Three Forms of Forgiveness

[Guest guest]

Three Forms of Forgiveness

Wendy Strgar

 

On the Edge of Forgiveness

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you. --

Unknown

 

Forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past. It is the path of

redemption where life can move forward from the present moment, where the past

fades with memory and we have the internal space to accept the daily

imperfections of life with those we love as they are. It is a true forgetting,

this forgiveness that frees the victim as deeply as the perpetrator. The

relationship is new, starting fresh, without the burden of selective memory.

This is not a path that we command; it is one that we serve.

 

Forgiveness does not come easily and for many it is an unknown emotional story.

It requires patience and is rarely a hasty proposition. It cannot be forced but

it is a way of thinking that has to be chosen. The most arduous and sometimes

insurmountable part of forgiving is that one must fully feel the injury and

acknowledge it before anything can be forgiven. This is why so many families

never heal. The children don't have the language and emotional maturity to

express themselves. The parents, often suffering with their own unresolved

childhood pains, have little insight into the damage they have done. As a parent

myself now, I often and painfully bear witness to the enormity of the task and

even with my best intentions I fall short. Some days there are too many unmet

needs and not enough resources and it is impossible to not inflict some harm on

the way to raising another human being.

 

 

 

I have been working toward forgiveness, which has been called the final form of

love, for much of my adult life with my original family. I knew it was a real

and promised place from the forgiveness that had transformed my marriage, but

still at every family reunion it has eluded me. Inevitably something in me would

crack, destroying the tentative approach we were all making. I haven't had the

heart to love the most broken places in me that are so loudly mirrored in these

interactions

 

 

 

Each meeting becomes more poignant and urgent as all the participants age and

each time together has the potential for being the last. I long for the freedom

to open my heart in these moments but mostly am faced with all of my worst and

ugliest character traits that are mirrored and louder in the previous

generation. As I witness the source of all my most unwanted behaviors, the ones

that stick to me regardless of how much or for how long I push away the

relationships they came through, I understand finally that all of this

brokenness is not about them anymore, my brokenness is mine alone.

 

 

Still the crass and unforgiving language, the negative spin on whatever is

happening, the fear of lack which precludes any real giving -- these traits that

I know intimately bring up a deep revulsion in me. My children see me wince at

my father's casual disregard for one of my own children which is at once so

blatant and so comfortable for him that he is not even aware of it. They hear

the tension in my voice when I try calmly to instruct him on the etiquette of

sharing a meal with a family, of something so basic as limiting your portion so

there is enough for everyone. They hold their breath wondering if this will be

the trigger that leads to the explosion that generally accompanies our rare

family reunions. My twelve year old son slides in next to me and gives me his

knowing smile at yet another oblivious blunder. My eldest daughter cues me to

breathe.

 

 

Then there is the glimmer of goodness as my father teaches my son about the

stock exchange, a piece of my own education that has stayed with me for decades

coming through direct to my kids. He starts recounting stories from his own

broken childhood that I remembered fragments of, but now I get the missing

details, the names and places that made him who he is. Tenderness catches me off

guard around my father; it has rarely been safe to have my heart unprotected

near him. I sit, waiting to serve forgiveness, to have the chance to be free of

the years of not good enough that I have lived out far from his sight.

 

 

There have been no explosions on this reunion and it is thanks to my own family

that I can inch closer to the edge of forgiveness. My eldest son, who knows me

well and is unaffected by my father's offenses, told me the other day that he

thought " it was refreshing to hang around grandpa. " In response to my

incredulous face he offers, " He has no idea how he affects anyone else, it's

funny. " I can see his point, but stubbornly remain attached to the small girl

that I was at the receiving end of his lack. My son acknowledges how that would

have sucked to be the kid and something softens in me.

 

 

This is perhaps how forgiveness happens; a few strands of a thick cord tying you

to your wrongs are worn away through the courageous process of feeling and

acknowledging until you can see that the injury holding you has less to offer

you than the freedom of carrying your brokenness tenderly on and away. It is a

real beginning for the New Year.

 

 

 

Forgiveness: The Action Verb

 

Love is an act of endless forgiveness. -- Peter Ustinov

 

If love is a verb, than forgiveness is the action verb. It is the highest form

of love and the single behavior that most distinguishes our human potential. In

an ancient tale from the Kaballah, God told some angels in training that the

capacity to forgive is the most excellent gift in the human experience, more

essential to the continuity of life than the courage to sacrifice your own life

for someone else or enduring the pain of giving life. God explained to the

angel, " Forgiveness is the only reason my creation continues. Without

forgiveness, all would disappear in an instantaneous flash. "

 

Certainly some might suspect this to be true with a quick glance to the Middle

East. What would it look like if the rule of power and force was replaced with a

mandate for the strength and courage of forgiveness? The comment by Desmond Tutu

that " Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual,

other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are

realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no

future, " speaks volumes about the state of things.

