When Forgiveness Has No Face

 

Sometimes the word “forgiveness” sounds like a distant bell, not rung by a human hand but by the sky itself — a sound that slides along the bones and returns to the heart as a memory of something we once understood but can no longer name. There isn’t always someone to forgive. Not because we are above it, not because we are holier or wiser, but because there is simply no one there. Only an absence, a silence, a tear in the fabric of the human. And then forgiveness becomes not an act, but a stillness — a refusal to touch what is already dead, what cannot be revived by kindness.

I often think of those who have sinned deliberately, with cold precision, with carefully measured lies. They do not seek forgiveness because they do not believe in the soul, nor in holiness, nor in anything that cannot be used. And when you stand before such a world, you feel not merely deceived — you feel unseen, reduced to an object, a stage upon which another’s shadow has rehearsed the role of God. But God does not live there. God is silent, standing beyond, watching, not interfering. He waits.

For a long time, I believed that forgiveness was the highest form of liberation — that by forgiving, one transcends evil. But there are evils that do not wish to be redeemed. They exist in a realm without mirrors. And then forgiveness becomes something else — an awareness that you are not obliged to keep open a door into the abyss. You are not obliged to love what does not know how to love. And perhaps that too is a kind of forgiveness — not toward the other, but toward yourself.

When the soul is wounded by betrayal, it does not bleed outward but inward. There are days when the pain is not pain, but a heaviness in the breath, a slow pulse, as if the body itself is trying to remember the cost of trust. In such moments, prayer is not a plea but breathing in the dark. I do not say, “Lord, forgive them,” because I know God is not naïve. He is not merciful in the human sense. He is not a judge but a balance. He knows when a being has crossed the line of humanity and must return to where it came from — into its own shadow.

And so I pray not for mercy, but for justice equal to the deed, for I deeply believe that this too is a form of love — love for order, for harmony, for that divine law which does not tolerate distortion. To forgive dishonor is to approve of destruction. We are not sent here to approve of chaos, but to see it, to understand it, and — when we can — to illuminate it with awareness.

Sometimes I think we do not choose the situations in which we become victims. They come as reflections of the collective shadow, of the shared dream we all weave — with our fears, our lies, our neglected prayers. It is not punishment, but a kind of summoning. The universe places us before the face of evil not to make us bow before it, but to make us see it clearly, without illusion, and refuse to feed it with our emotions. That is the moment when suffering stops being meaningless — when you transform it into knowledge.

At night, when I cannot sleep, I hear my own thoughts moving like slow waves — each carrying a fragment of what I wish to forget but cannot. In those hours, forgiveness seems like a distant shore — not because I do not wish to reach it, but because I know that the sea between us was not created by my sin. Sometimes I just stand and listen to the silence in which God breathes. In that silence lies a truth that words cannot express: that not everything must be mended, that some things must be left to crumble into dust so they can be reborn in another form.

And then I understand — forgiveness is not always forgiveness. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is saying: “No, I will not take part in your madness.” To leave without slamming the door, but also without returning. This is the quietest revolution of the spirit — the refusal to be wounded again in the name of a virtue that has become distorted.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, to forgive one who does not acknowledge their wrongdoing is a form of self-erasure, for in that act you affirm the aggressor’s fantasy that nothing happened, that your pain is an exaggeration, your suffering an invention. But the soul does not lie. It remembers. And in that remembering there is dignity — not vengeance, but the preservation of reality, for only truth can heal.

In the spiritual sense, when we refuse to offer forgiveness where there is no repentance, we do not reject love — we protect it. Because love is not spineless, not sentimental — it is the force that distinguishes light from darkness. And perhaps the greatest mercy is in this very discernment — to let evil meet its own reflection, without rescuing it.

Sometimes, when I imagine how God looks upon the world, I feel He does not grieve for the sinners, but for those who still believe they must endure evil in order to be good. He does not want our submission — He wants our wakefulness. And so when I pray, I do not say, “Forgive them,” but whisper: “Render justice, as only You can — quietly, precisely, without anger, yet without mercy for deceit.”

I believe there are moments when we do not suffer for a person, but for the very presence of evil in human experience. And then forgiveness has no addressee. It becomes a sigh directed toward the whole — toward this vast, unsettled humanity that has not yet learned how not to lie. In that sigh, there is no condemnation, only understanding — that we are all wounded by the same ancient cut.

And perhaps that is the secret: not to suffer more than necessary, and not to blame ourselves for having fallen into the web of another’s delusion. For we did not weave it. The world dreams through us, and sometimes the dream is a nightmare. But if we remain awake within it, if we keep our ability to discern, then perhaps — just perhaps — we will come closer to that light which neither forgives nor punishes, but simply is.

And in that presence, quiet and wordless, everything finds its place. Not because we have forgiven, but because we have understood.