If you could make the world a more forgiving place for you, would you?
For as long as human beings have been around, they have looked for ways to arrange the world and its events so as to fulfill our needs, wishes, hopes, and desires. Over millennia, we have looked for these ways in science, magic, politics, and warfare, all to varying degrees of success for any given effort, and sometimes unfortunately with achievement for one person resulting in a setback for someone else. Arranging the world is a perennial human desire, no less today than all those millennia ago.
The premise for it all is that human beings actually can arrange their world to meet their needs, wishes, hopes, and desires. From the dawn of humanity, we observed our own capabilities to use our minds and bodies to search the world for that which we needed and that in which we found pleasure. In time, we learned that we could meet our needs, wishes, hopes, and desires more quickly and more fully if we used our human capabilities to arrange the world. In a way, our own capabilities became not only what it meant to be human, but the extent to which they were used in our lives to fulfill our individual and collective potential came to define what it is to being living fully.
One of the most important arrangements we make in our world is the arrangement of our relationships. We are social beings, born with immediate needs for bonding, love, affection, social reciprocity, and kinship. In order to meet the needs, hopes, wishes, and desires we have for our relationships, we seek a way to arrange our relationships that will accomplish that.
One thing we may want to arrange for ourselves is a world that does not punish us for our shortcomings, flaws, and failures. If we can, we would even prefer a world arranged to respond to our shortcomings, flaws, and failures with love, encouragement, and support. Doesn’t that sound like a very good world? The good news is that we actually can arrange our world to be a place that responds to our shortcomings, flaws and failures with love, encouragement, and support.
I would not say that the world is a situation that runs on a “give x and you will get y” sort of transactional deal all the time and everywhere. However, it definitely is a “what goes around comes around” and “reap what you sow” situation. We could say that in general “give x and you will get x” is the deal. So, if we want a world that responds to our shortcomings, flaws, and failures with love, encouragement, and support, our basic plan should be to respond to shortcomings, flaws, and failures in others with love, encouragement, and support. That sounds like forgiveness, because that’s exactly what it is.
Let me confirm for you what I am saying will happen when you start working on being a forgiving person: as you forgive others you are arranging your world to be forgiving, and you will observe that forgiveness reflected…even reciprocated…in the world. You are using the basic universal law of cause and effect to arrange forgiveness in your world. The more you forgive, the more forgiveness there is in your world.
Today’s Liturgy of the Word for the Catholic Church includes the biblical passage in which Jesus teaches his disciples to pray to God with the words “forgive us our debts as we forgive tour debtors” (Matthew 6:12). The words “debt” and “debtors” are words meant to refer to a shortcoming or failure, just like when we can’t or don’t pay what is owed in the financial world, but applied to our human situation and relationships more broadly. These words of prayer to God cement our intention to actively participate in arranging the world both for our own personal forgiveness and God’s forgiveness, both by our forgiveness of others. t is pretty powerful when you think about yourself co-creating a world of forgiveness with God. What a business partner!
Later in that same section of Matthew, Jesus confirms that we will see our forgiveness reflected and reciprocated in our world by God (Matthew 6:14-15):
If you forgive others their transgressions,
your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others,
neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.
The meaning is clear: when you forgive, you will see your forgiveness reflected and reciprocated in myriad ways as God forgives you. The more you do that, the more you will see. The less you do that, the less forgiveness you will see. Pretty straightforward but we human beings can make it more complicated than it is or find it inconvenient to what we want to do and consequently choose not to put it on our personal “To Do” list for any day. Sometimes we may have grown up or grown older without ever having encountered the idea that we can arrange our world to be more forgiving by being more forgiving ourselves. In that situation, it’s understandable that a person just hasn’t been as forgiving as they maybe could be, and we can feel pretty good that it’s never too late to start forgiving.
Please share these words with someone who needs them today.
Tom Delaney, O.F.S.
This article is an original work of the author and was not composed by or with artificial intelligence (AI). The author is solely responsible for the contents of this article and the opinions and perspectives expressed in the article are solely those of the author. © 2026 Thomas Delaney. All rights reserved.
artwork: Hildegard of Bingen, 12th cent. C.E.
Live and Forgive 