To hot friends cooling

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the main character in Albert Camus' The Fall, muses:

"In the interest of fairness, it should be said that sometimes my forgetfulness was praiseworthy. You have noticed that there are people whose religion consists in forgiving all offenses, and who do in fact forgive them but never forget them? I wasn't good enough to forgive offenses, but eventually I always forgot them. And the man who thought I hated him couldn't get over seeing me tip my hat to him with a smile. According to his nature, he would then admire my nobility of character or scorn my ill breeding without realizing that my reason was simpler: I had forgotten his very name. The same infirmity that often made me indifferent or ungrateful in such cases made me magnanimous."

One night I had to stop at Kathleen's to pick up my son after he hit a pothole and got a flat. Her reception of me was, as Brutus describes in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "a hot friend cooling." I had feared that would happen since I was aware of having at least two strikes against me in her eyes. One is that she knows I have been telling our mutual grandson about Jesus. The second is that a few months ago when she phoned and said, "This is Kathleen," I stupidly said, "Kathleen who."

This is the way of the world. We file away offenses, and next we meet, we bring to mind the thing we have against that person and remember to act chilly toward him. We keep a bookmark where we left off, expending mental energy to remember our grievance, rather than the far simpler course of starting each encounter with a clean page. It would be a comical peculiarity of our natures, if it weren't so cosmically damaging.

My observation is that many of the slights and arrows in relationships are never so much forgiven as forgotten. To be sure, there are the hard core who never forget---who stoke fires of bitterness with the care of an English gardener tending his flowers, except that these are "fleurs du mal." But perhaps the case for the majority is that the passage of time induces forgetfulness that makes "magnanimous" a la Jean-Baptiste. It's better than nothing, I suppose. Or is it?

The best way is if we only understood that the person who insulted us last week (especially if it is a Christian) is a constantly changing and progressively sanctifying person. The Holy Spirit has rolled up His sleeves and started cleaning out his fixer-upper of a heart, and you just happened to get in the way of some garbage being hauled out. The person you are still nursing a resentment toward is in the middle of his story, and is not yet what he will be. And come to think of it, the same goes for you.

I want to say, in one blanket confession to all the people I have done and said evil and stupid things to, that I am very sorry for being often boorish and arrogant. I hate that about myself. How about we make a covenant right here and now? You forgive me and I'll forgive you. Let's make it 490 times. I think I heard that somewhere.

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