A Delicate, Difficult Balance

This is a difficult balance to sustain, but it seems to be important to hold these two apparently opposing values in some kind of equilibrium: the need to reclaim the future for humanity by forgiving its offenders, by refusing to let their past actions simply stop time, as it were, and freeze it at a particular moment of passion or madness or carelessness or forgetfulness or confusion; while, at the same time, retaining the moral ability to identify the actions themselves as bad, as things that should never have been done....

[I]t is an observable truth that the inability or refusal to forgive can be a sentence of psychic imprisonment that locks the person forever into the remembrance of the original trespass... we cannot order people to forgive, but we can recognize that their inability to forgive may have the tragic effect of binding them to the past and condemning them to a life sentence of bitterness.

-- Excerpt from On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgivable by Richard Holloway Connongate (2002)