Love is the emotional and spiritual energy that ties you to those who have hurt you. The issues that seem to defy forgiveness are always aligned in some way with love: the love you never received, the love that you offered and others rejected or betrayed, the love that was used to manipulate or control you. Love is the basis of your life's well-being, but in tying your spiritual energy reserves to old hurts you are severely limiting the energy of lovfe available to you in the present moment. Perhaps this is the time to search your heart for those you still need to forgive more fully.
Unfortunately, change and forgiveness do not come easily for me, but ANY willingness to let go inevitably comes from pain; and the desire to change and forgive changes you, and jiggles the spirit, gets to it somehow, to the deepest, hardest, most ruined parts. And then Spirit expands, because that is its nature, and it brings along the body, and finally, the mind.
In 1979 Mother Antonia started a tradition in the prison which she calls the Day of Forgiveness: her protest agains the eye-for-an-eye logic that dominates prison culture. She believes forgiveness is far more effective than any punishment at controlling all the hate and homicide.
"Forgiveness is hard," she says, "but not forgiving is harder. Unforgiveness will age me, it will make me sick, and it will make me ugly. Nothing can bring me so low that I'm goijng to not forgive somebvoedy and destroy myself. Because that's what unforgiveness does. It's a boomerang that comes back."
~ from THE PRISON ANGEL by M. Jordan and K. Sullivan
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
Blessings of Spring renewal to you, dear friends! A prayer may be calling to you, silently budding in the sacred temple of your innermost being, a fragile prayer for you to nurture into birth, response, and action. Blessed are you who listen to the soul-songs waiting to be sung in your heart.
The seed of prayer is sown in heaven. It pushes its stem toward the earth and comes to grow there. It produces an abundance of fruit. Then, as it becomes seed once more, it thrusts its way back to heaven.
We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub, but the spoke of the revolving wheel. In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender. God is the center, the Source, toward which all forces tend, and we are the flowing, the ebb and flow of God's tides. Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy.
~ from I ASKED FOR WONDER by Abraham Joshua Heschel thanks to Amy Bradfield