 

And yet we don't have to look that far, for most of us, right in our own homes

we struggle with hurts, real and imagined that separate us from the ones we say

we love. The smallest of details in sharing a life with someone can easily and

often without notice turn into a story line about the person you love. For

years, my disregard of my husband's need for order and his disgust at my

laissez-faire approach to house cleaning came to mean everything. We weren't

talking about behaviors where we dramatically differed, instead each

housekeeping incident was a personal insult that with just a small push inflamed

to fury about the other weak points in our relationship.

 

Before Christ was born, Marcus Aurelius said " our anger and annoyance are more

detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us. " The petty

arguments of life are the cracks in the foundation of the relationships we are

building and left unresolved often fall into the established patterns of retreat

and attack which impact both partners' ability to be emotional available and

vulnerable. It is not that big a stretch to see how these behaviors adapt into

the extremely common, no-win situation of the sexual initiation complex. The

questions of who asks and who says no are salt in the wound and all the small

disagreements come to mean everything about being both loveable and loving.

 

And what of all the broken hearts in the Middle East? Anyone you would ask, on

any street on either side, would tell you that they want the shooting, the

bombing, the killing to end, and yet probably each and every one would also tell

you why it must continue... for the cousin, the brother, the lover, the parent

or the child who was maimed, killed, forever injured. Every person living in

that region has a story to be forgiven and a heart so heavy with grief that the

courage to open to the pain and loss is often more than they can bear.

 

I have only experienced the deep, life-changing balm of forgiveness in my life

one time. Right at the moment when my marriage hung on the precipice of its end,

we decided instead to forgive. I can't say who initiated it or even exactly how

it happened, all I can say of that moment is that I couldn't remember any longer

what it was to not be wanted, that all the years of fighting over who we weren't

for each other evaporated and what was left was a space to love someone for who

they were. My intimate life, very much at the core of my marriage, reinvigorated

itself with a curiosity and genuine interest that had always cowered behind our

relentless arguments. I was blessed and have since that time tried to understand

just how that could have happened and how I can do it again.

 

I think that forgiveness is an act of the imagination. It embraces the child's

heart which is always ready to risk for a better moment and give up the hurt of

the last one. Forgiveness is an innocent place where your hurt and pain does not

have the final word. Yet there is little wisdom or strength that has more power

to transform the world than the courage to bear witness to your pain and let go

of it.

 

 

 

S & xual Forgiveness

 

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.--

Peter Ustinov

 

S & xual healing is only possible through forgiveness. The injuries and betrayals

that we sustain as we negotiate this most mysterious human interaction of

s & xuality are as diverse as life itself. How these injuries imbed in our

identities defines our s & xual relationships, sometimes for life. While this is

also true for other emotional injuries we sustain, the pain associated with

s & xual encounters is deeper by definition and encodes itself on us viscerally.

Because s & xual education is almost non-existent and s & xual topics mostly taboo,

most of us have very limited language to express our s & xual experiences, good

and bad.

 

The hidden scars and unhealed injuries from our intimate past often don't even

show themselves until a new lover has breached a body memory that we didn't even

know we had. The transformation of grief that occurs when a hidden injury is met

with the light of expression and the warmth of a loving ear is life changing.

The courage to expose events and self deprecating thoughts that attach to s & xual

betrayals of all kinds is both heart wrenching and heart opening. Deeply loving

someone through this process can feel almost as hard for the partner. The

feelings of powerlessness and empathy that sharing s & xual injuries provokes can

be almost equally intense. Yet, like all storms, after the raging emotions are

vented, there is a calm space of refuge. Something is made new in the process.

The emptying leaves room to begin again.

 

There are times when talking about it provides nothing. The words are all

inadequate to the experience and it is actually only through the tenderness of

touch that injuries can be felt and released. This is human alchemy, impossible

to describe even after you have experienced it and even more impossible to

instruct someone else in finding this path.

 

The ancient quote by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, " The s & xual embrace can only

be compared with music and with prayer, " provides a hint into this process.

Among its profound mystery is the power of intimacy to heal and often it is

enough to move forward with the right intention and an open heart.

 

These are the most fragile and tender of exchanges that we humans are capable of

sharing and so it is easy even with the best of intentions to hold too strongly,

to let go too soon, to not feel the other person's response in a timely and

sensitive way. To err is human and oh, how human we are. Yet to forgive in this

process is divine and the only way to stay together. Feel the pain with someone

who loves you, even imperfectly, because that is the only way to feel the love.

One of my all time favorite singers and heartthrobs, Bono of U2 sings, " Of

science and the human heart, there is no limit. There is no failure here

sweetheart, just when you quit.... "

 

We are not trained well in love or s & x or forgiveness and they are the trinity

of a life well lived, each impossible to understand or live without the others.

Here is to a truly new year of release and rebirth.