“Supernatural” Forgiveness

The Dialogue Partners

Evelyn Underhill (1877–1941) was an English mystical theologian, spiritual director, and retreat leader who authored nearly 40 books and hundreds of articles. She has been recently described as “one of the most significant Christian writers of the twentieth century.” ¹ Underhill was the first woman to be a guest lecturer in theology at Oxford University and the first woman to lead spiritual retreats in the Church of England. She is commemorated liturgically by the Church of England on the 15th of June each year.

Monique Lisbon is a contemporary author, musician, and songwriter from Melbourne Australia, and a survivor of childhood sex abuse. She is the author of Fragments of Home: Piecing Life Together after Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Founder of Living Hope Resources. ²

Underhill’s Insights regarding Forgiveness

In 1935, Underhill gave a series of retreat talks on “The Lord’s Prayer” at “The House of Retreat” at Pleshey, near Chelmsford, England. She reworked the talks in the summer of 1939 on the eve of World War II, and they were published in the volume Abba, in 1940. These published retreat talks were Underhill’s final considered utterance on the life of prayer.

In her retreat talks, Abba, Underhill provides theological reflection upon Jesus’ teaching to his disciples in “The Lord’s Prayer,” recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The fifth petition in this prayer contains the phrase “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” ³ Underhill reminds her retreatants that the petition about forgiveness comes late in “the Lord’s Prayer,” because it requires the foundation of worship and dedicating oneself to God, that precedes it. ⁴

“The Lord’s Prayer” was evidently important to Underhill as it is the first prayer she quotes from in her handwritten collection of prayers she selected and wrote for leading retreats. In this collection, Underhill quotes from the prayer on a further three occasions. ⁵ So what are the main contours in Underhill’s arguments concerning forgiveness, as present in the prayer Jesus taught his disciples?

In Abba, Underhill explicitly links our forgiving of others’ “trespasses,” to God’s “mercy”—His “law of generous love” in forgiving humanity. ⁶ But rather than linking the two concepts in a conditional way (as if we somehow “earn” our way into a relationship with God based on how well we forgive others), Underhill connects them in a profound, contextual way.

Two instances where forgiveness is necessary are outlined by Underhill. First, when our “rights have been infringed—trespasses [or sins]” because of others’ “vigorous self-love.” ⁷ Second, where our “own just demands” regarding “affection … consideration, possessions or status, have not been met—debts.” ⁸ The effect of both scenarios is the same: Our “self-love,” our “pride is injured” and our “anger aroused”; ⁹ “the walls close in” and we are “alone” with our “own wrath … own rights.” ¹⁰

Underhill is tough, and challenges her retreatants to forgive now, not just when our “sense of God is more vivid and our sense of injury, our emotional uproar, has died down.” ¹¹ But straight after writing this phrase (perhaps recognizing how challenging her teaching is!), she bursts into prayer mid-paragraph: “Show us, O Lord, your indulgent charity, and we will try to show it in our turn: bear with our faultiness because we are trying to love, ignoring our bruises and scratches, the small sums that are owed us, the infringements of our rights.” ¹² Underhill appears here to be alluding to Jesus’ parable about the unforgiving debtor in Matthew 18: the king cancels the large debt of his servant, then that servant goes and throws his own servant into prison, because he hasn’t yet paid back his tiny debt. Underhill quotes St. Teresa to back her case about the obedience of quick forgiveness: “The Saints rejoiced at injuries and persecutions, because in forgiving them they had something to offer God.” ¹³ In addition to forgiveness as “offering,” Underhill describes how St. Teresa makes “an easy and prompt forgiveness, in all the ups and downs of daily life, the very test of prayer; and thinks contemplation of little worth if we come from it able to resent anything.” ¹⁴ These are sobering words in the contemporary world that views personal “rights” and law suits as the norm.

