God's Poor Memory

During the first days of his presidency, Calvin Coolidge stayed in a suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington, before he and his family could arrange to move into the White House. Early one morning he awoke to see a burglar removing a wallet and a watch chain from his trouser pockets. Coolidge told the burglar that those items were not that important to him, but he asked him not to take the charm linked to the chain because of the engraving on it.

The robber read the engraving: “Presented to Calvin Coolidge, Speaker of the House, by the Massachusetts General Court.”

Dazed by the realization that he was stealing from the newly elected president, he apologized profusely, explaining that he had attempted the thievery because he and his college roommate needed money to pay their hotel bill and the railroad fare back to the college campus. Coolidge open the wallet and handed him a face-saving “loan” of thirty-two dollars, for which he never expected repayment (though it was later repaid in full). He then advised the lad to avoid alerting the Secret Service by leaving the hotel suite as unconventionally as he had entered.*

This was forgiveness without reprisal, a succinct depiction of Divine Mercy.

The well-known maxim “To err is human; to forgive divine” has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, for he, like Calvin Coolidge did not have a vengeful heart. When the Confederate army was finally defeated, Lincoln was asked how he would treat the rebellious Southerners. His magnanimous willingness to forgive was articulated in his unexpected reply: “I will treat them as if they had never been away.”*

That forgive-and-forget mentality, though rare among humans, reflects God’s way of thinking. In fact, forgiveness can be said to depict the mind of God. As Shakespeare put is, “Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.”*

How can it be “divine” to forgive? Human forgiveness partakes of the divine when it encompasses the element of forgetting. No, of course God doesn’t have a poor memory. But God does choose not to remember; that is, he refuses to harbor a negative attitude (wrath) toward us sinners when we show sincere repentance.

One second-grader in catechism class described this divine attribute with almost theological perspicacity: “God forgives and forgets, and then he forgets what he has forgiven.” Or a thoughtful quipster phrased it. “When God ‘buries the hatchet,’ he doesn’t mark the gravesite.”

Our choice of self-alienation from God – that is, our choice of evil – disappoints him far more than we can ever imagine. But that indescribably deep disappointment on God’s part simply “evaporates,” as it were, when we truly repent. When we say that God forgives and forgets, we mean that he forgives the sinner and forgets the sin. That’s almost a paraphrase of a passage from Hebrews, "I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12; see also 10:17).

This “divine forgetting” is mentioned eight times in the Bible. God simply refuses to harbor thoughts of our past failings. His love for the precious sinner is incandescent in the Gospels: Jesus shows the father embracing the Prodigal Son on his return home; he saves the adulterous woman from being stoned and promised heaven to the repentant thief dying next to him on Calvary. His loving mercy is the blazing sun that dispels all the darkness, which can then no longer becloud the repentant soul. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life: (John 8:12).

It is insulting to God’s goodness to insist on regarding oneself as sin-smeared after the Lord has graciously stooped to cleanse one’s soul. That implicit denial of his merciful love can nudge one toward the sin of despair, which violates the virtue of hope. Jesus revealed to one mystic that he is wounded by those who doubt his mercy in this way; such doubt bespeaks unrequited love. Its inner pain, he said, exceeds the physical pain of his Good Friday scourging.

*Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985). p. 140.

*Abraham Lincoln, in William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke (Louisville, KY: Know, 2001), p. 244.

*William Shakespeare, “the Merchant of Venice,” Act IV, Scene 1, in The Portable Shakespeare (New York: Pentuin, 1972), p. 627.

This excerpt is from the book The Awesome Mercy of God, by John H. Hampsch,C.M.F., originally published by Servant Books. It and other of Fr. Hampsch's books and audio/visual materials can be purchased from Claretian Teaching Ministry, 20610 Manhattan Pl, #120, Torrance, CA 90501-1863. Phone 1-310-782-6408.