Article March 17, 2008 Issue

THE CHRISTLIKE GUIDE TO FORGIVENESS

BEA ROEGGE

A recent spirituality.com live chat on "The Christlike guide to forgiveness" featured BEA ROEGGE, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science in Chicago, Illinois. Bea is a contributing editor to the Sentinel. Below is a selection of the questions that callers asked during the chat, and Bea's responses.

Are things we need forgiveness for automatically forgiven when we forgive others? For example, the Lord's Prayer says, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

I think it's essential that we forgive others in order to be forgiven. But I think forgiving others is different from seeing that we are forgiven. And we need to understand God's role in both of those actions. God gives us the patience and the love to forgive others, and we have that same patience and love to forgive ourselves. But we need to apply it. We need to specifically look at something and say, "Yes, I need forgiveness for this," and then we need to find that forgiveness. I don't think anything is just automatic.

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