Returning to the context of “The Lord’s Prayer,” Underhill reiterates her arguments about forgiveness:

We say here that we are satisfied if God deals as gently with us at our worst as we deal with our fellows at their worst—no more. We ask to be treated as we treat them; and we must expect to be taken at our word. Our disloyalty, selfishness and hardness, our failure in wide-spreading love, with all the resultant damage … It becomes clear that only a very great Christian can dare to say this prayer [i.e. The Lord’s Prayer] without qualification. It is the acid test of a life of charity, of true incorporation in the Body of Christ … ¹⁵

Underhill argues that it is only when “we have truly grasped” the fact of our “common human frailty” that “resentment” is killed and “indulgent pity [put] in its place.” ¹⁸ Thus she exclaims, alluding to the woman in Scripture caught in adultery, “Let the man [or woman], the group, the nation that is without sin cast the first stone.” ¹⁹ But Underhill goes even further, arguing that God’s forgiveness requires of us “the constant compassionate recognition of our fellow-creatures’ instability and weakness; of the fact that they too cannot help it.” ²⁰

Whether Underhill is applying this final clause to Hitler or Stalin at this point, I don’t know. But there are three points to consider regarding these words. First, Underhill was a passionate pacifist, so forgiving key leaders in World War II would have been an incredibly demanding and painful process for her. Following on from this, second, we have evidence of Underhill’s own inner turmoil and struggles with forgiveness, often hidden from others, in her personal notebooks and private letters. In her “Green and Flowered Notebook,” Underhill describes her “interior tempests” she “can’t calm,” ²¹ and of not being able to “shift the focus from feeling to will,” thus not feeling “safe.” ²² In addition, Underhill wrote intimate letters to her spiritual friend, Sister Mary of St. John, in her final decade. Replies from this Carmelite nun make mention of Underhill’s “devils! … depressions,” ²³ “severe suffering,” ²⁴ “tremendous strain,” ²⁵ and her “uproar & unrest instead of peace.” ²⁶ It is hardly surprising that Underhill openly states in one letter, that she struggles to “live” what she teaches. Third, Underhill was a spiritual director for decades and would have heard endless stories of excruciating pain and suffering and people’s struggles with forgiveness, and perhaps even their stories of feeling misplaced guilt.

Given Underhill’s evident experiences of suffering, both personal and vicarious, it is perhaps even more surprising that Underhill writes in her talk on forgiveness, the phrase “that they [the perpetrators of pain and suffering] cannot help it.” ²⁷ Perhaps there are two threads that Underhill is referring to here: first, our general condition as sinful humanity, as lamented by St. Paul: “the evil I don’t want to do, this I keep doing”; ²⁸ but second, Underhill’s words “cannot help it” as applied to specific acts, such as child sex abuse. It is in that application that her words don’t sit well with me in terms of justice. When Jesus says “If anyone causes one of these little ones … to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea,” ²⁹ I’m reminded that abuse of children is pure evil and heinous.

Monique Lisbon—Fragments of Home

I want to pause and tease out questions around the complex nature of forgiveness through weaving in some reflections from Monique Lisbon, an author and songwriter who was sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood from the age of 3.

In Fragments of Home: Piecing Life Together after Childhood Sexual Abuse, Lisbon reflects upon the complexities around forgiveness. I deliberately quote at length here:

Following on from those reflections, Lisbon wrote a song that emphasizes that forgiveness is not a “whitewashing” of the past: Not “pretending black is white … [not] letting lies and denial reign”; “To call a lie ‘forgiveness’ can never make it true.” ³¹ Interestingly, this metaphor of “whitewashing”—somehow trying to forget or erase the past—is a similar image used by Underhill, who tells her retreatants that forgiveness is “not the easy passage of a sponge over a slate.” ³² The well-worn phrase “forgive and forget” is not found in Scripture and is not part of Underhill or Lisbon’s understandings of forgiveness.

