THIS COLUMN BEGINS a three-part series on a challenging topic: forgiveness. Who among us does not have a broken relationship or two littering our personal landscape? Who isn't haunted by some offense, whether given or received?

Besides its perennial personal relevance, forgiveness, or some variation on it, is in the news these days. It may be a celebrity, such as movie star Mel Gibson, seeking pardon from their public. Or forgiveness may engage an entire nation, as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission did. It may take form in the apology from a pope or a president.

But why is forgiveness so challenging? Look no further than the dictionary to answer that one. "Forgiveness": "to excuse for a fault or offense; pardon," "to renounce anger or resentment against," and "to absolve from payment." Plenty of challenges there!

Forgiveness does battle with our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong. If we forgive something awful, are we somehow condoning it? Beyond that, forgiveness involves emotions, anger and resentment. Such passions of the heart don't always follow directions from the head, even well-meant ones. Finally, and as the third definition suggests, forgiveness can involve money or property -- almost always a danger zone.

If forgiveness is challenging, it also is necessary. Poet Robert Frost put it plainly when he wrote, "To be social is to be forgiving." Families, congregations, neighborhoods, schools, and all the other social building blocks of our lives, are laboratories for the study of forgiveness. One of the great things about marriage is that it gives us plenty of opportunities to practice forgiveness.

The alternative to forgiveness and reconciliation is depicted in C.S. Lewis' book "The Great Divorce." Lewis pictures hell as a vast, gray city, inhabited only at its outer edges. There are rows and rows of empty houses in the middle. They are empty because everyone who once lived in them quarreled with the neighbors and moved, and quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again, on and on. That, says Lewis, is how hell got so large; people chose distance over dealing with each other and learning to forgive.

In the second and third installments, I'll suggest some steps in the dance of forgiveness, how-to's if you will. But forgiveness is always more than a technique or formula. It is a matter of the heart and of what we truly believe is at the very heart of reality. Do we see life in some fundamental way as gracious, as giftlike? Or is it all a matter of getting what we are due, what we're entitled to? In my own faith, something like grace or mercy is at the heart of it. The words of Jesus, "Forgive one another, as I have forgiven you," express this.

The place to begin, then, may not be specific instances or hard cases. We'll get to that. The starting point is how we see life and our own experience. Have we needed forgiveness ourselves? Have we received it? Start there, with your own experience of having your slate wiped clean, of being given a second chance, or of having the burden lifted. Our capacity for cutting others some slack improves when we are in touch with and honest about how God, as well as other people, have cut us some slack or given us a second chance when we needed it.

Christianity, as well as some other faiths, begins with this premise: God is gracious and forgiving. Of course, we might protest, "Well, I've never done anything wrong. I don't need forgiveness." If that's our view of things, there are a couple of possibilities. One, we are clueless. Two, we have a severe case of selective memory. Three, we are sociopaths. Four: all of the above.

If, on the other hand, we've lived a few years and can manage reasonable honesty with ourselves, then chances are good that we have been on the receiving end of someone's graciousness, even that we have experienced the freeing mercy of a gracious God.

The great essayist Pascal said there are two kinds of people in the world, "There are sinners who believe themselves to be saints; and there are saints who know themselves to be sinners." Knowing ourselves, our own need of mercy and the experience of grace is where the capacity for forgiveness begins.