A Ponder...
Forgiving is essential in a community of hurt and hurtful persons.  There is, however, such a cultural confusion about what constitutes forgiveness...

First, we tend to confuse forgiveness with a spirit of indifference, the pretense that it does not matter.  "Oh, that is all right..."  That is not forgiving; it is lying.  The truth is that these things matter a great deal and it does not help to avoid the issue.

Second, there is the mistaken idea that to forgive is to cease from hurting... It simply is not true that the act of forgiveness necessarily erases the hurt.  Hurting is not evil.  We may hurt for a long time to come.

Third, many would have us believe that in order to forgive, we must forget.  But this is not the case.  To erase the memory would be like violence to the human personality.

Fourth, we trick ourselves into believing that to forgive means that the relationship can be just the same as before the offense.  We might as well make peace with the fact that the relationship will never be the same again.  By the grace of God, it can be a hundred times better, but it will never be the same.  We destroy ourselves and all those around us when we pretend things are just the same as before.

Richard J. Foster, 1987

Another Ponder...

(They say) "Forgive and forget."  (But) forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting, and forgetting certainly has nothing to do with forgiveness.

In fact, the power of forgiveness is in the letting go of something 'owed', usually to oneself, or to another, according to my etymological dictionary.  In forgiving, I am neither approving or condemning, I am simply releasing a demand for tribute, or payment for a past transgression.  Actually my resentments seem to be demands.  I tend to fondle and stroke the hurts, real or imagined, from the past and to continue to demand that tribute be paid because of their having happened.  And the paying of the tribute, someone's contrition, usually does not satisfy, since the hunger or craving persists.  If I can forgive, then I m the one who is freed from the hunger, or craving for payment. 

Tom Hoskins, 1993