I
read that, if we would spend at least half the time that we spend complaining,
finding fault, fussing over our dissatisfactions, being sad and sorry for
ourselves, and holding things against others; if we would spend just half as
much time in affirming that which we truly want, that would be
the time in which we would be healed and living in the circumstances which we
truly desire.
Listen
to the phrase "Infinite Wisdom within me"; and then
stop and think what this means: It
means that the Intelligence that operates through everything, visible and
invisible, is operating within you. Let’s see how we can use this power of
infinite wisdom as a place to begin, and then we shall use it to empower our
process of forgiveness as a place to begin, a foundation, for our spiritual
life.
First,
let’s agree that forgiveness is an act of flushing out the lethal,
repetitious thoughts that devastate our happiness and cause havoc in our
lives. Forgiveness is an act that restores our minds to wholeness. Forgiveness
is very clearly something powerful we do for ourselves, not something nice we
do for someone else. Through forgiveness, we take responsibility for our
thoughts and mental state, for our own integrity, and yet, no particular
action is implied beyond the change of our thinking.
Since
forgiveness is one way of taking responsibility, it is accomplished by first
acknow- ledging the nature of our own thoughts, and secondly, seeing clearly
the conflicted beliefs that our mind holds. This is a powerful choice.
It is a natural expression of Love.
Forgiveness is not accomplished by merely denying our thoughts, arguing
against them, or by trying to replace them with “good thoughts.”
This is what happens when we mistakenly blur the distinctions of
“denial” as it is commonly meant in modern day psychobabble.
We don’t really know what people mean by denial who are not engaged
in Affirmative Prayer, but let’s just agree that this kind of denial is a
kind of pretending that some condition or circumstance, some feeling or
behavior is not really happening even though we are clearly living with the
outcome of its existence. You know what I mean, it would be as if I were to sit here
and say “There is not a piano in this room.”
So what is that object to my left?
Perhaps someone would come and take my piano if I kept saying this with
sufficient feeling, but you can right now see the piano has not moved and can
infer that I don’t mean it.
This
definition of "denial" is clearly not the same meaning for denial
that is used in Affirmative Prayer, which is to look beyond the appearances to
the perfection that exists within. Affirmative
Prayer requires more of us than simply saying that something isn’t so.
It is to combine our faith in the wholeness of all that exists with the
deepest feeling and the knowledge that this wholeness exists with the
situation at hand, knowing that God hears these prayers and acts upon them.
This is a consciously chosen communication with God within the One
Universal Mind that is common to all humankind.
When
we are on the road to forgiveness, and have admitted to ourselves that we have
certain shadowy impulses, once we know what those impulses and ideas are and
how they operate in us, then and only then, can we turn to the place of
stillness and wholeness within us. This is the moment when what it is that we
are seeking to express within ourselves is accessible and ready for
realization. AND, if we take this
second step before the first step is completed, if we don’t honestly face
the troublesome lines of thought we have been engaging in, they will soon
return and repossess our mind.
I
am going to use the example of healing the relationship with our parents
because I know that once we do that, the road is clear for everyone else.
Just about each one of us has either now, or at some time in the past,
harbored grievances against our parents.
Perhaps it is merely biological for us and empowers our leaving home to
start our own lives. Here are
some ideas that might give you a little room for forgiveness.
The sooner we are out on our own, the sooner we will begin to reproduce
ourselves. What if, at least in
part, it was just this impersonal? Even
if you were kind about your leaving home, and some of us surely are, remember
the exhilaration of being in charge of ones own life?
Just a whiff of that possibility when we teenagers or young adults and
we would be dizzy with abandoning our parents.
Surely this possibility makes it easier to hold something against them.
We are meant to be free and it feels like getting rid of our parents
will be the very thing it takes for us to feel as if we are, indeed, free.
So what if there is nothing wrong here?
All the same, what most of us do is begin piling up evidence that we
were right in our decisions. As
young adults, our parents can become the objects of our scorn, no longer
examples of how life is engaged in well, we begin to create in our mind’s
eye the idea of our parents as the examples of how NOT to engage in life.
We
get such mixed feelings about ourselves for having had these feelings that it
can become downright difficult to let go of the negative thoughts we may still
carry about our folks. Consider
this: it is like we are gossiping
about our parents to ourselves, and anyone else we may have engaged in
listening to our painful ideas. Zen teacher Robert Aitken says "More people get hurt by
gossip than by guns." The
Dalai Lama counsels "If you find yourself slandering anybody, first
imagine that your mouth is filled with excrement. It will break you of the
habit quickly enough.” When we
keep carrying around the opinions we formed in our youth, the shortsighted and
possibly less than generous things we had to say about our families, it is a
kind of slander on our families and even upon ourselves.
Can you see how that works?
