Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph, and this is Pines of the Aquinas.

In this episode, I'd like to talk about forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of the greatest imaginable gifts that we can receive.

It pardons our sins, it reconciles us to God, it begins in us the life of heaven.

But it's also a gift that we can give, and so far as we can be made instruments of the divine forgiveness.

And what we come to discover is that by doing so, we are advanced in the spiritual life because it helps us to heal and to grow beyond our present limitations.

And it helps us to become the saints whom God intends us to be.

Unforgiveness or resentment or the anger and sadness associated with it can be a great obstacle or hindrance to our progress in the spiritual life.

So it's worth taking the bull by the horns and addressing this topic because it's something that we all need.

Boom, here we go.

Okay, so I just want to cover three main points.

First, the phenomenon of unforgiveness, like why we're so tempted to unforgiveness.

And then second, the different registers in which unforgiveness lodges in the soul.

And then third, just a simple description of how to forgive, and then practical steps that you can take to ratify that choice.

Okay, so the phenomenon of unforgiveness.

Sometimes when you're describing a reality, it's hard to make sense of why you feel it or why you think about it or why you experience it in the way that you do.

So sometimes, like in Christian conversations, people would be like, oh, you will just forgive or, oh, it's, you know, like all that you need to do is forgive the person.

And you're like, yeah, but I experience it is super difficult.

Why is that? Well, for me, at least, I don't think it's especially surprising that we find forgiveness to be difficult.

Because it's a response to a sin, okay? So somebody has sinned against us.

There's a guilt with that, right? There's a fault with that. There's an offense with that.

And it's something that kind of attacks us. It gets to the core of our being.

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