Seeing and Self-gaze in Forgiveness

A friend spoke up in Relief Society yesterday during a lesson about forgiveness and said something I almost agreed with. She pointed out that forgiveness is really between a person and God, and is largely irrelevant to the perpetrator of the offense. I think I agree, in that forgiving becomes for us largely a selfish act. We forgive others so that we feel better ourselves. But because it's selfish, we categorize so many things in our lives as "unforgivable" and then ameliorate that down to "unforgettable" and sever our relationships because we're protecting ourselves.

In some specific cases, I absolutely believe severance to be the best course: I see no reason to maintain dating relationships with someone who has crossed boundaries of any kind, because dating relationships specifically are contingent on very personal kinds of approval. And no sane human would consider remaining friends with a rapist, abuser, or thief after being victimized by that person.

But to say that all friendships are irrelevant, and that only our relationship with God matters might be too much of a stretch. I think, post-Romantically, we value individuality far too much. What about the shoulders of giants? What about the giant who lives next door? My success at anything is heavily based on the amenability of my roommates and housemates, but I value them not because they stay out of my way when I'm working (thankfully, they don't), but because people matter more. Always. You don't have to pray to saints to understand that their ripples have reached all the way to you.

No monetary "bottom line," no perfectly centered justice, no win or loss matters more than any single person. The end of that logic isn't to abandon all apparently non-people-related pursuits (I personally study, all by myself in my messy bedroom, literature written by dead, white guys from another continent), but to see more clearly other people. Seeing them and their struggles/needs/wants/gifts does help us make decisions in how to spend our time, but much more importantly, people are prettier. Souls are delicious, and ravishingly beautiful. Having people in your life, conversations, friendships, associations: these are inherently valuable, without reducing a person to an immediate asset or liability.

When we truly see the people who have hurt us, or whom we have hurt, forgiving is still a selfish way of keeping friends, but at least we wouldn't pretend that people don't matter. We see ourselves in the people around us. Lacan wrote (forgive his impossible syntax): "For the imagos - whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in outline in our daily experiences and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacy - the mirror-image would seem to be the threshhold of the visible world." I think what he means is that subconsciously, everything we see presents a (fragmentary) mirror image of us. Looking at ourselves only sours that image, but if we look outwords and see all of our brothers and sisters, we can be everyone, one broken piece at a time. And everyone is a piece of perfect.