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Some Notes on Forgiveness as an Act of Love
A. Some of the Subtle Qualities of Forgiveness 1. Forgiveness as an act of love is felt, not achieved. It can be given, but it cannot be bestowed as an act of triumph over another person, which would be to humiliate the other person. A definition: Forgiveness is the means to release yourself and others from an experience of hurt, injury, wounding, suffering, humiliation or pain that has already passed. 2. Forgiveness contains an element of magic. It cannot be controlled, but, under certain conditions it will appear. When it appears, we feel it in our body. Something that is almost a thing leaves the body. Muscular tension that we have come to live with habitually is eased. We are less vulnerable to infections as well as more serious illness. The immune system improves. The face relaxes. Food tastes better. Depression diminishes. We feel lighter, physically lighter. There is also a change in our emotions. Anger changes to sorrow or regret. Rage flattens out. We become more available to other people, and more available to ourselves. Yet, we think about ourselves less.
B. Forgiveness is not Rational
C. Forgiving is not Condoning 2. We do not forgive out of weakness; nor, are we saying that what was done no longer matters. I do not deny, minimize, or make excuses for what was done. In fact, I may see what the person who has harmed did even more vividly and have stronger feelings against it. 3. The intention to forgive sets two things in motion: l. I have come to understand that I can learn from my suffering; 2. I am willing to acknowledge that you are no less and no more deserving of love than I am. For the rational mind, these two things are crazy. How can someone who may be evil be as deserving of love as someone who is good? There is, however, good evidence that the person who has harmed may well not be able to feel love, or to feel at all. Here, though, is where we have to take particular care in our experiential description of forgiveness. Because those who do serious harm often do not feel love and do not feel, there is a strong tendency these days to, in effect, condone their actions by saying that they acted out of a pathology, a psychological illness. We will look more closely into this form of condoning in a moment.
D. The Incubaton Period in Forgivness 2. Allowing events to settle also means that they can move from the head to the heart. This is extremely important because the act of forgiveness can only take place from here. It is, however, not just a feeling. It is a spiritual act, the healing power of love. It cannot be muddled up with judgment concerning who is right and who is wrong. False forgiveness does not bring healing. It adds to the original injury. It intensifies the negative bond we have with the person that has harmed us.
E. Responsibility and The Forgiveness Process 2. Right here, however, is where we, these days, can get off the track. Because we can come to the point of understanding that those who have harmed us lack empathy, probably lack an inner sense of security, probably were brought up without love or understanding, and were themselves harmed by violence, hatred, and fear, it may seem that the person is not to blame for what happened. This is the kind of prevalent condoning that goes on in a superficially psychological culture. 3. The superficially psychological culture does not recognize how choice works. There are innumerable choice points in life, moments when we know, without question, that we are choosing between treating someone with care and harming them. When we choose harm, we also dull ourselves a little bit. And, unless some kind of conscious work goes on to undo this dulling, it will work at making us unconscious of our actions. When this happens, as it does, does this mean that such a person is psychologically ill and not responsible? Regardless of how we were treated in our upbringing, whether our parents were consistently loving or not, the conscious choices we make in each moment are the crucial factor. People who do harm cannot be condoned for their actions by saying: it was their shadow side; they are stuck at a schizoid level; they are unintegrated; they are sociopathic; they were harmed by their parents and are passing the pathology down the family line. It is highly arguable, though, that people who do harm to others are unconscious of what they are doing. The sadistic side of a person is satisfied only when they can see exactly what they are doing and witness the effect of their behavior on another. Or, they feel the feeling of self-righteousness for what they have done, if not sadism. 4. When we condone what someone has done through the available superficial psychological culture, then we are colluding with the perpetrators. We play into the notion that their behavior was inevitable, stemming from a history that cannot be changed. But, this superficial psychologizing misses the fact that, unless one is genuinely psychotic or psychopathic, one can witness what one does and its effects. We remain responsible for our actions, whoever our parents were and what they did. 5. We need some other framework for speaking of why people do harm to others than that given by the superficial psychological culture. In pervious times, the framework was sin. We cannot re-introduce that framework without a complete re-visioning of sin because the arbiters of what counts as sin, the clergy, have used this category to their own purposes; organized religion has used the notion of sin to commit its own sins without shame. The additional difficulty is that it is now completely possible to commit our sins without being held accountable. 6. Regardless of the psychological circumstances, harming others carries a moral element. It is an act of the individual spirit against the spirit. That is what is central here - to recognize that we can use the most central aspect of our being against another. That is the central harm of harming others; it is not the physical hurt, the embarrassment, not even the abuse per se. It is that we use our spirit to commit harm to another. If doing harm did not have this level to it, then it would all be a matter of psychological imbalance. It is not. Thus, in a new, theological psychology, it would be important to be able to work out how acts of harm toward others can be healed in only two ways: 1. Forgiveness; 2. And/or acknowledgment by the wrongdoer, followed by remorse, reparation, and petitions for forgiveness. It must be emphasized strongly, however, that for healing to occur, only the first, that is forgiveness is needed. The second contains all sorts of matter that have to be completely re-visioned; we need a new, theological psychology of remorse, of reparation, of petition and atonement. For example, remorse can be healthy, but it is often unhealthy because it brings guilt and shame rather than an awareness of the person who they harmed. Instead it gets stuck at the level of oneself. 7.What is creative responsibility?
F. What Forgiveness Does 2. The opposite of forgiveness is self-destructiveness. This person says: For me, being in a state of unforgiveness was very self-destructive. It made me want to destroy my own life. It was a crisis really that threw me head-long into despair and I was in that space for five or six years. I couldnt go on like that. In that time, I got diabetes. Id given up hope. The opposite of forgiveness for me is self-destructiveness. I have become sharper than I was. I can be very analytical, almost harsh. Im no longer idealizing nor am I projecting pain outwards and blaming. At a daily level, if something irritates me, I am not as forgiving. Having experienced forgiveness does not mean I have ceased to be judgemental!" 3. Forgiveness brings us into life and we realize that we do not come into this world entitled to anything. At the very heart of forgiveness is an inability to forgive life itself for not giving us what we think we deserve. Whatever we receive beyond life itself is a luxury. We give up the fantasy that we can order the world to be as we would like it; we find the means within ourselves to make up for what is lacking, rather than blaming others. When we are not forgiving life for not giving us what we want, we open up a sense of emptiness, deprivation, leading into depression. 4. The growth movement concept --- where you are expected to make life as you want it through the power of affirmations, visualizations, expecting mysterious changes through someone offering those possibilities is very egocentric.
G. Giving up is not Surrendering
a) Withdraw your attention from the person who has hurt you and return it to yourself and whoever else is in your care. 2. Giving up is more a certain kind of forgetting. For many, this forgetting actually has to precede forgiveness. Forgetting here does not mean never remembering or pretending nothing happened. It means living without those events being in your mind almost every second. This forgetting process prepares the ground for giving up our fantasies of what life is supposed to be. This forgetting means we can wake up and not be immediately hounded by what happened to us; sometimes going an hour or a week without them; being relatively secure that painful memories wont intrude; being able to go to sleep. This kind of forgetting allows a psychological scab to form over an open emotional wound, a healthy thing. It is healthy because it restores our senses, which are quite disturbed when we are harmed physically or emotionally or psychologically. And it allows the return of a capacity of attention to the world.
H. The Central Core of Forgiveness |
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