Instead, Underhill tells her retreatants that forgiveness is a “stern and painful process” ³³ that “makes a heroic demand upon our courage … it means the reordering of the soul’s disordered love.” ³⁴ The necessity for an ongoing shift from self-love to love of others recurs in Underhill’s words about forgiveness. She argues that “ignorance, malice, weakness and claimful desire” are the roots of our “worst de-ordinations” that the “Charity of God must cure … compel self-knowledge, kill animosity, brace the will and mortify desire.” ³⁵ But writing from personal experience, Underhill realistically states that our “Hardness is the one impossible thing. Harshness to others in those who ask and need the mercy of God sets up a conflict at the very heart of personality and shuts the door upon grace.” ³⁶

But the question is, how do we get past our pain, our “hardness” as “proud and assertive creature[s]” ³⁷ and come to this place of forgiveness? We’re not God! We’re weak, fragile, little, finite, and in Lisbon’s case, have been obliterated by a despicable oppressor, her own flesh and blood. Perhaps some clues are provided in phrases from Underhill’s letters of spiritual direction. In her words to suffering directees, Underhill is not formulaic. She recognizes the uniqueness of each person and their scenario, yet we see some recurring, hopeful themes emerge.

“Supernatural” Forgiveness: Underhill’s Letters of Spiritual Direction

First, Underhill teaches her directees about “supernatural” forgiveness. From personal experience, Underhill has confidence that forgiveness is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. It is “supernatural” rather than being simply a human activity. Underhill declares “if I didn’t think the whole of life was the work of the Holy Spirit, I should give everything up. It is the centre of my creed.” ³⁸ So Underhill repeatedly reminds her directees that it is God’s job to enable them to forgive others: “Remember God is acting on your soul all the time …”; ³⁹ “throw the whole emphasis on God—His work in your soul …”; ⁴⁰ “assimilate the priceless art of letting God make the first move.” ⁴¹ As far as reducing self-absorption, one directee is told, “we can never become un-selfed on our own—it is God’s work in us.” ⁴² Underhill sums up this orientation in the pithy phrase: Prayer is “God’s gift, not your work.” ⁴³

Yet second, we participate in the Spirit’s work in enabling us to forgive. Underhill tells one directee of her responsibility of “co-operating with the grace which has been given to you” and to “attend to just that and the less you judge others, the better.” ⁴⁴ As part of this participation and cooperation with God, Underhill encourages her directees to “surrender” themselves to God: “surrender is the only way … Humility and willing suffering have got to be learned if we want to be Christians, and some people learn them by boredom instead of by torture.” ⁴⁵

Third, willed surrender and abandonment to God leads to acceptance. Underhill adamantly declares, “The real equation is not Peace = satisfied feeling, but Peace = willed abandonment.” ⁴⁶ She continues,

The best way to take the “darkness and left aloneness” is not discussion, but a generous and humble act of acceptance of the state in which God has placed one’s soul, however useless and frustrated one may feel, and an act of trust that in this darkness and incapacity He is training us to a more perfect self-abandonment. ⁴⁷

Fourth, Underhill reassures her directees that God desires intimacy with them in their suffering: “Keep quiet inwardly and let God act. Don’t dash about trying to get out of the fog and do not be frightened. He is in it, and is working on your soul through it … It is God you want and God Who wants you.” ⁵⁰ Similarly Underhill writes, “You are in God’s hands and He can’t hurt you. Do rest your soul on that.” ⁵¹ Underhill assures her directees that God’s “grace comes with the pain and mysteriously takes away the real bitterness. Once that is done, you will know a new serenity.” ⁵² This is what Underhill describes in another retreat talk as

Finally, Underhill writes to a directee about joining with Christ in His suffering: “Offer what you suffer in this darkness to Christ, it’s worth offering, and if you do this, the worst of the sting will go.” ⁵⁴ To another directee, Underhill states that “the suffering you have faced can all be offered to God, can’t it? It is of the very stuff of prayer—there is no such thing for a Christian as a vain sacrifice.” ⁵⁵ This is echoed with another directee: “Don’t attempt to force a complete surrender while it raises a tornado. Just acknowledge very humbly that you cannot get past the tornado without His grace but that underneath it all, you do desire to give yourself, or rather to be taken from yourself, into His love.” ⁵⁶

So we see Underhill provides repeated encouragement to her directees about trusting God to supernaturally enable them to forgive.

