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PRINCIPLES ON THE PATH TO FORGIVENESS
by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Portland, OR
From: December 2007

I have been a parish minister for 17 years, and I have whittled away at this question of forgiveness year after year, as I have helped congregants deal with it and as I have dealt with its ramifications in my own life. I will continue to learn and to deepen, I hope, in my capacity to forgive. Of course, this issue will never be “closed and done” for me, and in fact I wonder if it ever is for anyone. But through the years I have learned a few basic principles that have helped guide me, and I pass these on to you, in the hope that they might in some way be resonant with you.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR FORGIVENESS

Principle #1: Take responsibility for any part you may have had in the hurtful situation.

Did you invite the pain in any way? Did you allow it when you should have turned away from it? Did you go back for more, when you should have known better?

Some of the sting goes out of the hurt once we discover that we have contributed to its cause. Sometimes, of course, we have not been a causative agent at all. But when we are a part of a convoluted relationship of pain and we fail to accept our piece of the problem, our clinging to blame will not allow the self-reflection and change that need to occur so that we can learn and grow from our experience.

Principle #2: See people for who they are, not for who you would like them to be.

We need to understand that other people are different from ourselves—in temperament, experience, family background, and in a multitude of other ways—so why should we expect others to think and behave the way we would?

Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh uses the word “suchness” to mean the essence or true nature of a person. He says that if we want to live peacefully with another, we have to understand the suchness of that person. In other words, we must recognize and respect the limits of that person. When we do, we can benefit from what that person can give, and we will not expect that person to give what he is unable to give.

We can’t expect people to be other than who they are. Can people change? Yes, of course. But not because of our expectations. Notice the signs which will tell you who a person really is and don’t dismiss those signs. Don’t say, “He didn’t really mean to say that,” or “I’m sure that was just an oversight.” When a leopard shows his spots, know him for a leopard, not a Labrador retriever. Don’t try to pet him.

Principle #3: Realize that forgiveness is not about the other person—it’s about you.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It’s not necessarily about reconciliation, because the other person may be absent or dead or unable to truly understand why or how you’ve been hurt. The individual may even be quite willing to continue abusing you. So forgiveness is not essentially a gift to the other person, though at times it may be that, as well. It’s for you: it’s what is necessary for your emotional and spiritual and even physical well-being.

Think about what happens to us when we cannot bring ourselves to forgive. All our energy becomes engaged with this enemy, the perceived source of our unhappiness. Soon we cannot see clearly, for our vision turns inward, supporting and nurturing our suffering. We reserve a huge reservoir of energy so that our pain might have a home, a place to live and thrive—and in the meantime, the life we could have been living escapes us forever.

Principle #4: Stay with yourself and your pain. Get under the anger to the hurt and then on down to the sadness and the grief.

In my experience, I have found that I must navigate layers of feeling in order to get down to forgiveness. Typically, the initial feeling is anger and resentment. Underneath the anger, I have generally found pain and sadness. To get to the healing, we have to go there. This is a tough one. We want to deny the pain and the sadness, to push it away. But the only way out of it is through it.

In regard to anger with another person, it’s not helpful to let our thoughts dwell on the other person. That’s of course what we tend to do—we think of her dishonesty, his cruelty, her maliciousness, his betrayal—and the more we think about this other person who has hurt us, the more we feed our anger. We feel the pain of the closed heart.

We don’t want to return to ourselves, for we think that the solution is outside ourselves—we think it is in blaming the other person, or getting revenge. But it is not. When we are deeply angry, the anger seems to consume us. If we can sit with the anger and the grief and breathe, in meditation, we can care for ourselves, we can be with our pain. We need not be afraid of this pain or reject it. And what we notice is that space begins to form around our pain, and it begins to ease and let go of its grip. The words of Lao Tzu offer wisdom for us:

Allow yourself to yield, and
You can stay centered.
Allow yourself to bend, and
You will stay straight.
Allow yourself to be empty, and
You will be filled.

Principle #5: Realize that for forgiveness is too hard to do alone—go with intentionality, but depend on grace.

Forgiveness can be longed for and opened to. It can be prayed for. But it cannot be required or demanded. Sometimes it has to be done over and over again—70 times 7, as the scripture says—because old hurts we think we’ve put away can sneak up on us with surprising force and power. Then we have to go back to the drawing board.

Something everyone should understand about us human creatures: we don’t forget loss, pain, and fear—these are stored in our very flesh, and they are stored there from the time we are born, some would say perhaps even before that, in our mother’s womb. And every new loss calls up past losses. We need not be surprised if forgiveness is difficult, or if it takes a long time. We need not feel guilty about our struggles to forgive. We are not bad people because we struggle in this way. We are just human.

It is comforting to me to remember that my very weaknesses form the tension that pulls me again and again to the Holy One, asking that my brokenness be made whole. This is a process that will end only with my death. And yet my very longing to forgive and be forgiven is what scours out the stony core at the center of my heart and makes it possible for me to love, in spite of it all. So may it be for you.