Corrie ten Boom and her family were heroes of the Dutch resistance during World War II. They hid many Jews and helped them escape to safety. Eventually Corrie and five members of her family were arrested; later, Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to a death camp, where Betsie died. After the war Corrie spent the rest of her life speaking about God’s forgiveness, the need for reconciliation, and her experiences with love overcoming evil.
At the ten Boom house in Haarlem, Netherlands, there’s an exquisitely framed embroidery of a crown. During talks, Corrie would hold it up, first showing the backside of the embroidery where hundreds of tangled colored threads hung in a mess. Then she would flip it around to reveal the beautifully stitched crown. She said we often view our lives from the tangled side, whereas God views our lives as the perfectly woven crown. This perspective enabled Corrie ultimately to forgive the man who’d betrayed her family to the Nazis.
Most of us will not have experiences as terrible as Corrie’s that are calling for our forgiveness. But regardless of the circumstances, forgiving when we’ve been wronged doesn’t always come easily. It may be the most demanding counsel of Christ Jesus’ teachings. He modeled the importance of it when he said on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
This spirit of Christly love that Jesus demonstrated has the power to open our hearts to God’s love and transform us from feeling hatred or resentment to actively affirming good for others – even those who’ve wronged us. Praying that our enemies can feel the healing love of God, we are embraced by this love ourselves. As the power of the Christ-spirit uproots resentment in our hearts, we are no longer imprisoned by that resentment. We are free to love the true, God-given goodness of ourselves and others.
This Christ – the divine influence – inspires and frees us, revealing our core being. We discover the Christ as our true, Godlike nature, showing us our wholeness and completeness as God’s child and shifting thought away from victimization to healing and transformation. Through Christ we gain an understanding of our spiritual completeness. We begin to identify with qualities of God more than with human events, and we see that we were never broken by another’s wrong action.
I spent almost seven years not talking to a close family member because I couldn’t forgive his abusive behavior. I felt that if I forgave, I was somehow condoning the wrongful treatment. But the Christ-influence moved me little by little into feeling the infinite love and universal intelligence of God, and this finally replaced the resentment. I could see how the lack of forgiveness was only hurting me.
The foundation for these realizations was the teachings of Christian Science. These teachings explain how we can each turn from focusing on what may feel like a messy human life to seeing things from the standpoint of divine perfection – God’s perfection reflected in each of us, God’s loved spiritual ideas. The power to do this is not one of will or self-help, but is the Christ-power breaking through resistance and enabling us to yield to the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, which are synonyms for God. As we see our life spiritually, we see the perfectly woven crown of divine Love rather than a tangled mess of mistaken beliefs.
I eventually forgave the family member mentioned earlier, although it took a few more years before we reconciled and began communicating again. By then, he had undergone a complete transformation, and all the previous behavior had stopped. We now have a close and caring relationship.
More than just a choice we might make, forgiveness is a divinely impelled willingness to yield human thought to God’s love working in us. This happens when we separate the wrongful act from the pure idea of God, the spiritually created identity of the individual.
If the wrong done us feels much bigger than the spiritual truth we want to embrace, we can hold to a desire to know love rather than resentment, truth rather than a tendency to react negatively. As we feel divine completeness and wholeness in ourselves rather than holding on to thoughts of retribution, this will chip away at the desire for revenge and finally crush it with healing love and forgiveness.
As God’s love grows in our consciousness and we feel its presence, any sense of ever having been harmed will be removed. The tangled mess of threads will be replaced by a whole, beautiful crown of God’s blessing.
Adapted from an editorial published in the March 23, 2020, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
