How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You — De Sales on Hard Forgiveness
⏱ 14 min read
You have been told to forgive. You have heard it from the pulpit and from the bedside and from the well-meaning friend who said it over coffee a year ago in a tone you have been trying to forget. You have wanted to forgive — not because anyone pressured you into it, but because somewhere inside you, you know that the carrying of this is hurting you more than it is hurting them. And still, every time you try, something honest in you refuses. The mouth says the words. The heart sits across the room with its arms folded and will not come to the table.
This essay is not the voice that will tell you to try harder. The question of how to forgive someone who hurt you is not a question that responds to being shamed at. It responds to being walked slowly, with someone who has held the same kind of weight, by the kind of light a four-hundred-year-old book can still give. Francis de Sales — the seventeenth-century bishop and spiritual director whose Introduction to the Devout Life has been on the shelf of contemplatives for four hundred years — does not flinch from the difficulty of hard forgiveness. He does not pretend it can be done in one sitting, or in one season, or by gritting one’s teeth and saying the prayer. He treats it as a long, honest, often cold, often weary work, and he gives the soul that is trying to do it a kind of company the bumper-sticker version cannot. The slow practice this essay walks has its 140-day form in the Christian Healing Journal, built for the woman whose heart has been holding the unfinished business of a real wound for longer than she meant to.
What follows is the slow contemplative version of hard forgiveness. Not the just forgive them and move on. Not the spiritualised pressure to perform a feeling you do not feel. The older thing the saints meant — the slow, honest, sometimes cold, sometimes weary work that, walked over months, actually loosens what could not be made to move by force. (Self-care ideas for Christian women in hard seasons is the letter to the depleted woman this season has worn out, and why you can’t let go until you name it walks the prior step that hard forgiveness is the second half of.)
The first thing — what forgiveness is not
Before any of the rest of this essay, the small unspoken sentences need to be said out loud. You may not have heard them from the people who told you to forgive.
Forgiveness is not pretending the hurt did not happen. The hurt happened. The forgiveness does not require you to revise the record.
Forgiveness is not the restoration of trust. Trust is rebuilt slowly, sometimes never, and the forgiveness work and the trust work are two different works.
Forgiveness is not a feeling you have to produce on demand. The feeling, when it comes, is the late fruit, not the entry fee.
Forgiveness is not the dismissal of the seriousness of what was done. Saying I forgive does not mean what you did was small. It means I am no longer going to be the one carrying the full weight of this alone.
Forgiveness is not necessarily reconciliation. Some of the people who hurt you should not be brought back close. Forgiveness, in the de Sales tradition, is the soul’s slow laying-down of its case before God; it does not require the resumption of the relationship that caused the wound.
These are the things forgiveness is not, and the reason they are worth naming first is that most of the women who have tried and failed to forgive someone who hurt them have been trying to do one or more of these other things and calling it forgiveness. The thing they were actually being asked to do was never possible. The actual forgiveness is a different — and slower, and gentler — thing entirely.
The first line — de Sales on the work that is done coldly, wearily and indifferently
Here is the first of the three passages worth keeping near the page. De Sales is writing in Introduction to the Devout Life to a soul in spiritual dryness — the very state in which trying to forgive a deep hurt nearly always happens — and he gives her, in the same breath, both an instruction about prayer and an instruction about what to do when the prayer feels like nothing:
But when you pray let your words and affections, whether interior or exterior, all tend to love and trust in God. “O God of Mercy, most Loving Lord, Sweet Saviour, Lord of my heart, my Joy, my Hope, my Beloved, my Bridegroom.” Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy, and although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. The Enemy strives to make us languid in doing good by depression, but when he sees that we do not cease our efforts to work, and that those efforts become all the more earnest by reason of their being made in resistance to him, he leaves off troubling us.
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Read what he is naming. Although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. This is the sentence that most modern teaching on forgiveness has lost. The assumption underneath the modern version is that real forgiveness comes with a felt softening — that the heart will warm, that the bitterness will melt, that you will know forgiveness has happened by the inner weather. De Sales, who had directed hundreds of souls through hard forgiveness over decades, knew that this was not how the work usually goes.
