An attitude of gratitude, an attitude of forgiveness.

Having forgiveness in your heart and being a forgiving person are premier Christian concepts, but it is a lot easier to talk forgiveness than to give forgiveness. For some of us, forgiving those who harmed us, or caused us serious emotional pain, seems beyond our comprehension and is just too hard to do.

Nonetheless, there are ways to come to forgiveness for others. One unlikely path is to have an attitude of gratitude toward those we need to forgive.

I often write prayers in my journal. In one prayer I asked God to show me how to release resentments I have held tightly for a long time. As I wrote, God gave me the answer. Look beyond the bitterness and anger, search for what was right and good in those relationships--use gratitude as the foundation for forgiveness.

I have had a bitter resentment toward my father for his alcoholism and the pain it caused me, especially on my 14th birthday. That was more than 40 years ago but I still embraced the hurt.

He did not come home from work on time that day. He was not there to celebrate my birthday along with my mother and sister. We all knew where he was, at a bar near his work drinking with his cronies. When he did come in at about nine o'clock, he was drunk. He spent a few minutes talking to me, and making (to me) a half-hearted apology for not being there.

I had other resentments toward him, but that one was immense. My father died in 1987, and for years, each time I thought about him, especially on my birthday, that's what I saw--him lying on my bed nearly a half-century ago, his speech slurred, and acting contrite for what he'd done.

The cliche "Forgive and forget" is easy to preach, hard to practice, and something many of us don't know how to do.

Many of us struggle with forgiveness because we feel that if we forgive others for the harm they caused us we are saying, in effect, that what they did does not matter. It feels like we are saying the wrong done was not really wrong and the harm done really did not hurt.

Writing in my journal day after day, looking for a way to sincerely forgive my father, I kept hearing, "Where's the gratitude?.... What did he do right?.... What did he do that made your life better, today?" I wanted to ignore those questions; not answer them. But they helped me see, and admit that I was focusing only on the negatives in our relationship. In her book Attitudes of Gratitude in Love, M. J. Ryan wrote: "Noticing what's right (in relationships) is more useful that analyzing what's wrong." That sentence helped me focus sharply on the positives in the relationship with my father.

I had to look at the positives, too. I started writing positive aspects of our relationship in my journal, and my heart started to thaw and open--slowly and cautiously--to forgiveness.

Rich Buhler, in his book Love: No Strings Attached says: "Each of us has a language of love that is unique, distinct. We use it to express love to others, and we expect others to use it to express love to us. When that doesn't happen, we fear that love may have been lost." Though he was referring to a husband/wife relationship, it's reasonable to apply it to parent/child relationships too. When we don't know or understand someone's language of love it's pretty hard to realize they love us."

My father's language of love was different from mine. My language of love envisioned an arm around the shoulder, and him making "I'm proud of you, son" kinds of statements. His language of love, I now see, was more distant and more pragmatic.

By writing every day in my journal, I found many things to be grateful for. For example, my parochial school education. My parents could have sent my sister and me to public grammar school and high school, but instead my father paid tuition for us through the 12th grade. By today's standards the tuition was low, but in the 1950s tuition for two children cost at least several days' wages each month. That did not even include the cost of books, supplies and school uniforms.

That foundation has served me well, not only in terms of education, but also in terms of a strong relationship with God. I am grateful for it.

I never went hungry, I always had a place to sleep, good clothes to wear, and other amenities that only now, through the eyes of an adult and parent, can I appreciate how hard it was to provide them--and how much I have to be grateful for.

I learned basic auto mechanics and maintenance from him, too. He kept the family cars running smoothly and reliably, and at the same time taught me how to do it. How many thousands of dollars he must have saved me over the decades when I did the same things. I learned, too, basic carpentry, plumbing and other useful skills from him. And I am grateful for how much it has helped me and my family.

As I explored our relationship, I recognized his language of love was not perfect or easy to decipher, but it was sincere. It was a language of education, not emotion. A language of "I am showing you this so you can take care of yourself and have a better life." He probably did not realize that was what he was doing--I sure did not know it at the time--but I see it that way now. As I am able to see more and more the things he did right, and they grow in stature while the things he did wrong are diminished.

In Attitudes of Gratitude in Love, Ryan writes: "In their humble, gracious way, (our) expressions of gratitude ... open our hearts and gets us out of bitterness and resentment ... and expand our feelings of love for others." As we find reasons to be grateful to that person, and are more grateful, our love, and hence forgiveness, can expand.

Without question, forgiveness sounds easier than it actually is, and it does not necessarily come easily. But by searching every day for reasons to be grateful to my father, and to others, I am able to forgive them more fully, and I am able to more honestly follow Christ's admonishment to Peter to forgive others not just seven times, but seventy times seven.