Beginning occasionally two years before, but then with a great deal more frequency during the pandemic, I’ve been making and handpainting 7’ x 11’ canvas banners which I suspend from the columns of both my churches from their positions at the head of each town square. It’s my little community service attempt at instilling a bit of inspiration and hope. I’ve painted 40 of them so far.
The current banner opines, “Be at peace. Zen you can do anything.” Yes it’s trite and unapologetically cute. It also very nearly over-simplifies Zen Buddhism. But perhaps that’s the point of Buddhism in the first place. If you choose the right words, you can say an awful lot with very few letters. That will not quite be so in this column, but it’s still good advice.
The banner I am painting over the next few days will read, “A pound of opinions is not worth an ounce of knowledge.“
Everything I ever write in this space is just my opinion. And it really should be taken for that. All spiritual and theological statements are opinions. It is my opinion that this is universally true.
So it is with that humility in mind that I approach the subject of forgiveness. And not just any run-of-the-mill basic forgiveness. I’m talking about an active practice of forgiveness. Something that requires a little bit of effort and intentionality. Scalable for small moments but also with enough layers and dimensions that it could provide the basis for a lifetime of study and reflection. Forgiveness is a multi-dimensional experience.
Much of the burden we carry in life is because we are still holding onto old pain. Much of our present day worries are founded upon both major and micro-traumas from the past. I still notice a reactive fear of fire inherited through my mother who—as a child—witnessed a forest fire in my hometown many decades ago. Could this be an inherited lack of forgiveness on some level?
That might seem like a stretch. But these things do generationally compound with one another. Our parents’ lack of forgiveness can become our own. It’s definitely true that many of our fears are actually a lack of trust. We might be afraid of fire because we don’t trust fire. Or we might be afraid of being alone in the house because we don’t trust that we’re safe.
Our ability to trust informs almost every aspect of our daily lives. Even to the point of trusting that the kind of milk we want will probably be available at the grocery store. Because we trust in its likelihood, we are willing to get in the car, drive to the grocery store, even during a pandemic. If we showed up a few times in a row and the kind of milk we wanted wasn’t there, the store would have, essentially, betrayed our trust, and we’d go buy our favorite milk elsewhere.
Obviously that’s a low-stakes version of trust. But it illustrates the point that violations of our trust always have consequences. And those consequences can be multi-generational. So don’t discount the possibility that you may be loaded with unresolved resentments that originate from times before you were even born. Although of course not over milk.
Adding to those inherited trust issues, which even if they are only small, still contribute to the overall weight on your shoulders, are small and large traumas which have occurred during your own life. This cumulative damage is difficult to identify because most of the events which cause our overall feelings today don’t appear to be things which should bother us still; or perhaps even bothered us in the first place. Events like being pushed on the playground, or your best friend missing your birthday party, or losing a beloved aunt, these each represent a small betrayal of trust. Trust in your classmate, trust in your best friend, trust in God. We brush ourselves off and move on, but some of that dust remains.
These moments have a tendency to dim our light. To what degree is dependent entirely on two factors: The nature and scope of past hurts, and our willingness to get under the skin of them.
When our trust is betrayed, forgiveness becomes one of the possible coping options.
If you do not feel optimal in your life, meaning if you are not content, if you are not resilient when faced with challenging situations, if you feel unfulfilled, it’s quite possible that an active practice of forgiveness could undermine some of the foundations of the things which prevent you from moving toward that which would give you the most joy in life.
But remember, that’s just my opinion.
And so I ask you not to invest your trust in what I say, but in perhaps your own ability to become more comfortable in your own skin, and better equipped to face this challenging lifetime with resiliency. Believe me, I need it too.
Considering the possibility that an active practice of forgiveness would be useful for literally anyone, assuming we all have thousands of these small hurts within us that may very well be skewing our perceptions, what does an “active” practice look like?
First, I’ll start off by saying that it doesn’t have to be a big deal. It can simply be a matter of choosing to pay attention to things about which we maintain a lack of trust and can perhaps force ourselves a little bit to be curious about their origins. It’s not an “active“ practice by definition, but it is angling our antenna in the right direction. And even incremental progress is valuable.
But an active practice of forgiveness is deliberately purposeful. It’s something you choose to do on a regular basis. Yoga is an active practice, for example. You have to choose to go to class and make the time in your life to do it, because you have an expectation of benefit. Or you have to choose to unroll your mat in your living room as a solitary practitioner. Something I’m definitely not disciplined enough to manage. Active practices require a bit of effort to really witness the benefit.
I’m terrible at journaling, but for those who like it, journaling about every single thing you don’t trust, with an intention to be curious about why, is an excellent first step. You’ll be astonished to think about all the things where you’ve had a trust of one kind or another violated.
Many of these things will disappear simply by looking at them. They’ve just been hovering in the background waiting to be relieved of service. As soon as we look them in the face, by acknowledging they exist no matter how small, and writing them down, they are often released. That’s not true for all of what bothers us, but it’s a good way of wiping out a swath of it.
Read everything you can on the subject of forgiveness. They won’t all be good, but forgive those who give bad advice. That’s a trust issue too. Forgive us in advance.
It’s important to remember that real forgiveness is the opposite of forgetting. Real forgiveness removes the emotional power behind an event and renders it into nothing more than a historical fact. The fact remains to continue to teach us, but it does not trigger us emotionally anymore. Like making peace with your ex husband. Many of the formerly-married are great friends. They have not forgotten that one another exists. They haven’t forgotten that which separated them. But they have formed something new in its place. Finding ways of doing that on purpose is definitely part of an active practice of forgiveness.
But it doesn’t always mean making friends. Sometimes we have to forgive people from whom we do not feel safe simply because, even from a distance, their actions still poison us. From a safe distance, we should be able to take away their power and relegate them to a historical fact.
One trick I’ve learned about active forgiveness is thinking about every positive thing I can about the person who hurt me. If we were close at one time, we doubtless have good memories. I let those memories remain good. I let the valuable still have value. I believe this has the ability to change our brain chemistry
I have appreciation for much of what those whom I struggle to forgive have brought into my life that was positive. When I dwell on that sense of appreciation, it takes away the power behind hurt. It doesn’t change the facts, it just changes my feelings.
The mystic in me likes to think of this as an energetic exchange that has the capacity to ameliorate tension from a distance. I like to think of it a bit like a magic wand soothing the connection of uncomfortable history between us. This, by the way, is the idea behind why we should pray for our enemies. Wishing well upon one’s enemies alters us chemically and quite possibly, energetically. What benefit may come from that alteration? There’s only one way to find out.
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