If we follow these ideas truly and deeply a very disconcerting notion starts to enter our consciousness. If we truly halve all debts owing to us, we begin to  recognise that the harms done to us are not our possessions. 

Do you protest that  they never were your possessions ? 
But think - how much do you think of yourself as your history. The tale of who did what and to whom, and how this has lead to the place where you find yourself - how important is this when people ask who you are? 

Forgiveness asks us to put this description of who we are to one side. 

Thus we begin to practise true poverty. Poverty of spirit. Our memories are not our own memories, our history is not our own possession, the harm that has been done to us is not owned by us, to do what we like with. Yet how we cling to our histories as if they were identical with ourselves !

Consider. If someone accidentally bumps into me, do I limp a bit, just to make sure that they know what they have done ? Do I remind myself and maybe others, that I would be better off today if someone had not cheated me some years ago ? 

Remember that we follow the God who died in agony rather than assert his right to be treated decently, rather than to assert the rights of power and potential his creativity might expect in our lives.

But remember also that we follow the Man who refused to stay dead. And if he did not stay dead, how can anyone remain guilty for his betrayal and torture ? 

Perhaps the only difference between St. Peter and Judas Iscariot was not that one took silver for his betrayal, but that one returned to receive his forgiveness and to compfort the others, and the other could not find it in himself to do so. To be forgiven for betraying Jesus was tantamount to realising that ones own acts of power were utterly useless, and bereft of personal power. The biggest thing ever done in my life, whether for good or ill, has no power without His assent.

There might be some point to pogroms and crusades and inquisitions had the story of God's son ended on Friday afternoon on the cross. Just the simple vengeance, to make them feel as bad as we do. (remember the old saying, Nothing's going to bring him back). There might be some point to our remaining sinners if our spiritual sickness nailed him up and left him there. Then, ever after God could point at us and say - "Look what you did" and we could say, "We can't help it, look what we did? How can anything go right for us after that?" But he refused to allow even that crime to have lasting consequences, we can have no excuse to hang back, even murder has been overcome, and it's consequences demolished.

Healing and forgiveness are very much connected. If I am healed and my past is healed, then there is no longer anything to hold against my enemies is there ?  No longer any reason someone who hurt me in the past should feel too guilty to enjoy their lives.

This is true poverty of spirit. Not that we dream one day of approaching the Throne of Grace, there to be so justified that those who have hurt us will be ashamed. But that - it no longer matters. I do not want to be thought noble because I forgive, because my hurts are not my hurts they're his, and they've been taken away. If the harms that I do have been forgiven, taken away, never thought of again, then even my sin does not belong to me any more. My story is not my story, but his. 

We are all as capable of harming as of healing. We all do hurt to each other, whether we wish it or not. God, however,  sends rain on the just and the unjust, and bad people receive just as much sunlight as good people, and each of us knows hardship, and wealth of one kind or another.

It seems that as we let go of our past, and our pains, and our history, we begin to find our true place. We are no longer separate from the Creation, we are no longer separate from our God. We fly with the eagle, we walk and do not stumble. We mount up with wings. 

As we contemplate we begin to experience God, closer than our bloodstream, our thoughts, our breath, nearer to us than our feelings and our sense of personality. And as we begin to experience God, we begin to able to feel what it is to be other people, to fly with the eagle and to run like the wolf. Because we are no longer closed in our minds in our description of what and who we are.

It is not money that Jesus identifies as Mammon. It is possessions. And somehow our own righteousness, our own history of harms and of things to forgive is one of the hardest of all possessions to give away.