Matthew Ichihashi Potts

“What if forgiveness allowed for anger and rage and grief? What if it preserved mistrust and could keep a safe distance for its victims? What if forgiveness acknowledged hurt rather than promising healing; what if it uniquely reckoned with the permanence of a wound, rather than hastily dressing that wound with a thin reconciliation?”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account

“Just as the realism of mourning involves an acceptance of a future bereft of one's beloved, forgiveness's refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be. It does not vainly try by violence to restore a life that has been permanently destroyed. It refrains from a retaliatory attempt to rectify an irrevocable wrong. It looks with grief toward what life really must become going forward, and then it faces that future with a grim will and survives. It is precisely because forgiveness refuses the retributive fallacy of fixing the past that it is freed to move slowly, painfully, even perhaps like Christ with permanently open wounds into the future.”
― Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account