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The meaning of the word didn’t always mean: ‘to stop feeling angry/resentful/sad/hurt, to stop feeling a bad feeling, or to stop feeling the need or desire to punish someone’, but used to mean to give someone something from yourself – at cost to yourself. Interestingly, because the word meant simply to ‘give’ you could use the word to talk about a dad who ‘forgave’ his daughter in marriage, or a man who ‘forgave’ his wife his love, just as much as you could say that a man might ‘forgive’ another man the debt owed to him or the punishment he deserved for having injured him.
And the crucial point about all this is that while my concept of forgiveness is about changing the way I feel towards another person, the older original meaning of the word is about changing the way I act towards another person… and the difference this makes, seems to me to be liberatingly huge
To check all this out, I looked up the origin of the word online and discovered that the word forgive comes from the old English word forgiefan meaning to “give, grant or allow,” or “to give up” or “to give in marriage;” and is made up of the two words for meaning “completely” and giefan meaning “give”. The modern sense of “to give up desire or power to punish” originates from use of the compound as a Germanic translation of Latin perdonare which in Dutch is vergeven, and in German is Vergeben…
So basically its like the AFN Vibe. :smokebuds:
And the crucial point about all this is that while my concept of forgiveness is about changing the way I feel towards another person, the older original meaning of the word is about changing the way I act towards another person… and the difference this makes, seems to me to be liberatingly huge
To check all this out, I looked up the origin of the word online and discovered that the word forgive comes from the old English word forgiefan meaning to “give, grant or allow,” or “to give up” or “to give in marriage;” and is made up of the two words for meaning “completely” and giefan meaning “give”. The modern sense of “to give up desire or power to punish” originates from use of the compound as a Germanic translation of Latin perdonare which in Dutch is vergeven, and in German is Vergeben…
So basically its like the AFN Vibe. :smokebuds: