Forgiveness

The Four Axioms of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a concept very few of us understand. We think that our biggest challenge is to forgive others for what they have done to us. But that is only the icing on the cake.
It is easy to forgive others when you have already forgiven yourself. But it’s impossible to forgive others if you have not forgiven yourself. The process of forgiveness starts in your own heart. It has very little to do with others.
When I forgive myself, it is not hard for me to forgive you. If I can remove the sting of blame and shame from my own heart, I can offer that gift to you. If I can see my own innocence, I can see yours too.
Most of us keep trying to back into forgiveness. We attempt to forgive other people before forgiving ourselves. That creates a real problem, because not everyone wants to be forgiven. Some people refuse to be forgiven. Some people even refuse to believe they are guilty!
Did you ever try to forgive someone who didn’t believe he/she was guilty? It’s impossible! No matter how hard you try, he/she just won’t let you.
Then there are the people who feel guilty all the time. They keep coming up to you and begging your pardon, but you just can’t bring yourself to forgive them!
Even when you realize that you are the one in need of forgiveness, you can still put the cart before the horse. You can ask someone else to forgive you, a friend perhaps, a priest or rabbi, perhaps even God. But that doesn’t work either. You can be forgiven by hundreds of people, indeed forgiven by divine right, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t forgiven yourself.
It just doesn’t work to start outside of ourselves with this process. Starting outside is just our way of beating around the bush and beating ourselves up in the process. It doesn’t open the door to our hearts. That door opens only when we realize that we are the ones who feel upset. We are the ones who feel guilty. We are the ones who attack and justify our attack. We are the ones who need forgiveness. And no one else can git it to us.
So, the first axiom of forgiveness is that it comes from within. It’s something you must do for yourself before you can demonstrate it to others.
The next axiom is that forgiveness is not conditional, nor is it partial. Forgiveness is a wholehearted, whole being act. It brings release from burdens, release from pain. Bargaining for forgiveness doesn’t work. Yet that is exactly what we try to do.
I’ll forgive myself if I get the job or relationship I want;” or “I’ll forgive you if you apologize to me first;” or “I’ll forgive you, but I won’t forgive him.
As long as there is some aspect of our attack we’re trying to justify, forgiveness just doesn’t happen. Indeed, partial forgiveness is just a subtle for of attack!
Forgiveness is unconditional and impartial. It takes me out of the past into the present. It takes me out of self-imposed illusion of “feeling separate” into an open feeling awareness of myself and others in which intimacy is a continual possibility.
When I forgive, I accept what happened in the past, including all the past judgments I made about myself or others, without bringing this material into the present or future. Or if I bring it forward, I accept that I bring it forward, and release it.
I may have grievances, but I do not “hold onto” them. I understand that my grievances come from a fear space and I allow them to fall away naturally as I move through my fear and learn to trust again.
I don’t have to be perfect to forgive, because forgiveness is an ongoing process in my life. I forgive, and judgment comes back, and I forgive again. There is never a time when I stop forgiving myself or others. This is the third axiom of forgiveness.
It’s like the story of Samuel Beckett tells about the man who likes sucking stones. He sucks one and then puts it in his pocket and then he sucks another one. He develops elaborate schemes to make sure that each stone gets equal attention, until in exasperation he throws them all away.
Of course, sometimes it feels pretty futile. We are doing the best we can and we keep getting the same lesson upside the head for four years. But the funny thing is, that when we finally let go, the metaphor doesn’t matter anymore. We are content to let the big stone we have been shoving uphill lay in the gully below. Or we are happy to empty our pockets and let the little stones fall into the sand. It’s all the same.
Burdens must fall away. It is their nature to be carried. And it is also their nature to be cast away. Lessons are here as long as we need them. Tell Sisyphus that or old man Job. They don’t want to hear it!
We don’t want to hear it either. Today it’s a problem at work; tomorrow it’s a problem with our spouse or the kids. It never ends, right?
Right! Problems continue almost forever. We can’t stop them from occurring. We can’t tidy up the external form of our lives no matter how good we are at housekeeping. Someone always breaks an egg on the newly vacuumed carpet. Someone always spills the sauce.
What would life be without spilling the sauce? Be honest. Would you trade the malformed raggedy adventure in the flesh for a tidy one? Would you take rigidity if it meant neither pain nor humor, neither struggle nor learning?
Be honest. There is something here worth preserving. Beneath the mountains of dogdew, there is grass growing. There is sunlight and shade and rivers flowing. There is love beneath the pain. And love is what we want.
We must go through the pain to get to the love, live through the darkness to get to the light. We don’t say ignore the darkness. We don’t say forget the light. We say take them together. Take yourself together with all your contradictions. That is what the healing journey is all about.
Why do we need forgiveness? Because every one of us has condemned ourselves. And every one of us has tried to work out our self-hatred by projecting the responsibility for our problems onto others.
But it just doesn’t work. Self-hatred remains self-hatred, even when other people become involved. Attaching others or defending against their attack does not lessen our deep-seated judgment of ourselves. Deep down inside every single one of us is a wounded child who needs to heal.
The process of forgiveness offers this child the opportunity to heal. It is a life-long process that continues as long as we continue to judge ourselves or others.
We aren’t going to stop judging right away, but we must begin to learn how we are wounded by the judgment we make. And, through self-acceptance, we can bring love to those wounded places within. Every act of acceptance neutralizes some judgment we have made.
Every act of acceptance open our heart to love. And love heals all wounds.
As we move through life, many situations occur and many relationships are offered to us. Each one offers an opportunity to choose fear or to choose love. If we choose love, we bless ourselves and others. If we choose fear, we cry out for love from all our woundedness. Every apparent attack is a call for love. Every crisis in life is a call for healing.
No thought or action, regardless of how ill-conceived it is, condemns us to eternal suffering. For right now, in this moment, we can make a new choice.
If Jesus could choose to love the very people who were pounding nails into his body, if He could see the face of Christ in them, how can we fail to see it in one another. The life of Jesus is a powerful teaching for us, not just because it shows us the light, but because it also shows us how we can bring the darkness in the light.
Jesus did not tell us to deny our fear. He showed us how to walk through it. Don’t think he was a stranger to temptation or doubt. He spent forty days in the desert. He cried out on the cross “Lord, why have you forsaken me?” He was human. He had a body.
He felt pain.
You cannot say he did not know the depths of suffering. He did. But in the face of all of that, he chose to love and forgive. That is why he is such a powerful teacher for us.
This is not about the specialness of Jesus, or anyone else. It is about a process that each of us must go through to find the source of peace. As such, we learn from every brother or sister who makes the journey with us.