One of my blogging friends, Anne, has honored me by requesting that I write about forgiveness.  It just so happens that the subject is much on my mind, having been a recurrent theme in my exploration each morning of A Course in Miracles with my wife. For months my she and I have explored the infinite intricacy of forgiveness, learning that it is more than a perfunctory function because one is “supposed to” offer it.  Forgiveness is recognition in some sense that, “there but by the grace of God go I.”  Furthermore, if one finds himself perfunctorily forgiving people while harboring continued indignation and anger, there is no meaningful forgiveness.  ACIM even points out that forgiveness can be a way of asserting power over the other person, as in, “Hey, I forgave you for this heinous offense….so you better not forget it!”

I can offer forgiveness only to the degree that I have received it.  And “receiving” it is often avoided as it might require opening up, even to someone else, about very unsavoury things that one has done and said, so unsavoury that often they are barely remembered if at all.  It brings to mind a relevant mantra that I use often, “There is nothing wrong about being wrong other than admitting that one has been, and is, wrong.”  Each of us cannot escape our “human-ness” and to be human is to have an ingrained tendency to be wrong, often even in the pursuit of doing things that are “right.”  It is very liberating to find the grace to be able to put into words with another person, or even in a journal, moments of shame that he has recoiled from for years.

Anne made an observation when she emailed me about this subject that is highly relevant, She noted, “I do not think we can actually ‘decide’ to forgive. Maybe it happens to us where we are swept into a current.”  This “current” is so important.  Until we have begun to experience the fluidity of life, its “flow,” our linear-thinking will often confine us to habitual ways of thinking and feeling which often make forgiveness little more than a perfunctory, rote performance. This flow of life is very related to discovering the practice of meditation about twelve years ago, a practice which I happen to know Anne is much more familiar with than I am.  Until I discovered meditation I did not realize the wisdom of the teaching, “You are not your thoughts.  You are the one having them.”  This wisdom helped me to understand that the cacophony of thoughts that had free-rein in my mind and heart, left little or no space to say to myself on occasion, “Oh, I didn’t even mean that nice thing I said!  I was just reading a cue card and ‘being nice’ again.” That was the beginning of the “internal dialogue” of Hannah Arendt that I speak of often.