First Week of Lent, Tuesday, March 2

Isaiah 55:10-11; Mt 6:7-15

If you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.

Right before this instruction to forgive, Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray: Our Father, who art in heaven?" The world suffers from an epidemic of anger. We are angry-rightly so-when we have experienced injustice. But we have a hard time forgiving the person who inflicted the injustice and hurt us, or hurt someone we love.

Jesus says that we must forgive. Books are written about psychological techniques to help us to forgive, to let things go, to move on, to rise above our feelings. Such techniques may be helpful, but forgiveness is really only achievable by prayer. Perhaps that's why the prelude to Our Lord's revelation of this demanding challenge to forgive is a lesson on how to pray.

Where else in the Bible, in the Old or New Testament, does God teach us how to pray? Moses, Jacob, Abraham talk with God, but he does not instruct them in prayer. Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah pray by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but that's not the same as God the Son explaining to us the beautiful, simple and all-encompassing phrases of the Our Father.

To forgive, we have to strive not to go back over the hurts-sticking our finger in the wound and never letting the soreness die down or the healing to begin. All of us to some degree are obsessive: while we dress in the morning, as we prepare for bed at night, driving alone in the car, even in prayer, we review the hurts and refuse to forgive. To let things go, we must turn to God and to prayer. We must cling to Our Father, repeating the prayer Jesus taught us, or to other beautiful prayers that we know and love. This is how we push away the repetitious and obsessive thoughts of anger and hardness of heart.

The road to forgiveness is long; we cannot always forgive in an instant (unless we really love the person, as God forgives us in an instant because he loves us.) But we will move in the right direction if our minds turn to prayer-piety-to overwhelm any compulsion we may have to rehash things and harden our refusal to forgive. Besides, we should be convinced that the hurts we've experienced are what make us who we are, they sanctify us, and are God's way of sculpting us. Even the injustices we suffer-and forgive-are part of making us into saints.

We pray the Our Father at Holy Mass every day, as well as in the Rosary and at other times. Let's pray it a lot-along with other prayers-so that we can abandon our anger and begin to forgive. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

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