For making war and calling it peace, special privilege and calling it justice, indifference and calling it tolerance, pollution and calling it progress, may we be cured. For telling ourselves and others that evil is inevitable while good is impossible, may we stand corrected. God of our mixed up, tragic, aspiring, doubting and insurgent lives, help us to be as good as in our hearts we have always wanted to be. Like a familiarity with the land, even though buried with life-altering dangers that might remain submerged long past the conflict, familiarity does have a security about it, not like the open and honest, but perhaps painfully discomforting process of forgiveness. There are four components to forgiveness, the first one being remorse which is what most are familiar with, in fact some might think that it's synonymous with forgiveness.
Remorse means being genuinely sorry for what has happened.
Remorse is rooted in the strong, sincere and deeply felt awareness that someone has been hurt. Next is resolution, the determination to change, not to repeat whatever it was that caused the hurt. This isn't always such a simple thing and unfortunately I think it's sometimes made too easy - let's call it cheap forgiveness. I have a colleague who was telling me about a man in his congregation who was in the hospital dying. The man's wife was so angry, she felt so used, that she walked out of the room and didn't come back until after he'd died.