Author Archive: directorifi

Is it wrong to want to forgive someone by making the decision to help yourself to be freed from the rage and resentment? Or, is forgiveness only legitimate if you do it for the offending person? 

We need to make a distinction between what forgiveness is and what are motivations for forgiving.  When a person, who was treated unjustly, has the goal of reducing rage, this is a legitimate motivation.  At the same time, forgiveness itself, as a moral virtue, is for the one who offended.  So, as you appropriate forgiveness, you are doing your best to reach out to the other with kindness, respect, generosity, and even love.  Your motivation for doing so may be to help yourself to heal emotionally.  Further, this motivation eventually can change toward wanting the best for the one who offended.

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Finding Meaning As We Suffer

In recent months, the theme of suffering and finding meaning in that suffering has emerged more and more because of current events in the world, including the conflicts in Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, and in Nigeria as examples.  To reflect on the importance of finding meaning in suffering, we are reposting an essay first published here at the International Forgiveness Institute on October 15, 2013:

Let us start with the prophetic words of Shakespeares Macbeth, as he mourns the passing of Lady Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 5:

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

There is no meaning in life and therefore there is no meaning in suffering.  To live and to suffer are meaningless. Yet, experience tells us that this kind of thinking is a dangerous illusion.  Did Martin Luther King, Jr. have no meaning when he wrote his Letter from the Birmingham jail?  Did Maximilian Kolbe see no meaning in life when he asked the Nazis to let him take the place of a condemned man who had a family?  Whether ones beliefs are in God or in random variations generated by mutations, we are either made for or have evolved toward finding meaning in our life.  The skeptic would say that my point is a happy illusion:  Yes, we need to believe this, but we do so just to stay alive; it is adaptive to think fairytale thoughts.

Yet, what else in nature can you identify that is so very important and at the same time is an illusion?  I can think of nothing.  If finding and having meaning is tied to our well-being, then there must be something to it.  The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz (which Maximilian Kolbe chose not to survive for a higher good of protecting another person), observed this: Only those who survived Auschwitz found meaning in the profound suffering endured there.  Those who found meaninglessness died.  Finding meaning in this case was tied to positive, concrete outcomes.  There was a need (to find meaning) that was fulfilled (surviving and even thriving).  Can you think of any other real need that is not tied to something real that can fulfill it?  If not, then it seems reasonable to say that we have real needs with real fulfillments and finding meaning and achieving the state of thriving are concretely, really linked together without illusion.

When we are treated deeply unjustly by others, we suffer. If we have come, through wisdom, to know the meaning of life, then we will find meaning in our suffering. If we find meaning in both life and suffering, we have the foundation to forgive well and to survive well the cruelty against us.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing?  Please be careful in so concluding.

 

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If someone hasn’t harmed me directly, can I still forgive this person?  As an illustration, one of my fellow employees was intentionally injured by our boss.  Can I forgive the person who mistreated the co-worker whom I respect for his integrity and tenacity?

You speak of what some philosophers refer to as secondary forgiveness. Put another way, you have suffered by someone else’s wrongdoing toward a significant other and not toward you personally.  You can forgive if something unfair happens to others and then this causes you pain.  This can even happen if you are injured even though you don’t know the victim or victims. This is called tertiary forgiveness.  Here is an illustration of this tertiary forgiveness: the head of your country starts a conflict with another nation and you believe that your leader’s actions are unjust. If you choose to forgive the leader, then you can.

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How can I convince myself that I am worthy of love after letting down too many people in my life.  I am having a hard time loving myself.  Help!

Once we forgive others, we realize that we can offer unconditional love to ourselves, as we do not judge ourselves by our actions alone. Self-forgiveness is about finally allowing yourself to be gentle to……you.  You realize that you are imperfect. You fall flat sometimes, and yet you do not have to keep yourself down.  In a way, you are offering your own hand to yourself, accepting yourself as fully human in your imperfections, worthy of love because you are a person who is special, unique, and irreplaceable no matter what you have done.  This is not some kind of trick you play on yourself because self-forgiveness challenges you to seek forgiveness from whomever you may have offended when you offended yourself.  Self-forgiveness challenges you to be fair to those who experienced your unfairness.

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