Spirituality and Forgiveness
Moving beyond the ego and forgiveness to oneness
Forgiveness is a big theme in many religions, and for good reason. Strong unresolved emotions of any kind, such as anger or grief, can hold one back on the spiritual path until they are healed. As one who has been on a long spiritual journey through several faiths, I struggled a bit with the concept of forgiveness. I’ll talk about the struggle and recent experiences beyond religion that made forgiveness and something beyond forgiveness meaningful for me.
Let’s start with an example. I had a boss a few years back who was a brilliant engineer, affable some of the time, and also highly abusive whenever he heard any reports he didn’t like. He would not hesitate to beat people up in front of meetings with a dozen employees if they gave him a bad report, and he didn’t withold severe criticism for the most minor and insignificant mistakes, no matter who was present in addition to the employee he was targeting.
He came after me late one afternoon right in the middle of our open office, and we had a shouting match unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at work as I defended myself from his attack. We were a hair’s breadth from coming to blows. Miraculously, neither of us was fired (I expected to be because I was his subordinate), but a few months later, he found another job. I’m not one to carry a grudge, but I nursed a grudge against him for years after he was gone until something happened to change my viewpoint.
But first, let me talk about other struggles I’ve had with forgiveness. Of course forgiving others is a wonderful thing to do, good for you and the other person. We all make mistakes and need to be forgiven. In addition, if our emotions, such as anger, cause us pain, it can prevent us from moving ahead in life and spirituality because we get stuck in our emotions and can’t see beyond them. It’s therefore wonderful if we can work with our emotions and find ways to let them go so they no longer consume us and block our thinking.
My trouble was that in a Christian context I felt the obligation to forgive, pretty much as a rote practice of doctrine because of the sermons I’d heard about how god will not forgive you if you don’t forgive others. (I’ve since learned that is NOT true; I have experienced divine unconditional love, not judgment, and that love heals.) When someone angered me, I prayed for the situation and the other person and said out loud that I forgave the other person. I was practicing forgiveness from the ego, but it didn’t really work. I was just suppressing my anger, often unsuccessfully. I didn’t feel forgiveness emotionally.
In more recent times, I’ve come across a way of forgiving that is far more natural and loving. Events of the last few years caused me to seek therapy for my emotional struggles, and I’ve also practiced my own personal version of spirituality more intensely. The combination of the two has led to insights and changes in my awareness that have brought emotional relief and positive spiritual progress.
I discovered that meditation and visualization on another person’s perspective can lead to a kind of nearly effortless forgiveness. I didn’t even need to consciously forgive anyone; it simply became a part of a new mindset that has happened spontaneously. The words for this new viewpoint are empathy and compassion.
I recognized this shift had taken place for me when thinking about my parents. In the past when I thought about them, I felt love, of course, but I also felt some longstanding anger, disappointment, and deep sadness that they had harmed me in ways that left me damaged for life. I had learned painful ways of thinking and feeling because of what they had done during my childhood and because they had done little to help me cope emotionally.
Recently while meditating on my parents in the process of healing those old wounds, I was given the gift of compassion for them and empathy for their experiences during that time. I felt what it was like to be them. They were wounded people too! And I felt their wounds, felt their struggle with life, work, marriage, and raising children. As I was in the midst of this vision, which started with seeing and feeling my own pain during those years, I was filled with compassion for them, saw everything from both my viewpoint and theirs simultaneously, and my own pain and struggle simply melted away in my love and compassion for them as fellow wounded souls.
There was nothing to forgive! I could feel their hurt and confusion and knew they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time. Even if they sometimes intentionally harmed me by saying or doing something cruel, I knew it didn’t come from their heart but from their pain. And I see that I do the same things, wounding others unintentionally because as Jesus said, we know not what we do. And even when we do know, we can’t always stop ourselves.
Empathy and compassion from envisioning and feeling the other person’s wounds leads to something far beyond forgiveness. It leads to oneness, to love and acceptance, to knowing that even when others hurt us, even when it’s intentional, they are doing the best they can with they have learned so far in life. They are still learning to cope and doing it imperfectly, just as we all are.
The best way, in my view, to forgive is not to forgive at all. It’s to focus on the other person during inward quiet time and imagine life from the other person’s viewpoint. What do you suppose they feel about their life, their work, their family? What pain and struggles do they carry? What inner pain might have caused them to be unkind? This meditation can help us feel as they must feel, think as they might think, and see their struggles as our own. As we feel their pain and understand how they could have made mistakes that harmed us, our own pain begins transforming into compassion.
About that cruel boss? I’ve seen his pain too. I remember things he said about his family of origin in moments of confidence, and I realize he has a lot of unconscious pain, a lot of drivenness and overachieving that will not allow him to tolerate mistakes from himself or others. I recall that he said things indicating he is unconsciously passing on some of that pain to his children. And I feel compassion for him and for them; my heart hopes he and they find healing.
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I heartily agree! My confusion lies more in the area of people doing harm to others, not me. And I get impatient because I don't know how compassion after the fact helps. For instance, when some 19-year-old shoots people in a church or a school (or anywhere), I can't imagine forgiving them, and my thinking just comes to a stop. I know intellectually something is very wrong in the shooter's life, but I don't see a useful reaction for myself.
There’s lots of wisdom in this post. I’ve always struggled with the tension between forgiveness and the desire for justice. Here, you present forgiveness in a framework that’s very different and very helpful. When viewing forgiveness as understanding, the difficulty dissolves.