​Forgiveness is sobering. It’s difficult to ask for and difficult to grant. The words of forgiveness can be incredibly difficult to say or accept. Analyzing forgiveness, as I am about to do here, is much easier than practicing it.

We all have wronged someone or been wronged. We utter the proper words but continue to feel unforgiving or unforgiven. This is especially true in situations where the wrongs are grievous and people’s lives have been shattered beyond repair. The proper phrases can be spoken: “I’m sorry,” “I forgive you.” But after the wrong and the wreckage, such verbal transactions can feel like a Band-Aid on a jagged knife wound. They sound dismissive, as if their speaker presumed to have addressed and eliminated the problem entirely, restoring matters to previous harmony: “Well, I said I was sorry!” How am I to “get over” a hurt at the drop of a formulaic hat? The words may be uttered, but the heart is unable to follow.

On the one hand, while the words aren’t a magical formula—the “proper” words could be uttered with no forgiveness transpiring—I am convinced that it matters to utter them. To say “I apologize” or “I forgive you” is to carry out a speech act, not unlike saying “I do” or “I promise.” The words accomplish the thing they say in the saying of them. Just as the Lord says, “Let there be,” and reality comes to be, just as the words “I do” or “I promise” bring a new family into existence, so saying “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” seem to reach down into the stuff of the universe and shift it toward something more and new.

On the other hand, forgiveness may occur without the words ever being said. This all suggests that something more—or something else—is happening in genuine forgiveness. But what exactly? At what point do we feel that forgiveness has occurred? What does it take to forgive, and what does it take to feel forgiven?

The Act of Coming to Know

Michael Polanyi, a premier scientific discoverer in the early twentieth century, made a series of philosophical arguments that bear fruit with regard to these questions about forgiveness. He taught that discovery can never be merely a matter of amassing information. Just think about the many times you’ve had an aha! moment, honed a skill, deepened your perception. Discovery, the act of coming to know, involves at its heart a dramatic breakthrough of insight, a moment of epiphany. You initially feel blind to any further reality as you stare at disconnected pieces before you. But then some of these pieces start to point beyond themselves, pregnant with a hidden meaning. You start to climb into what are now clues, groping forward from them toward a still-hidden farther pattern. There is no surefire, linear adding of information, only this scrabbling to connect the dots.

Insight, when it arrives, comes from beyond. Take for example the everyday skill of bike riding. Can you remember the magic moment when you realized that you were riding a bike? Can you remember how painfully opaque everything felt before you had figured it out? I personally can’t forget the agony of focusing on the disconnected pieces of the puzzle: distrusting that alien, two-wheeled contraption, feeling my body to be a clunky blob of cluelessness, and utterly mystified by what my father meant when he yelled, “Balance!” But somewhere down the road everything shifted and integrated to a coherent performance—Oh! I’m doing it! In the successful performance I have shifted from attending to the disconnected, meaningless pieces of my world, my body, and my dad’s directions to attending from them, indwelling them as meaningful parts within the coherent whole, the performance of bike riding. Your sense of balance is a fabulous example of what Polanyi calls subsidiary awareness: this beyond-words but palpable body sense centrally sustains the performance.

Life brims with instances of this pattern of discovery. Polanyi calls it subsidiary focal integration. We think we are staring at a mess of disconnected units of meaning, only to experience a surprise reversal—a fresh pattern comes into view; the clues are integrated into coherence. You’re picking out an odd pattern on a leafy woodland path when you suddenly see a copperhead snake quietly staring up from your feet. A child learns to read, a magical moment that marks the opening of a world when marks on a page become meaningful words. A pro quarterback enacts from-to knowing every Sunday afternoon: he snaps the ball and, artfully reading his own O-line, the opponent’s defence, his rushers and passers, he spies the goal line beyond and makes a play. All discoveries and all creative acts, not least of which is the Christian believer’s experience of conversion (as per the disciples on the road to Emmaus), involve subsidiary-focal integrative insight.

All knowing is from-to, says Polanyi, and beyond. The integrative pattern opens up an inexhaustive range of future possibilities—that’s how you know you have made contact with reality: a doorway to a new world. You learn to ride a bike, and the world comes to you now in so many bike paths. Oh, the places you can go! You learn to read, and you find yourself in Narnia. That book proves to be a wardrobe of its own.

