As Far As The East Is From The West

She says the sentence often enough that she has stopped hearing it.

I know God has forgiven me. I just cannot forgive myself.

She has said it to three people and each of them has said something warm and useless in reply, and she has nodded, and nothing has moved, and it has been two years.

And here is what nobody has done, and what she has never done either: nobody has asked her what she means by it.

Because when she sits with it, honestly, it is very strange. What would forgiving herself involve. She has no idea. It is not an action she could perform and she cannot describe what would be different afterwards. It seems to mean something like: reaching a state where thinking about it does not hurt.

Which is not forgiveness at all. That is anaesthesia, and it is a completely different thing, and it is not on offer to anybody.

But she has organized two years around waiting for it, and treats every day that it does not arrive as evidence that something is still wrong with her.

There is a photograph on the shelf from before it happened and she does not look at it directly.

You may have your own sentence. Something you have said so many times that you no longer hear it, that nobody has ever asked you to define, and that you have been waiting for two years to complete itself.

The distance God chose

Here is a verse about distance, and the measurement is chosen very deliberately.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

East from west.

He could have said north from south, and that is the thing to notice. North and south are measurable: there is a north pole and a south pole and the distance between them is a number. Travel north far enough and you begin traveling south.

East and west never meet. You can go east forever and never once begin going west. It is the one direction in the world with no meeting point, and that is the distance the psalm picks.

So the removal is not far. It is unmeasurable by construction.

You are separated from what you did by a distance that has no number in it. Psalm 103:12 chooses the one axis with no meeting point, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman stand inside a measurement she cannot get her mind around.

Now let me ask you the question nobody has asked, and take your time with it.

What would forgiving yourself actually consist of?

You have already half answered it: it would be a state in which remembering does not hurt. And you noticed yourself, in the honest hour, that this is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a feeling about a memory. It is a decision about an account: that it will not be brought up, that no more will be required, that the matter is closed.

That decision has been made. It was made by the only party with the standing to make it.

So the thing you are waiting for is not a second forgiveness from a second authority. It is the absence of pain, which is not the same, which nobody is promised, and which you have quietly been treating as the evidence.

You are not the one who keeps this account, and you never held that office. The written word removes the transgressions on an axis with no meeting point, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to countersign a decision that was already final.

The honest half. Remembering it may always hurt a little. I am not going to promise you the feeling goes, and anybody who does is selling you anaesthesia and calling it grace.

And I am not going to tell you God arranged it for your development.

There is a part only you can do and it is one sentence, and it is a resignation rather than an achievement. You say that you are not the one who keeps the account. And then you stop, without waiting to see whether anything feels different.