Forgiveness
is taking responsibility. It is the acknowledgement that our childhood is over
and that we alone reenact the damage. Confusion and discouragement mask our
unwillingness to take responsibility. We have to stop getting bogged down in
either of these emotions and move on to what we need to do to restore
ourselves and our parents in relationship within ourselves.
For
me, this began to take place around the age of 28, however, it took years to
complete the process. I don’t know if it took so long because of how stubborn I
am or how difficult my childhood, but it did take me nearly ten years to
complete the forgiveness process with my mother.
So if it takes you a little while, I suggest you extend some
forgiveness to yourself! Forgiveness
is one of those qualities like love that seems to expand much like the loaves
and fishes upon our need for it.
Perhaps
maturity is the moment when we begin to realize that we don’t have to
continue thinking in this way about our parents, that whatever it was that led
us to have the ideas and opinions we held against them, and whatever was going
on with them at the time, is all in the past and is best left there.
Before leaving it there we can first, reinterpret events in light of a
larger understanding available to us now, "My parents were the way they
were, and this is simply what happened." Take the spin off!
Telling yourself that it shouldn't have happened, engaging in what if
this part had been different, is a form of denying that it did happen, so try
to concentrate on honesty rather than resentment.
The
second step is to add God back into each scene. God was there when it
happened, and God's love protected your heart, your spirit, your soul, as well
as anyone else involved. Clearly, Love does not micromanage events. Each party to any event is using Love and Law at the level of
their awareness. We are not
protected from our experience, the way that life is leaves the door open to
our choices and this is true for all involved. The Divine protects and blesses
us but on the level of the material, we reap the consequences of our thinking.
If we are thinking that our parents are the resurrection of the
Terminator’s nemesis, then what else could we experience?
A
third step you can take is to begin noticing how resentment and other
emotional patterns connected to withholding forgiveness cost you your
vitality. What kind of moods do
you get yourself into when you continue to hold things against another? How many opportunities for happiness go sailing down the
river of sorrow and regret so that you can be self-righteous about what
somebody should have done another way so long ago?
Or last week! It doesn’t
take long for resentment to begin eating up your life.
How
do we defuse this challenge? Once
we have been honest with ourselves, we can effectively take the matter into
prayer. If we can’t find a way
to be completely honest with ourselves, we can affirm and seek support for our
ability to be honest. And we can
keep in mind that we are doing the best that we can. Once we have been honest with ourselves, in prayer we can
release what happened. We can
release our need to see things the way that we once did.
We can begin to look upon the events of our lives and our parents lives
with some compassion. God
remained in and through you and could never reject you, nor could God reject
your family. Remember this.
As you begin having some compassion and forgiveness for yourself and
for your family, you will begin exhausting these old “personal family mental
movies” of the source of their pain.
While
you are working this out through telling the truth, correcting your thoughts
as you go along, and by taking the matter into affirmative prayer, you can
refuse to act out the damage this negative thinking causes whenever possible.
In this way, you will no longer put others on the defensive and make the
situation more complicated. Once you have refused to make things worse, and
have found some forgiveness for yourself and the persons you once viewed as
perpetrators of your suffering, you must then open your heart to the grace of
God. God will return you to the experience of your Divinely inspired and
sacred feelings, not one of which was ever touched by this experience of
difficulty, suffering and sorrow. Silently repeat: "I choose now to see
as God sees and feel as God feels. I express Love as God expresses Love. I
want nothing more than to be as God created me."
In the beginning of this talk I quoted Holmes saying, “Love
points the way and Law makes the way possible.” And the Bible For
if you forgive men their faults, your Father in heaven will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive even
your faults. Since we
believe that God is in all that exists, including you and I, this Biblical
quotation has an interesting meaning.
If we are to be forgiven by God we have to begin with ourselves!
Even this forgiveness thing is an inside job. This is another one of
those things where having faith the size of a mustard seed is a sufficient
beginning. Just seeing the possibility that what we had once thought of as the
truth about someone else is no longer a useful idea for us, just
the inkling that there could be another deeper interpretation of events, that
idea “blows the doors off” and lets the fresh air back into our lives.
As
I said before, it took me years to work this all out with my mother.
During that time, I had to learn to keep my mouth shut about when I
wanted to blurt out some horrible stuff about my mother in order to absolve
myself of responsibility for some condition in my life.
Someone once told me “If you can’t find something good to say, then
don’t say anything at all.” This
is a difficult practice, one I am sure the Buddha would recommend, as would
Confucius and Lao Tzu, who wrote in Verse 56 of the Tao te Ching:
Those
who know don't talk.
Those who talk, don't know.
If
you speak or act with a corrupted heart, then suffering follows you like the
cart's wheel follows the foot of the ox. If you speak or act with a calm,
bright heart, then happiness follows you, like a never-departing shadow.
