FORGIVENESS

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (175-186)

• Each March 17, parades, Celtic music, the wearing of green, and oceans of beer commemorate the memory of St. Patrick, the legendary apostle to Ireland.
• Patrick courageously strolled into violent pagan villages, befriended the chieftain, won both the man and the tribe with hospitality, served the needy, and by the end of his life had drawn most of Ireland to the  gospel of Jesus Christ. What a life!
• Patrick had no faith of his own by the time he was sixteen.
• Pagan raiders kidnapped him and took him north to the Irish realms.
• He spent the next six years as a captive and was made to tend herds on frigid pasturelands, ill fed and ill treated. 
• It was a season of great suffering, but it served to return him to the Christianity of his fathers.
• Before long deliverance came, though the journey was arduous and it took several years for Patrick to make his way home.
• Sometime later, Patrick began experiencing visions that turned his attention to the land where he had been a captive. 
• "I saw a man whose name was Victorious coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters...and they were crying as if with one voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.'"
• What kind of man endures six years of cruel captivity and yet emerges with a new and vital faith? What kind of man returns to the land of his former captivity because he is touched by the needs of the people there? What kind of man converts warring pagan tribes with kindness, miracles, and beer? The answer is a holy man, an anointed and, a man who is chosen by God. Indeed, a true man, in the highest and grandest sense.
• For a man to become a great man, he will have to defeat the force of bitterness in his life. No one escapes it. There is enough offense and hardship in the world to assure that all of us will be wounded and betrayed, all of us will have opportunity to drink the sweet-tasting poison of bitterness against those who have wronged us. The art of surviving untainted is to learn the art of forgiveness.
• Men hold on to the wrongs done them, rehearse those wrongs, make excuses for failure out of those wrongs, and frequently poison their lives with the bitterness they keep circulating through their hearts and minds. 
• It makes them small, blaming, angry souls rather than the large-hearted beings they are called to be.
• So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is. 
• "To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you." - Frederick Buechner