Forgiveness

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.
Marianne Williamson

Many of us are terrified of making a mistake, of failing. We often spend many hours regretting what we did wrong. We all long to be forgiven. But true forgiveness is as rare and precious as is true listening. We say that God forgives us but I am not sure that we really beleive it, or that most people even know what real forgiveness is like. People often say they forgive us, and then expect us to reward them for it. And be forever grateful. Which just makes us feel used and resentful. Or else they say they forgive us this time but we better not do it again.

True forgiveness is recognizing that a crime was not even committed, so there is nothing to forgive. It is recognizing that we are all humans so we are all going to make mistakes and fail sometimes. We are all going to do things sometimes that in hindsight, or other people's sight, are really stupid. It is pointless to get mad at someone if you are just as likely to do something just as "bad" tomorrow. It is, of course, just as pointless to get mad at yourself for doing something that if you had known better, you never would have done. We are all doing the best we know how to do at the time. You need to forgive yourself just as much as you need to forgive others.

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world. Forgiveness is the only way to show true love. If we cannot excuse someone for being less than perfect, then we can never truly love them. True love is loving even the ugly parts of a person. We all have those parts of us that we are ashamed of, and our greatest longing is to find someone who will accept all of us; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Only then can we begin to heal our shame.