The work, in his reading, is most often done coldly, wearily and indifferently. The mouth says I forgive her. The heart says I feel nothing. The prayer is offered. The chest stays tight. The same person walks across the mind half an hour later and the old story plays again. The soul that has been told the forgiveness will come with a warm feeling concludes that the forgiveness has not happened, and gives up.
De Sales says — do not give in. The cold offering counts. The weary offering counts. The indifferent offering counts. The Enemy of the soul, in his older language, strives to make us languid in doing good by depression — that is, makes the heaviness of the work itself the reason to stop doing it. The de Sales instruction is to keep working — keep offering the cold prayer, keep saying the difficult words, keep returning to the table — even when the working seems to be producing nothing. The producing is happening underneath the feeling. The feeling will catch up later, or it will not, and either way the work is real work.
How to forgive someone who hurt you, on this reading, is in part a matter of not giving in when the work feels like nothing. The repeated cold offering is the thing the soul has been told would not work, and is, in fact, the thing that quietly works.
A pause for the body
Set the screen down for a breath. The body knows where it has been holding this. Most often it is a tightness at the back of the jaw, or a held band across the upper chest, or a knot just below the throat that gets worse on the days the person who hurt you crosses your mind unbidden. Bring one hand to the place where the holding sits. Stay with it for one slow inhale and one slow exhale. Do not try to forgive in this minute. Do not try to feel anything in particular. The body has been carrying the unfinished business with you, and the muscles that have been bracing have grown tired in their own quiet way. Let the hand rest where the holding is. Let the breath drop one inch lower than it has been dropping. The body is allowed, in this minute, to put some of the weight down even before the heart knows how. The slow loosening starts here — not because anything has been decided, but because the body has been told it is allowed to soften a little.
The second line — de Sales on the cross that is kissed, not gritted-teeth tolerated
The second passage is from the Treatise on the Love of God, the longer cousin of the Introduction by the same author, and it is one of the most precise descriptions of what hard forgiveness looks like when it has finally been done at depth:
Whereupon, representing to himself the greatness of the pains, toils and hazards which it would be incumbent on him to undergo in that behalf, he immolated himself in spirit to God’s good-pleasure, and tenderly kissing this his cross, he cried from the bottom of his heart, in imitation of S. Andrew: “I salute thee, O precious cross, I salute thee, O blessed tribulation! O holy affliction, how delightful thou art, since thou didst issue from the loving breast of this Father of eternal mercy, who willed thee from all eternity, and ordained thee for my dear people and me!”
— Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
The first thing to notice is the order. Representing to himself the greatness of the pains, toils and hazards. That is, the seeing of what was done — fully, deliberately, slowly — comes first. The man in the passage is not laying down a vague injury. He is making himself look at the actual cost, the actual size, the actual shape of the cross he is being asked to carry. The forgiveness, in de Sales’s hand, never bypasses the seeing of the wound. The wound is named in its full weight before it is laid down.
The second thing to notice is the tone of the laying-down. Tenderly kissing this his cross. Not gritted-teeth toleration. Not resigned acceptance. Tenderly. The forgiveness, when it has reached its depth, is not a transaction the soul performs through clenched teeth. It is — astonishingly — an act of affection, made possible only because the soul has been brought to see that the suffering is held inside a longer story than the one the wound told.
The third thing is the source. Since thou didst issue from the loving breast of this Father of eternal mercy. The cross — the unfair, hard, undeserved thing that was done — has, in this passage, been reframed not as proof of God’s absence but as something held inside His permission, willed from all eternity, ordained for my dear people and me. This is theological water that has to be drunk slowly. De Sales is not saying the person who hurt you was right to do it. He is saying that even the wrong they did is held inside the larger care of the Father. The hurt was real. The Father, even so, has not been absent from it.
The reason this matters for the question of how to forgive someone who hurt you is that the soul cannot let go of a hurt it believes God was not present for. If the hurt sits in a story where God was absent — where He let it happen and looked away — the soul keeps holding it, because somebody has to hold it. De Sales’s path puts the hurt back inside the larger care. Issue from the loving breast. It is not an explanation. It is a placement. The wound is moved from the place where it was sitting alone in your chest to the place where it sits inside a Father’s longer holding.
