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
BLESSINGS, dear friends! As Spring approaches, may our house-cleaning include times of silence, where we air out our inner rooms of any old anger or resentments that continue to bind us to the past. May we experience the liberation and deep gladness that forgiveness of hurt from situations, others, or ourselves will bring -- especially of our own betrayals to living our own deepest truth! The Dalai Lama reminds us that our enemies are our greatest teachers because they provide us with the opportunity to practice compassion and forgiveness.
Despite repeated breaches of trust, Papa found the courage and humility to forgive those who betrayed or hurt him again and again: "I would rather trust and be betrayed, than to live in mistrust." He never tired of preaching forgiveness or pointing out that when people spend their lives harboring grudges, they become crippled by unwittingly binding themselves to the person they cannot forgive. They are imprisoned, yet they refuse to take the key of forgiveness out of their own pocket and unlock the door.
~ from I TELL YOU A MYSTERY by Johann Christoph Arnold
The most authentic sign we can give ourselves that we have actually begun the process of forgiveness is our prayer. This is true even if the only prayer we can say is to ask to want to forgive. In the beginning ít may be too much for us even to pray for the person who hurt us. Perhaps all r¡re can do is to pray for ourselves — to pray that for our own sake we may begin the process of forgiveness. Prayer is a way of recognizing and acknowledging God's movement towards us and God's gift of grace
~ from THE PROCESS OF FORGIVENESS by W. A. Meninger
