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I recently got together with a dear friend that I had not seen in years. She was traveling through Massachusetts, and decided to visit for a couple of days. It was major catch-up time. The events of my last five years have had a few deep difficulties in them, and as I was catching her up - with what seemed like one trauma-drenched-tale after another -- an odd thing happened. I got tired of having trauma in my past. Through unforgiveness, I had been dragging it into my present and presumably my future.
I found myself skipping over stories that I have told a dozen times to a dozen people and saying instead to her, "It was a hard time," and letting it go at that.
I didn't have to replay the drama, portray the villains, display my legitimate sorrow. That is not to say that cruel things were not done, and that I did not have to endure some pretty rotten moments. I sure did. And there used to be comfort in sharing with a close friend the can-you-believe-it-happened nature of some of these events.
But suddenly, I didn't need to be comforted, or understood. I realized, with a shock, that I had begun to forgive people -- my father - his girlfriend -- my ex -- life in general. I was finally starting to understand what the heck forgiveness meant!
Websters says:
1 a : to give up resentment of or claim to requital for [forgive an insult] b : to grant relief from payment of [forgive a debt]
2 : to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon [forgive one's enemies]
First, let me say that there is no more loving friend than she who will let you grind over the same tale until you can shake free from it. I have been blessed with just such friends -- women (and men) who trusted my urge to be free of bad feelings enough that they let me slog through them for a while until I found my footing -- extending a hand when the quicksand suddenly loomed up beneath me.
I had friends smart enough to shut the heck up and let me speak my way to greater wholeness. They knew that to listen was big. They knew me well enough to know that I didn't want to wear my sorrows like some radioactive but threadbare shawl. They knew they could hear me out.
And they knew they could kick my spiritual tail when I needed to be shoved into a deeper awareness.
I don't know everything about forgiveness, but I have apparently learned something. I share it here in the hopes that it takes root and helps someone else, too. Maybe yes -- maybe no. If nothing else it is a sign that you are not alone in struggling with this.
These were my rungs toward the light, in no particular order. Your mileage may differ. Please add your own.
1. Forgiveness is a corrosive feeling. It grounds us in a victim position. Even if we were victims, we don't stop being victims by rehearsing our victim-hood.
2. Sometimes sharing helps. Sometimes it doesn't. There is no set rule here.
3. Forgiving does not mean putting oneself in harm's way again. It is not denial of the truth. Step away from injury, always. Insist on justice when you can, knowing that justice is different from retribution.
4. Forgiving is easier when the person you are forgiving is sorry. But it is not impossible even if the person does not regret hurting us.
5. Forgiving means not having to live out of the wound. We do not always have to shape our lives around a broken spot. Just because our mother said X or our father said Y or our husband did Q - does not mean that we have to live as though they never stopped doing it. If we don't forgive, we keep building a life around our pain.
6. The best that some people are capable of is less than we may deserve from them. That doesn't mean it was not their best effort at the time. Or that it didn't hurt.
7. To not forgive, is to attach. The people we least forgive are the ones we most strongly attached to -- even if we do not like them. Un-forgiveness is like superglue.
8. Forgiveness is seeing someone's flaws in a new way. It helped when I started to see my father as a man who was a good man who had lost his way.