Sometimes,
when we are looking for that calm, bright heart within ourselves it takes us
awhile to find it under the dirty laundry of our past, and if we can keep our
mouth shut at those moments when we would gossip about those whom we have
judged, before we know it, our prayers will be answered and we will no longer
think the thoughts that led to that struggle.
We will be returned to our original state.
In the book of Proverbs it is said:
“For lack of wood the fire goes out; and where there is no
whisperer, quarreling ceases.”
We
are told that God will forgive us after we have forgiven others. This is a
direct statement and one that we should ponder deeply. Can God forgive until
we have forgiven? If God can work for us only by working through us, then this
statement of Jesus stands true, and is really a statement of the law of cause
and effect. We cannot afford to hold personal animosities or enmities against
the world or individual members of society. All such thoughts are outside the
law and cannot be taken into the heavenly consciousness. Love alone can
beget love. People do not gather roses from thistles.
The
Father who seest in secret will reward us openly. Shall we not learn to enter
the “secret place of the Most High,” within our own soul, in gladness? We
are to fast without outward sign, but with the inner mind open and receptive
to the Good alone. Our treasure is already in heaven, and our thought can take
us to this treasure only when it is in accord with divine harmony and perfect
love.[iv]
This
is a picture of my Mother when she was in third grade. It came to me when I was struggling with the memory of some
painful childhood experience, that if I ever wished to hold anything against
her, that I would get out this picture and think of this Peppermint Patty
face, of this tender adventurous girl with the thick coppery hair and
full-bodied set of freckles. This
is a girl who saved her brother from Polio. I think of the great difficulty of
her life. I remember that no
matter how tall she grew to be--and she was very tall, and no matter how she
towered over me all my life--that inside the heart of her was still that
wonderfully devilish girl who would try anything, who was terribly generous,
and not particularly fearful of the consequences of the choices she made.
And I cannot be angry with her. I
choose to remember this as the Spirit of my mother, and just as I would
forgive any adventurous girl her mistakes, I can still forgive my mother, as I
did many many times on the way to complete forgiveness. It is easy to be angry
with the 5’10” threatening God that she was to me when I was the shortest
child in my class at school. But
as an adult I can see the perfect and playful child of God within my Mother.
In
learning this with my Mother I found that I could forgive anyone for just
about anything, and that includes myself.
Maybe you don’t have a picture of the person you wish to forgive, but
I am sure that you can imagine them as a child, or you could picture their
vulnerability, their tenderness,
with a loving heart you can find a way to understand how they might have come
to do the things that they have done.
Underneath
all suffering and all acts that cause suffering lies a commitment to Love.
Perhaps the commitment is not fully realized, but it is there, and in
finding it we find our way back into the recognition within ourselves of the
grace of God. Forgiveness can certainly be challenging, though it does not
have to be. It is the passage
back to the center of our being. It
is the note upon which life begins to balance, achieves harmony and it is the
passageway into the life of Spirit. Forgiveness
is the key to our own complete spiritual freedom.
Yes others really do benefit from our forgiveness, even when they
don’t know about it. In that
sense, forgiveness works like prayer, it doesn’t matter who knows or how far
away they might be from the person doing the acts of forgiveness.
It is truly the light of freedom that ignites within ones own heart.
Forgiveness clears away all the stuff that is between us and a mystical
union with God. Forgiveness is a
worthy use of the Law. It changes us from hard, ungenerous, unsympathetic and
self-righteous into thinkers capable of Divine thought.
Forgiveness rebuilds our capacity for compassion and understanding.
It clears away the debris from the portals of our Spirit and unifies it
with the Divine. Forgiveness is a
mystical act that uses the Law to create this experience of divinity within
ourselves. You have the keys to the kingdom and you are free right now to use
them. Who might you begin
forgiving today? Forgiveness does
not change the past, but it truly does enlarge the possibility of the future. Gandhi said it best when he said “The weak can never
forgive. Forgiveness is the
attribute of the strong.” Just
by beginning to forgive, we begin to experience our own innate strength.
Kahlil Gibran reminds us of how horribly we injure ourselves when he says: “If the other person injures you, you may forget the
injury, but if you injure him you will always remember.”
By forgiving and giving up the gossip against those who we need to
forgive, we reclaim our souls from any further self-inflicted damage, and we
create for ourselves a powerful place to begin our lives again.
This is the wisdom of the ages, that there is a power for good in the
universe greater than we are, and we can use it!
Thank
you for being here today.
[i]
Dr. Ernest
Holmes, The Science of Mind, 1938 Ed.
[iii]
Dr. Ernest
Holmes, The Science of Mind, 1926 Ed.
[iv]
Dr. Ernest
Holmes, The Science of Mind, 1938 Ed.
Emerson
Center for