But here is a beautiful thing to note. Caught up in the larger pattern, you haven’t forsaken the particulars that began your quest for the integrative pattern. Rather, you have come to relate to them in a different way. And it is a better way: you have stepped back from making them bear the burden of a wrongheaded focus. You have stepped into honouring them as what they are more properly: parts meaningful now within a larger whole. We rely on them as we indwell them, freeing them up in a light-handedness that allows them to interact dynamically, artfully. A skilled surfer joyously, creatively—subsidiarily—negotiates and melds all manner of unprecedented moves and situations as she rides a wave. In this she is honouring the waves, the board, her own felt body sense. Were she to revert to focus on her feet, say, the dynamic performance of surfing would go up in a spray of ocean mist.

The Farther Pattern of Forgiveness

Forgiveness, too, involves subsidiary focal integration: the coming into being of a farther pattern, a larger reality, which catches up the older, splintered one within it and transforms it. It’s when this catching up into the new pattern has occurred that forgiver and forgiven actually experience forgiveness. The failure of forgiveness involves focusing on what needs to become subsidiary. The success of forgiveness involves being swept up into a more deeply coherent pattern, one that makes transformative sense of its subsidiaries without being reduced to them.

Psychologist and theologian James Loder, in his book The Transforming Moment, explains personal experiences of the presence of Christ that parallel Polanyi’s epistemology. The transformative knowing event, as he calls it, includes five steps:

Loder proposes that, in the Christian believer’s experience of the convicting presence of Christ, this common dynamic of knowing is being specially employed by the Holy Spirit.

Loder also shows how this dynamic of ordinary knowing develops through four dimensions: our world, our self, the void, and the Holy. It is helpful to imagine the four dimensions as endpoints of two lines laid out in the form of a cross: the world and the ego form the horizontal line; the void marks the bottom of the vertical line, and the Holy is the top.

These four dimensions tap deeply into our humanness: they involve our own selves coping with the world—as we commonly recognize. These anchor the horizontal line. We try to cope, and it is good and human to do so. But our experience of the void, when it appears, undercuts and outruns our coping. It stands at the bottom of the vertical line. Loder defines the void as “the possibility of not being.” Examples of the void include near-death experiences, the loss of a loved one, addiction, betrayal, rejection, and being grievously wronged. But so would the fun scare at the top of a roller coaster, a monster wave, or even boredom. In fact, the void just is the “might not be” that is our existence.

There are two wrong responses to the void: to deny it and to make your bed in it. The right response is to cry out for help. Asking for deliverance is the first truthful move of hope. Locating it at the top of the vertical line, Loder defines the Holy as “the gracious inbreaking possibility of new being,” the transformational undoing of nothingness. Our experiences of both the void and the Holy come from beyond, yet develop two essential dimensions of our humanness.

In ordinary knowing, the void shows up as the uneasy realization that there is something not adding up in our coping with the world. This inaugurates our hope-filled subsidiary scrabbling in search of a farther integrative pattern. Our moment of discovery is the possibility of new being breaking in graciously from beyond, catching us up in a profounder and coherent pattern.

A New and Different Future

In an essay titled “Forgiveness Constitutes the Person,” Haddon Wilmer, one of Loder’s former students, links forgiveness to Polanyi’s notion of subsidiary focal integration. “Forgiveness is not so much a way of settling an account from the past, writing it off and getting free from it,” Wilmer writes, “as opening a new and different future of surprising rescue.” He comments that Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness has a converse that is equally true: there is no forgiveness without the future: “It is the promise and venture of a specific future which gives the power and the vision to escape what the past seems to be prescribing, namely, revenge, grudge, caution, building negation on negation. ‘Your Kingdom come’ is the ground that gives validity to the prayer, ‘Forgive us our sin.’”

Forgiveness involves an interlude for scanning, which involves “exploring how to make something of a compromise by forgiving.” This is that lively, subsidiary scrabbling toward a farther vision of a half-hidden, beckoning real. Jesus, Wilmer writes, continually shows his disciples how they are going wrong and then shows them a better way:

Wilmer adds, “This transformation is not and cannot be achieved in a moment or by magic.”

Forgiveness is something more than the verbal transaction. It coincides with our being caught up in the gracious inbreaking of a farther, more deeply coherent pattern of reality.

