges discovered that Lang had totally forgotten the insult. Bridges said this of the incident, “To forgive was the sign of a great man, but to forget was sublime.” I’m not so sure … “Forgive and forget” goes the shopworn cliché, but forgiving and forgetting are not the same thing, and I’m not at all sure that forgetting is a loftier virtue than forgiving. In fact, when we forgive we sometimes need remember.
I recently watched as much as I could handle of a History Channel program on the 102 minutes between the moment the first tower of the World Trade Center was hit and the moment the second tower came down. The documentary was nothing but film footage shot in those 102 minutes. It was painful to watch, but I watched … in order not to forget.
Many a firehouse in New York City has a plaque with photos of firemen lost that day, usually inscribed with the words, “We will never forget.” We shouldn’t. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, was built for the primary purpose of not forgetting. A nation may forgive the past, but it dare not forget history. On a personal level, though we forgive, we should not necessarily forget. I can forgive a person I once trusted, someone who betrayed me, but at the same time I need to remember that I can’t trust them as I once did.
So how do you walk this existential tightrope — forgiving but not necessarily forgetting? The balance point is found in grasping that both forgiveness and remembering are best oriented to the future, not the past. As a pastor, I’ve so often sat with members of my congregation who’ve been deeply hurt by someone — a parent, a spouse, an ex, a child, a friend. Sometimes, even when the hurt is old, they’re still carrying it around like a fetid emotional albatross about the neck. Forgiveness, I try to remind them, is not so much a gift to the person who wronged them; it is more a gift themselves. To forgive is to choose not to carry the emotional weight into your future. Forgiveness liberates, opens the future. It may sometimes liberate those we forgive; more often, however, it liberates those who do the forgiving.
But ironically, remembering should also be oriented toward the future more than the past. We remember because memory teaches. We remember 9-11 not to hang on to the hot coal of anger, but so that we might chart as wise course as possible into our world’s fragile and dangerous future. Yad Vashem remembers the Holocaust not to keep bitterness alive, but so that the world might do everything possible to forestall such horror in the future.
I’d rephrase those words of Robert Bridges, “To forgive was the sign of a great man, but to forget was sublime.” I’d rather he’d said, “To forgive is the sign of a great man, but to remember without bitterness is sublime.”
MICHAEL LINDVALL is pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City.
