Does forgiving mean forgetting?
Some people say that to completely forgive someone we must forget what transpired. I am not convinced this is possible, short of brain surgery. The forgiving person will remember with sympathy. The offender must suffer the ultimate social and spiritual consequences of his or her behavior. Compassion will help the forgiving person to finally let go of the incident, leave it alone, and with the aid of the Spirit, let days and weeks of life’s other challenges and blessings help it fade into the past. 3 William George Jordan said: “We cannot forget by trying intensely to forget—this merely deepens and gives new vitality to the memory. True forgetting really means finer memory; it is displacing one memory by another … so that the first is weakened, neutralized, and faded out like a well-treated ink stain.
