"The cost to me of not doing so. I'm unwilling to pay the cost of
carrying a resentment (or whatever) around, so I draw on the
intelligence of forgiving."
The more dire the hurt, the harder it is to forgive - or so it would
seem. Following betrayal, disloyalty, divorce, treachery, and other
such major traumatic situations when forgiveness may be the most
desirable path, the preferred option, the best course of action for
everyone concerned, the surest way to allow healing to begin, it's
often the most difficult thing to do. It can be worse than that: it can
look like it's the most counter-intuitive thing to do as
well, the most unnatural way to go, both of which justify
not forgiving.
Werner
Erhard
answers my question
"On what do you draw to forgive people who are hardest to forgive?"
during a recent exchange, with "The cost to me of not doing so. I'm
unwilling to pay the cost of carrying a resentment (or whatever)
around, so I draw on the intelligence of forgiving.".
I don't need a reason to forgive. I've already got a great reason to
forgive. It's this: it doesn't do me any good not to
forgive. I've already got a great reason to grant forgiveness: it's no
good without it. But I'm stuck with not forgiving until I figure out
how. How do I forgive? Werner's right. Not
forgiving comes with a great cost, a cost I'm acutely aware of, a cost
I'm not willing to bear. I'm already enrolled in forgiving. I just
don't know how ... AND ... when I tell the truth about it,
I'm not even sure I really know what forgiveness is.
So I pursue Werner's answer further, as the seed for an inquiry.
There's a solid gold track record that pursuing Werner's answers as
seeds for an inquiry, always gets me to a good place. It's uncanny. It
always does. Never fails. You can put it in the bank.
I go to the dictionary. I look up forgiveness. Here's what I find - and
as I read, I can tell it's not enough. There's a certain
dynamic missing. It's inadequate.
Definition
forgiveness
noun
from the verb
forgive
to stop being angry with someone who has done
something wrong
<unquote>
It's not just inadequate because being angry isn't always the way I am
when I'm stuck not forgiving. And even if (for argument's sake) I
were angry, the dictionary definition of forgiveness,
keyed as it is off being angry, begs the question "How do
I stop being angry?". It's circuitous.
It's further inadequate because what if the person I'm stuck with not
forgiving didn't do anything wrong? In the case of
theft ie if I was going to forgive them for stealing
something from me, maybe I could say they did
something (quote unquote)
wrong.
But what about divorce? What if they just went out of
relationship? That's not wrong per se. And yet
it's still a traumatic situation and an action which calls for
forgiveness.
This is why the definition of forgiveness in the dictionary doesn't
powerfully distinguish forgiveness for me. It isn't enough - on two
scores. One, it doesn't give a how to. It doesn't provide an
access to forgiving. It says (essentially) "Stop being
angry!" - yeah ... but how do I stop being angry? And:
what if I'm not angry? What if it's some other emotion underlying being
stuck with not forgiving? Does the dictionary definition of forgiveness
still apply? Two, by including the value judgement
"something wrong",
it provides no
context
for nor access to
transformation
in the matter of granting forgiveness, in the matter of forgiving
(consider that in
transformation,
nothing's
wrong:
- things are simply the way they are and the way they
aren't).
I realize I'll have to write my own definition of forgiveness which
will one, provide an access to forgiveness in two, a
transformedcontext,
and then inscribe it in
The Laurence Platt Dictionary.
For me, rewriting the dictionary is a perfectly valid endeavor, a
perfectly legitimate undertaking. When the dictionary was written, it
wasn't written in a
transformedcontext,
and it wasn't written deploying
language
as the instrument, as the leverage of
transformation.
And there's
nothing wrong
with that.
The raison d'etre of forgiveness is there's something
to forgive.
That's not a "Duh!". It's profound, and it's essential for
getting to the heart of what forgiveness is. Something happened.
Someone did something. Someone said something. It didn't
work.
It hurt. It betrayed. It violated. Whatever. There's resentment.
The resentment is incomplete. And until what happened is
forgiven, it (ie being resentful about it) festers, not doing any good.
The longer it festers, the more entrenched, embellished, and plausible
my
story
about what happened
becomes.
I assert the way of forgiveness isn't found in having someone apologize
for what they did - whatever they did. It isn't found in
having someone pay for whatever transpired as told in my
story about what
happened.
There's what happened. Then there's the
story about what
happened.
The two are distinct. What happened, happened. What I add
on to what happened is my commentary, my
story about what
happened.
What happened, doesn't remain. What remains, festers, and doesn't do
any good long after what happened has disappeared into the
past, is my
story about what
happened.
Pretty soon I can no longer distinguish ie I can no longer
differentiate between the original incident itself (what
happened ie the
what's so
of the matter), and my commentary, my opinions, my feelings, and my
resentments I've added on to the original incident (the story about
what happened). As long as these two are indistinguishable from each
other, it's not possible to forgive.
This is the access to forgiving: giving up, renouncing my
investment in the
story about what
happened.
This is what forgiveness is. This is the way of forgiveness. This is
the new entry in
The Laurence Platt Dictionary:
