"To Err Is Human, Forgive Is Divine"

Last night at holy hour I was asked to be the speaker. The topic was all about forgiveness. I was very excited for this talk and all was going well with it until I woke-up yesterday morning. I woke-up sicker than I have all week. I did not have a fever so I managed to make myself still go into work. As the day progressed, however, I began to feel worse and worse and eventually ended up with a 100.5 degree fever. I took advil and was very tempted to skip holy hour. It would not have even been a mental debate had I not promised to speak. I decided to take advil in hopes that the fever would go down and I could give the talk. Luckily, it did go down, and I did still give my talk. I had planned it for about ten to fifteen minutes. but fighting a really bad cough I shortened it quite a bit, but still managed to keep the important parts in my very short talk. I will share my outline with you all here....

I. Introduce myself and my talk.

"To err is human, to forgive is divine"

-Alexander Pope-

II. How we are all called to forgiveness

A. God does not call us to do anything He would not do Himself

1. confession

2. how some of Jesus' last few words before His death were "Forgive them Father, they

know not what they do."

II. Some common misconceptions about forgiveness

A. How some people believe that when we forgive someone we are condoning the action that

they did

1. We can only forgive what we believe is wrong

2. We are not condoning what happened. We are only choosing to move on from it.

B. Some people believe that we have to be asked for forgiveness in order to forgive

1. Again not true because, sadly, not everyone will be looking for forgiveness

2. Forgiveness is internal

3. We do not even have to tell the person we are forgiving that we forgive them.

III. Why forgive?

A. Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves

B. Forgiveness challenges us to believe that the final outcome of a situation does not have to

be our hurt.

C. Every meaningful relationship must have forgiveness involved

D. When we forgive we tend to gain more confidence and are happier when living in the

present moment.

E. Physically people who are better with working on forgiveness tend to have lower blood

pressure and lower stress-levels.

F. When we forgive we tend be less likely to have problems with substance abuse and

depression.

IV. What happens when we do not choose to forgive?

A. We allow to continue being prisoners of the situation.

B. We are not really in control of the situation, the situation ends up controlling us.

C. We bring our anxieties and bitterness into our future relationships

D. We can not fully enjoy the present when we are holding a grudge about something that

happened to us in our past.

E. People fall into depression more easily

F. Most importantly we put up a barrier between our relationship with God.

V. Forgiveness is a journey...

A. It is not always an easy process. It may take days, weeks, months, or even years

depending on the degree of hurt that a situation has caused us.

B. To help us through this journey we must rely on God and our faith. We cannot do it alone.

VI. We all make mistakes

A. We are all human and no one is perfect

B. Compassion is a key ingredient to forgiveness. We must show compassion to one another.

C. Forgiveness is supposed to be a humbling experience. We are not supposed to believe we

are better than the other people involved because we are forgiving them. It is not

supposed to be like that at all.

VII. Share the story of St. Maria Goretti

VIII. Conclusion

End with

"We do not really know how to forgive until we know what it is to be forgiven.
Therefore we should be glad that we can be forgiven by others. It is our
forgiveness of one another that makes the love of Jesus manifest in our lives,
for in forgiving one another we act towards one another as He has acted towards us."

-Thomas Merton-