Forgiveness: A Spiritual Journey

Jesus continually preached on the subject of forgiveness, using parables like the Prodigal Son, and direct statements reflecting His need for us to grasp what He was trying to teach us. I often contemplate His kneeling alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, weeping His bloody tears. And wonder if those tears weren’t for our refusal to listen.

Forgiveness is the most difficult concept for most of us to grasp, let alone put into practice. Oh, certainly if someone hurts us in a minor way, we are usually very quick to forgive. What I am referring to here are the deeper injuries, including the ones we inflict upon ourselves. Those self- inflicted hurts are the deepest and most profound, and the ones least likely to be addressed. What we don’t realize is, that until we forgive ourselves, and let go of overdone guilt, we can’t progress spiritually.

When we do our spiritual housecleaning, this means we look at the things we’ve done that we are not proud of, try and be honest about why, and learn from it. Once we’ve closely looked at our spiritual errors, made amends where possible and understood why we behaved that way, we then turn to Him, and make our peace. To continue to carry around your errors, is to shut yourself off from God’s grace. Most importantly, you will not be able to forgive others, until you’ve freed yourself.

When I envision Christ’s suffering and death, I see and feel His forgiveness for those that damaged Him and ultimately slew Him. He forgave them from His cross. That had to be an enormously difficult thing to do. Yet He did it freely. We, who suffer much less than this, can do no less. We have all seen and heard victims of crimes, forgive and in fact embrace the perpetrators. I believe this is the embodiment of the living Christ, still showing us the way. If a person who has had a child or family member slain, and yet they freely forgive, then how can we at least not try to do the same?

Yes it’s a very hard thing to do… forgive, when someone has hurt us deeply or betrayed us on a very profound level. On a very basic human level, we want people to hear us, share our outrage and sense of hurt. And of course that too is necessary in recovery, during the initial stages of shock and pain. After that, for too many of us it becomes a sort of emotional bankroll, we can call on to excuse all types of behavior.

Pain, whether physical emotional or spiritual, carry lessons that need to be learned. Those are important to our personal and spiritual growth. The failure to take the message inherent in the pain, is to show a lack of spiritual maturity. I have heard the anger so many people express, when a minister, priest, rabbi or imam, tells the mourning crowd, "This is His will, His plan. When you look at these words in light of the lessons that must be taken from such pain, the meaning becomes clearer. His plan may well be that individually there is something that must be dealt with in each life. Most of the time, that involves forgiveness.

Forgiving someone for hurting you doesn’t mean keeping yourself in harms way. Forgiving abusive spouses or parents, doesn’t mean, you go back into the situation to get hurt again and again. It simply entails letting go of hate, anger and guilt, and moving on. Praying for one’s enemies brings untold grace, and eases troubled spirits. It also brings you back within His loving grace and light, no longer blocked by selfish ego. Ask yourself this: which is more important, holding on to anger and grief, or freeing yourself to reach the One Who loves you? Loves you enough to sit back and patiently wait for you to turn back to His loving heart.