Courage

Barriers to Forgiveness, Part 7: The Weak vs. Strong Will

Never giving up. Perseverance. The strong will. Forgiveness is hard work and the more severely you are hurt by another person’s injustice, the harder will be you work. It is too easy to enter forgiveness with a kind of euphoria, full of hope that all will be well soon.  As you then start to sprint, you realize that you are in a marathon……not a sprint. It is then that your strong will has to come into the picture to aid you in continuing to practice forgiveness until you make significant progress.

Learning to forgive those who hurt you deeply is analogous to starting a physical fitness program. You may start with a light heart and much enthusiasm, and these wane as the exercises get routine, as the muscles get sore, as the enthusiasm melts. It is then that sheer determination must help you through. It is similar with forgiveness.  After a while, the practice of forgiveness may become a chore rather than an enthusiastic exercise of hope. Please note that the perseverance is well worth the pain of continuing the marathon. After a while you will notice an emotional strength building in you. After a while you will see that you are now stronger than the hurts against you. After a while you will see that through the exercise of your strong will, you are now forgivingly fit. Let the strong will help you to complete the journey of forgiveness.

Robert

Barriers to Forgiveness, Part 6: Presuming that You Have Finished the Process

“Ahhh…..I’m glad that’s over!!”  How many times have I heard that….and even said it to myself.  We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that if we go through a forgiveness process, such as the one outlined in the book, The Forgiving Life, then all is well and we are healed.

Yet, because forgiveness is a process that takes time, we cannot presume that if we go through that process once with a particular person in mind, then the journey is over.  Forgiveness is not that simple for the deep injustices of life.

I was talking with a psychiatrist friend recently and he said this: “Sometimes I tell my patients that they will have to be working on the process of forgiveness for the rest of their lives.”  He was not implying that they will never reach the goal of forgiveness.  Instead, he was suggesting two things: a) Even when we have forgiven, the anger can creep back into our hearts and that is the time to open the door once again to forgiveness and b) As we forgive, we go deeper into its meaning and in new discoveries about the process; thus, as we continue to develop we have not finished forgiveness or perhaps forgiveness has not yet finished with us.

So, do not grow discouraged if you have been slammed by injustice.  The road to forgiving will get easier and more familiar…..but at the same time you may be on that road for the rest of your life.  Take heart because this is not a burdensome road.  What happened to you may be burdensome, but the process of discovery about whom the other person is, about who you are as a person, and about humanity itself is filled with fresh and healing insights.  After all, when you walk the path of forgiveness, you are walking in love.  This is not such a bad path to be on, right?

Enjoy the journey of forgiveness.

Robert

Barriers to Forgiveness, Part 5: Not Knowing How to Forgive

“But, I just don’t know how to forgive.  How do I go about it?”

I have heard this so often…..and it breaks my heart because it should not happen.  How have people’s teachers somehow failed to show a growing child the path to forgiveness? Don’t we work hard—very hard—to show a child how to find his or her way home so that, when lost, there is a map in the memory?  Why do we fail to work even harder to place the map of forgiveness in a child’s mind?  To have to grope in the dark for the forgiveness path when one’s heart is bleeding is not fair.  When we neglect to show children the path out of darkness and into the light of forgiveness, we are neglecting a key point of being human….a key point in surviving tragedy and others’ mayhem.

Children need forgiveness education to know that, when forgiving, a first step is the freedom to admit injury.  Another has withdrawn love from me and I am hurting.

Facing such a reality helps people to see the injustice for what it is.  It can give a person courage to look injustice in the eye and call it by its name.  Such courage can propel a person to commit to forgiving, committing to reducing resentment and offering goodness in spite of the hurt.

The courage helps a forgiver to then see the inherent worth of the one who did the hurting…..not because of what was done, but in spite of it.

The courage helps the forgiver to let compassion grow in the heart as a response of mercy to those who have not had mercy on the forgiver. Eventually, the forgiver begins to find meaning in the suffering and to reach out to the offender, at least within reason so that the forgiver protects the self from further serious injury.

This path is vital to a restored emotional health.  We need to see this and to have the courage to teach children how to forgive so that they do not ask, in confusion, as adults: “How do I forgive?  I do not know the path.”

Robert

Barriers to Forgiveness, Part 3: Pride

C.S. Lewis once noted that pride is that tendency to find pleasure in moving other people around like toy soldiers.  Pride seeks to win, to be superior, to have the light shining on the self.

When we are treated unjustly by another, then perhaps it is that other person who has moved us around as if we were toy soldiers.  It is at this time that resentment can take hold of us and if we are not able now to competitively move our injurer around like a toy soldier, we dig the trench of resentment and stay there for the battle.

If the other does not apologize, we do not want to budge from our pride-trench.  The central problem of waiting for the other to admit defeat is this: Too often those who hurt us do not apologize.

What we need is an antidote to pride, something that will extend a warm hand and help us out of the trench.  The antidote is the virtue of humility, a virtue that the philosopher Nietzsche looked on with distain, calling it a “monkish virtue.”  It is apparent that Nietzsche’s philosophy valued power and so he wanted nothing to do with humility.

The major problem with detesting humility is that sometimes the other’s power over us remains, despite our best efforts.  If all we have left is our pride-trench, then the other’s power could defeat us in an emotional sense as we develop unhealthy anger and even anxiety and depression.

To combat the barrier of pride, we need to value and practice humility, that sense that we need not always get our way and that power is an impostor not worthy of following.  With humility, we do not meet power with power.  Yes, we meet power with a call for justice, but this is very different from pride, which calls for its pound of flesh from the other.  Once we have developed the virtue of humility, which gets us out of our pride-trench, we are free to begin forgiving, which can actually eliminate the resentment so that it no longer has power over us.

Barriers to Forgiveness, Part 2: Hatred

“A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it’s hungry. You keep feeding it more and more people, and the more it gets, the more it wants. It’s never satisfied. And pretty soon it squeezes all the love out of your heart and all you’ll have left is a hateful heart.” –Jerry Spinelli in Love, Stargirl    

In other words, hatred is an insatiable monster that demands its supposed due. When people hate, they can all too easily create the rationalization that the other deserves bad things, deserves to be punished…..and by the one who hates.

Hatred clouds the mind as it freezes the heart.  And it does so slowly enough that the one now with the clouds and freezings was not even aware of this progression from a sunny mind and a warm heart.  Yet, it can happen.  Scrooge in A Christmas Carol; the final scene in Dr. Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book; the list is long.

Eventually, hatred becomes self-righteous; the person believes deep within the self that the hatred is not only justified but also moral.  It becomes a quest and even a way of life…….until it turns on the one with the self-righteousness and the sense of the moral quest…..and destroys him.

With hatred, forgiveness is not allowed to grow.  With courage, a person can begin to see hatred within and stand against it, giving forgiveness a chance to grow and to redeem and to lighten and to unthaw.

Robert