Song of Prayer

ACIM Rapid City Study Group will meet this Wednesday 11/29/ 2017 7:00 PM at the Agape Spiritual Center 610 Saint Francis St . Rapid City, SD 57701 Our Topic this week Is II. Forgiveness to Destroy

"I Will Forgive but Never Forget"

Excerpts from the Academy Class held at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles Temecula CA Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. Part I

This topic, "I Will Forgive But Never Forget," is a way of talking about what The Song of Prayer pamphlet refers to as "forgiveness-to-destroy" (S.2.II). The section in Chapter 30 called "The Justification for Forgiveness" is one of the few places in the Course where this concept of forgiveness-to-destroy is talked about—Lesson 126 is another—although the term itself is used only in the pamphlet.

The phrase "I will forgive but never forget" is a well-known one and is used by many groups and people. It is typically what the world thinks of as forgiveness: yes, you have done something terrible, unconscionable, and sinful, and I do forgive you, but I will not forget. One of the rationalizations for that position is that if I forget and if the world forgets what you did, then we can end up in the same boat again. That, for example, is what many Jewish groups and Jewish people say about the holocaust. "We will forgive, but we will not forget, because if we forget, it will happen again." A Course in Miracles is quite clear about why that does not work. People do not realize—because most people are not psychologically sophisticated—that when they adopt such a position they have made it the sin real. If you make error real and call it sinful, the only reason for your doing that is that you believe it is real in you. That is what is important to understand. If you accuse someone of sin, whether you are doing it on a global scale or a personal scale, and then you adopt the position, "I will forgive but I will never forget," you are accusing them of a sin because you do not want to see that sin in yourself. https://www.facim.org/…/i-will-forgive-but-neve…/part-i.aspx