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Today, we find it hard to believe in grace and the gift of life – the gift of forgiveness. We are more and more convinced that we can make everything happen including forgiveness – a new metaphor permeates our day to day lives.
Rather than our lives growing and developing naturally we are convinced we can “make” them. We talk about ‘making time’, ‘making friends’, ‘making meaning’, ‘making money’, ‘making a living’, ‘making love’, even ‘making babies’, we can make it all better.
Eda Gorres in her book, ‘The Hidden Face’, suggests something different – that forgiveness is “in large part, a gift and the result of grace and we who are advancing in age, need to be aware that, ‘Grace goes further in youth as it meets less opposition’. Old men and women are in soul as stiff, as lean, as bloodless as their bodies, except so far as grace penetrates and softens them. And it requires a flooding of grace to do this.
What is required of us is a gesture, an opening to this flooding of grace and that gesture could be to confess our failures to another and ask forgiveness – we all need to confess according to Dostoyevsky. It is a human need.