Wilmer allows us to identify subsidiary focal integration as the dynamic of forgiveness. We shift our manner of relating to the disparate particulars to seek a coherent pattern that integrates and makes sense of the clues. We move beyond fixating on a wrong and its broken pieces, including the seemingly irreparable break. We reach out in hope, seeking help from beyond. Only in the farther, graciously inbreaking pattern can the break be mended; only in a transformative rationality can there be healing—a coherent pattern logically irreducible to its parts.

This process allows us to let go of the wrong and, in time, to let go even of the agonies of hurt that betrayal has unleashed, to live in a new world that seemingly achieves the impossible: in a profounder rationality, it achieves harmony out of hitherto irreparable discord. Caught up within that farther pattern, the broken pieces of our lives will not so much be left behind as come to rest in their rightful place, no longer made to bear the weight of our fixation, and honoured in their new supporting service.

This coming of the Holy cannot help but suggest the coming of the divine Lord. Of course forgiveness is divine. This is his signature. According to another Polanyian theologian, David Kettle, the gospel itself is “the hospitable approach of God as our ultimate context.” Forgiveness shares in the very dynamic of the gospel.

Forgiveness Accomplished

When I think about the formulas of forgiveness, I can’t help but think of Joseph’s astounding pronouncement regarding the horrific way his brothers had mistreated him: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Nowhere in the recorded story does either side voice the formula. And coming to this larger reality no doubt took Joseph years. But both sides—the whole nation of Israel, and all of us in Christ the son of David—are caught up in a larger world of profounder meaning and sense.

In our own lives, as forgiver and forgiven are caught up in this larger integrative pattern, we finally feel that forgiveness has occurred. The actual verbal transaction—“I’m sorry,” “I forgive you”—may or may not coincide with this being caught up in the larger pattern. This is why sometimes my “actual forgiving” doesn’t seem to be accomplished in the words uttered. “We forgive,” writes Lewis Hyde, “when we give up attachment to our wounds.” Giving up that focal attachment to the pieces can take time, as well as help from beyond.

In Being Disciples, former archbishop Rowan Williams marks the divinity and the futurity of forgiveness: “Mutual reconciliation is one of the marks of the work of the Spirit, a radically new possibility opened up through the Body of Christ: it is itself a sign of God’s future at work. These are dimensions of our human experience in which God’s future is visible. If forgiveness is the most demanding instance of learning to offer one’s resources for the sake of the dignity of another, in many ways the least ‘natural’ or most counter-cultural form of service to each other, it is surely right to see it as a gift from the future, as God’s undefeated purpose for us draws us forward.”

Some years ago New York Times columnist David Brooks offered a reflection on post-traumatic stress disorder that witnesses to a healing dynamic similar to the matter of forgiveness. In “Tales of the Super Survivors,” Brooks poses that the people who recover from PTSD, who undergo post-traumatic growth, are ones who retell their own story.

A story is itself an irreducible integrative pattern—a temporal pattern that assigns surpassing value to its parts. What Brooks avers about post-traumatic growth and what is going on in forgiveness—even in our far less momentous everyday exchanges—are kin to one another. “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Thus far the new story of Joseph, the super survivor.

It helps me to see that forgiveness isn’t so much a transactional repair of an old world. Rather, it is a glimpse of a more profoundly coherent new one. It is as we eventually come to feel ourselves at home in this new world that we experience the forgiveness given and received. Subsidiary focal integration, the way knowing works, reveals this significant dynamic underway in forgiveness.

Often the arrival of this new world may be more like childbirth, a lengthy and agonizing labour. But on the other hand, let us not dismiss the critical, reality-changing speech act. The words “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” are critically important if not technically necessary. They themselves signpost that farther world. And they supply a critical catalyst that concatenates the fresh pattern. Fixating on the words transactionally actually enervates them. But treating them as a clue or a doorway to a farther world accords them their proper value.

The matter of forgiveness remains difficult—as Williams says, our least “natural” form of service to each other. But this analysis injects something key into the process: it injects hope. And it may grow in us a general posture of readiness to forgive, as we grow to trust ourselves to this signature dynamic of a lively reality.

The new world proves to be ours now. Hear the simple confidence of the wise Dallas Willard:

Forgiveness is difficult, for there is no going back. But you wouldn’t want to, for a profounder reality has come and is here. Let us entrust ourselves in hope and seek the gracious inbreaking of this larger real.