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No one really forgives unless he has been hurt. We turn the miracle into a cheap indulgence when we pretend to forgive people who have never hurt us. I do not mean that you can forgive only scoundrels who laid a hand on you. You can be hurt when you suffer at the hands of people you love. But unless you are hurt, speak of something other than forgiving.

But not every hurt needs to be forgiven. There are some hurts that we can swallow, shrug off, and chalk up to the risks of being earthen vessels in a crowded world. We should not try to forgive when all we need is simply a little spiritual generosity. Consider the following hurts:

Annoyances. People. annoy us by being late for appointments, by telling boring stories at dinner, and by cutting in front of us at the checkout stand.

Defeats. Some people succeed when we fail; they get promotions when we are ignored; they get the glittering prizes we want; they always seem to be there ahead of us—and to make things worse, these people who beat us are our friends.

Slights. People we want to notice us ignore us; professors we adored forget our names two years after graduation; pastors we love never invite us into their special circle; and the boss does not even invite us to his daughter's wedding.

These are all hurts, but they are not the kind that need forgiving. Such bits and pieces of suffering require tolerance, magnanimity, indulgence, humility—but not forgiving!

The kinds of hurts that need forgiving are both deep and moral. They are deep because they slice the fiber that holds us together in a human relationship. They are moral because they are wrongful, unfair, intolerable. We cannot indulge them or ignore them; we cannot shrug them off. We cannot just chalk them up to the human condition. The sorts of hurts that need forgiving are the ones that tend, in the nature of the case, to build a wall between the wrongdoer and the person he wrongfully hurts.

There are two kinds of hurts that must be answered with the miracle of forgiving. They are acts of disloyalty and acts of betrayal. Maybe there are hurts that need forgiveness that do not fit these categories, but most do.

What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty. The bonding tells us who we are: we are who we are, most deeply, because of the people we belong to. This is why disloyalty is so serious. When someone who belongs to us treats us like a stranger,- he digs' a ditch; and he builds a wall between the two of us. And in doing so he assaults our very identity. Words like "abandon," or "forsake," or "let down" come to mind:

• A husband has an affair with his wife's friend.
  
  
• A partner who promised to come through with a loan reneges at the last moment when he can make a better profit with his money elsewhere.
  
  
• A friend who promised to recommend you for promotion lets you down when he discovers you are out of favor with the boss.
  
  
• Your father fails to show up when you are given a coveted award.
  
  
• Your neighbor spurns you when you, a Jew, need a place to hide from the Gestapo.

These examples all have the same painful feature: someone who belongs to you by some spoken or unspoken promise treats you like a stranger.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46