Diane Marrapodi, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science who lives in Forest Hill, Maryland, was the guest on this online chat earlier this year.

Many times the hardest person to forgive is ourselves. It might seem like our mistakes are too great or too numerous for us to be able to pray effectively. What steps can we take toward self-forgiveness in the midst of feeling unforgivable? 

We have to remember what the Bible tells us our purpose is. Our purpose is to know God, to reflect and express Him, intelligently, lovingly, kindly. There’s no limit to the direction in which we can do this. When I stop and think about the statement that we all know so well, “Charity begins at home,” why wouldn’t we bring that sense of love and forgiveness to our own thought? 

There are a couple of aspects of forgiveness we want to look at here: 

The first might be regret or remorse. That’s really a recognition that we made an “oops”—we made a mistake—and whether we did it ignorantly or maliciously, we need to look at that. It catches our attention, and you know when you’ve made a mistake! It just doesn’t feel right if we’ve misspoken or done something we shouldn’t have done. We first acknowledge that mistake. Then we repent—we have a change of heart, a change of mind. For instance we might say, “I knew better than that. I shouldn’t have done it.” 

The next aspect of forgiveness is reformation. We know that we will never repeat that mistake again. There’s not a power on earth that can cause us to misrepresent ourselves to ourselves, to God, or to others. Divine Love is the motivating power. It calls us, it inspires us. It leads us to do the next right thing. And that leads then to the renewal and the regeneration, the freshness and the inspiration to think and act rightly.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to stay at the point of beating up yourself. We can do that pretty well with no help. But that’s not what God requires of us. In Micah we read, “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (6:8). 

The quickest way I have ever found to make a correction and forgive myself is to obey Micah’s three commands. When I’m busy about that, I’m doing what God made me to do. I’m living honestly, in earnest, productively, and gracefully. Wallowing in regret and not moving past that is just an excuse for failure, and that is no part of a Christian’s attitude or disposition.

Whenever I forgive people or situations, I can never forget.  How can I forget and move on without digging into the past?

In Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mary Baker Eddy says that we have “nothing to mourn over, but something to forget” (p. 353). Thinking, “I have to forget, I have to forget, I have to forget,” is not useful. I love the efficiency of Mind that gives us our next thought.  

At every moment, God is giving us something infinitely better to know than a hurt that we’re holding on to or a regret. By entertaining His angels, His thoughts passing to you—knowing that you are receptive, responsive, and obedient to those angel thoughts—you find that thought is just lifted right out of a loop or a circuitous dream, where you are spinning your wheels in mud.

We also want to make sure we’re not holding on to any justification. “Well, OK, I’ll forgive them, but I won’t forget, because . . . ” and then we might have this long list of justifications. They may be humanly reasonable, but they are not divinely natural. To be a spiritual expression of God’s idea, man, we want to stick with that which is divinely natural. You can’t have “forgive and not forget.” That really doesn’t mean that forgiveness has taken place. We’ve just put a band-aid on it, and the transgression is still there, and we’re ruminating over it. True forgiveness doesn’t include ruminating. It includes leaving a situation with the desire that each party, each one involved, is under God’s control, in His sight, free to make progress.

How do we forgive people who do offensive things and disrupt others’ lives, and they seem to be just fine with what they do? 

I think the thing that has always been most helpful to me is to know that long before we met one another, we all had a relationship with God that He established, and just as I have been made to hear God’s voice and respond to it, so have they. And what we want to know is that there is no equal or opposite power to God as Truth, Life, and Love. There is no other voice that has the ultimate say but God. And what is He voicing to each one? The divine good.