The slow practice — the seeing, the placement, the tender laying-down — is the older work the saints walked, and it is the daily work the Christian Healing Journal was built to walk. Not as a forgiveness script, but as a gentle daily room in which the seeing can be done a little at a time, the placement can be made one prayer at a time, and the laying-down can be returned to as many evenings as it takes. The book is built for the woman whose hard forgiveness needs more than a single sitting — which is most women, doing most of this work. (What does the Bible say about singleness walks the sister practice in another de Sales pastoral context, for the woman whose wound came from a hope that did not arrive, and Murray on bitterness — the root that defiles — is the sister reading for the day the unforgiveness has grown a quieter, more chronic name.)
The third line — de Sales on the soul that has finally moved through
Once the seeing and the placement and the tender laying-down have been walked, de Sales gives one more line — this one from the Treatise — that describes the soul on the other side. Not the soul that has forgotten what was done, but the soul that no longer has to keep the case open:
As for example, the soul having long dwelt in the feeling of the union whereby she sweetly tastes how happy she is to belong to God, in fine, augmenting this union by an amorous pressing and moving forwards: Yea, Lord, will she say, I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve; or: Ah Lord! I am so indeed, and will be daily ever more; or, by way of prayer: O sweet Jesus! Ah! draw me still more deeply into thy heart, that thy love may devour me, and that I may be swallowed up in its sweetness.
— Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
The soul having long dwelt in the feeling of the union. The key phrase is long dwelt. The soul that arrives at the all, all, all, without reserve has not arrived at it in a week. It has long dwelt — over months, sometimes years — in the slow, daily, repeated practice of small contemplative returns, the cold offerings, the tender laying-down of the seen weight, the receiving of the placement of the hurt inside the Father’s longer care. The all, all, all, without reserve is the late fruit, not the entry fee.
This is the de Sales correction of the modern just forgive. The just-forgive instruction asks the soul to begin where de Sales says one ends. The just-forgive instruction asks the all, all, all, without reserve of a soul that has not yet been allowed to long dwell in the slow daily practice that prepares the depth of it. The soul cannot make the deep surrender on demand. It can only walk the slow path that gradually makes the deep surrender available.
How to forgive someone who hurt you, in the de Sales tradition, is therefore not an event but a path. The path is walked daily. The forgiveness on day three of the path is not the forgiveness on day three hundred. The work is real on both days. The fruit shows up later than the work.
So — how does one actually forgive a real hurt?
You let go of the project of doing it in one sitting. The just-forgive instruction has been hurting you for years; you can lay it down now. The slow path is the real one.
You let the offering be cold. Although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. The cold offering counts. Say the difficult sentence. Lord, I am laying down the case against [name] for what was done. Say it on a day the heart is in another room. Say it again tomorrow. The repetition is the work.
You let yourself see what was actually done. Not the wrapper. The specific thing. She did this, on this date, and the cost of it has been this. The seeing is part of the work. The wound has to be looked at to be laid down. (Why you can’t let go until you name it walks the naming step in more depth, by the same author’s same hand.)
You let the hurt be placed. Issue from the loving breast of this Father of eternal mercy. The placement is not a justification of what was done. It is a relocation of where the hurt is being held — out of your chest alone and into the longer holding of a Father who has been there the whole time.
You walk the path daily. Five minutes. The hand on the chest. The slow cold offering. The seeing, the placement, the tender laying-down — done badly, done wearily, done again. The all, all, all, without reserve will come, if it comes, on a day far from the day you started. The walking is the cure. The walking, not the feeling, is what hard forgiveness is.
That is the slow de Sales answer. It is gentler than the bumper sticker and harder than the bumper sticker, both at once. The gentleness is in the cold offering being allowed to count. The hardness is in the daily return — for months, sometimes for years — until the heart has long dwelt in the union the saints knew the soul would eventually be brought to. The forgiveness is the late fruit. The slow daily walking is the actual work.
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal.
