FORGIVING YOURSELF
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Guest
Thank you for the awesome and well-spoken reminder on forgiveness. As a Christian, I needed to be lovingly reminded and awakened again to the freedom that forgiveness brings to me. Thank you!!!!
Originally posted by Lenore:
I receive an email once in a while fr MARY HAYES GRIECO - a newsletter actually - on forgiveness. I had rec'd one recently & I'd like to share w/ you guys:
LENORE
There are many reasons to learn and live the ways of Unconditional Love and Forgiveness. Here are some of them:
1)You are tired of suffering about something, and need to move on.
2)You want to reduce your stress and improve your health.
<span class="ev_code_RED">3) You want to be a better Christian.
(Or Buddhist, or Yogi, or ....)
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4)You are in the Twelve Step Program of recovery from an addiction
5)You are on a path of self mastery, and want to reach your potential and live purposefully.
6)You want to improve your family relationships.
7)You are a mental health professional and you want a reliable tool to help your clients release the pain of the past.
8)You want to contribute to world peace.
9)You want to create a more abundant life for yourself.
10)Joy!
Reason #3: You want to be a better Christian. (Or Buddhist, or Yogi, or ....)
Unconditional Love and Forgiveness is the central message of Christianity, and a key concept in other great world religions as well. Jesus spoke of these principles many times, and walked this earth as a blazing lamp of spiritual energy, kindling the fire of love and Spirit in everyone he met. From the cross, he modeled the ultimate act of forgiveness when he asked his Father to forgive those who were torturing and killing him. He told us to love one another as He had loved us, and to forgive our brother, seventy times seven times if necessary. But he didn’t tell us how to do it. I know many Christians who are very dedicated to their path, and yet perennially frustrated with the typically human petty hate and anger that plagues them from time to time. They wonder, how do I love a person, Jesus, if he appears to me to be immoral or just terribly annoying? Why must I forgive my brother every time if he’s being a jerk and hurting people? Why did you make such a big point about this and leave us this mandate to forgive, when it’s just so hard to do?
When I was growing up in the Catholic Church, I heard about unconditional love and forgiveness many times, and I knew that a good person is someone who loves her enemy and forgives everyone who hurts her. I was taught that forgiveness is the right thing to do. But I never understood why it’s good to forgive, and it felt to me like one more pressure, one more “should” that I carried from my weighty religious training. I felt guilty for being unable to forgive people, and yet resentful about being told so often that I ought to do it. No one ever told me that it would be beneficial to me personally, and no one ever demonstrated to me how to do it. Now that I’ve experienced and witnessed the freedom of forgiveness so many times, I think I understand why Jesus made such a big point of it.
My theory about Jesus’s focus on forgiveness is that He wasn’t trying to pressure us to be good people and spare others the brunt of our hate. Rather, the truth is that in His tremendous compassion and love, Jesus could see that our hate is so very hurtful to us. I picture Him looking out at the crowd, at face after face that was shadowed with pain, loss, health issues, disappointment in life, and toxic resentment. "Ouch!" He thought. "They are carrying such terrible burdens inside — unnecessarily --- and they don’t even know it! They’ve got to let go of that stuff if they are ever going to experience the kingdom of Heaven within themselves. As a healer, Jesus could see that resentments cause illness, lack of harmony and poverty of the spirit." When he exhorted everyone to live the ways of love and forgiveness, I think he was saying something to the effect of, “Come on, kids – lighten up! It doesn’t have to be this hard. You’re only hurting yourselves. Let go and live the new Law I give you: Love one another. You’ll feel better.”
Christianity is not the only religion that comes to life and greater vibrancy with the practice of real forgiveness. The tools and experience of forgiveness will help a Buddhist deal with the emotional pain of impermanence in our personal lives, and truly live the principle of non-attachment. A yogi will find the experience of union with God’s Light within, if their “within” spaces are not clogged up with stagnant energy and blocks in the chakra system from old wounds that never healed. A Jewish person can consciously choose to “clean house” at Rosh Hashana if they know how to use the Eight Steps to clear up a relationship that got messy in the last year - atonement happens. Unconditional Love and Forgiveness are aspects of Universal Law, and every great religion has intuitively named this in its own way in its own time for its people.
When we utilize an effective method of forgiveness to let go of a hurt from the past, and we experience light and liberation flooding in to our lives in the present, there is a dawning appreciation of the real gift in the teachings of Jesus and other masters, when they encourage us to forgive. Unconditional love and forgiveness are spiritual practices, and spiritual practices are good habits that we adopt in order to be healthy and to feel the joy of connection to Spirit, day by day.
Forgiveness: Do it for you.