Forgiveness as “Supernatural”

All of these snippets of spiritual direction point to a major argument in her retreat talk in Abba: forgiveness is “supernatural.” ⁵⁷ It is “divine.” Underhill argues,

the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is so drastic and so difficult, where there is a real and deep injury to forgive, that only those living in the Spirit, in union with the Cross, can dare to base their claim on it. It means not only asking to be admitted to the Kingdom of Redeeming Love, but also declaring our willingness to behave as citizens of that Kingdom even under the most difficult conditions … the lover of peace forgiving the maker of war. Cruelty, malice, deceit and violence doing their worst; and seen by us through the eyes of a pitiful God. All this is supernatural, and reminds us again that the Lord’s Prayer is a supernatural prayer … the prayer that the soul may be fed by the hand of God. Only then is it ready for this supreme test; this quiet and genial acceptance of the wounds of life, all the deliberate injury and the casual damage that comes from lack of love; this prayer from the cross … ⁵⁸

Concluding Thoughts

In this article I have argued that forgiveness is intensely difficult and incredibly complex. I have also argued that forgiveness is not simply a human activity but is the work of the Spirit. It is supernatural, a work of grace, not merely human endeavor. Forgiveness is rich mystery, a gift, not formulaic but unique to each person’s experience, thus it is difficult to theorize and comprehend and define.

Speaking with Monique Lisbon recently, she posed questions around the nature of forgiveness pondering, “is it about feeling compassion rather than anger? But if you don’t feel anger, does it mean you’ve forgiven? Is it being free or not defined by wounding? Changed feeling towards the offender? What are we letting go of? Of our right for revenge, hatred? But what if you don’t feel those things?”

Lisbon mentioned how Nelson Mandela had one of his captors on the stage with him, during his inauguration—the captor he had forgiven and been reconciled with. But Lisbon reflected that the difference there is that “Mandela had grown up with a solid sense of who he was, then had the abuse later in life. What about when abuse is from a trusted care giver at an early age? Notions of forgiveness are so much more complex.” Lisbon posed the question, “How do we forgive others if we have no sense of self to forgive from? Can true forgiveness stem from self-annihilation? Or is forgiveness merely a pseudo-solution to messiness and discomfort?”

This article has raised more questions than provided answers but I think that’s because there is mystery concerning forgiveness because it is supernatural. In conclusion, three points stand out to me. First, we are all sinners and we all wear both hats of victim and perpetrator: we do wrong and are wronged by others, though clearly some cases where we are wronged are incredibly challenging to forgive. In fact, the raw, long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse can have inconceivable and life-altering impacts upon the victim’s identity and health. Second, we are not the judge. God is the judge and knows more than we can ever know about all realities. Third, we can only really extend mercy to others when we truly recognize the mercy that God has extended to us.

After engaging with these two wonderful dialogue partners (both writing from embodied, lived realities of pain) it’s my conviction that our task as lovers of God is to live authentically and keep responding as the Spirit does His work in our souls. If forgiveness truly is supernatural, it is the work of God in us. He takes the initiative and invites us to participate in His work of redemption. Our job is to be open and expectant; to keep our ears open and our eyes alert to see what the Spirit is doing in His creative, restorative work. Beauty from the ashes.

I close with a prayer from Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book:

Lord, we offer You our prayers … for all those who have in anything made us heavy, or hindered us or done us hurt or grief … forgive us altogether our sins and offences against You, and against each other. Take from our hearts, Lord, all suspicion, indignation, wrath, variance, and whatever may wound charity or diminish the … love that each of us should have toward others. Have mercy on us … ⁵⁹ Amen.