A Continuing Dialog on Forgiveness

In the July, my column was devoted to forgiveness. This is a spiritual issue needing some kind of process for resolution and healing in all of our lives. The active process of forgiveness is something we need to have in order to continue growing and moving forward on the spiritual path. After all, yesterday is gone and tomorrow has not come. We can only live in today. Yet, most of us continue to experience the emotional pain and turmoil created by our actions and events in the past. Whatever we have done or not done, the emotional energy we hold toward others and ourselves that represents a need of forgiveness is an energetic force that continues to influence and color every moment of our lives. Perhaps the most important effect is in terms of our spiritual path — who and what we need to forgive

At the end of each of the articles I have written over the last few years, I invite readers to send me an email with their thoughts, comments and questions about the month's topic. It came as little surprise that the article on forgiveness generated a strong response from several readers. I have always viewed my writing as being a living dialog between the God of my Heart and me. At the same time, I also have felt a deep urge to support others in their quest, regardless of form or substance. We have so much to learn from one another if we are willing to stop and listen. That means putting aside our own ego needs to be right, or know more, or act and feel superior in any way. At times, what we hear from others reminds us of what we know and believe. In other cases, there is a new perspective to be gained on some spiritual issue we are wrestling with and trying to understand.

One email I received about the forgiveness article created a deep emotional response within me. I began an email exchange with the writer. Then I asked permission to use parts of our exchange in this month's column. With the writer's permission, I am including excerpts from our emails. There are several reasons this writers responses were powerful for me. Most of all, I was deeply moved by their willingness to share their thoughts and questions in an open and honest way. I know anyone who reads the following exchanges will see the universal nature contained in our dialog and benefit from the information.

Rereading the article as it appears in the July issue before reading our dialog may be helpful. I have included the questions as they appeared in July, followed by the writer's responses.

The first email begins:

I have just reread your excellent article on forgiveness. At the end of the article, you posed several questions:

Question in Article: How many issues can you think of that need forgiveness in your life?

Reader Response: Yes, there are many issues that need forgiveness and they have quite a bit of power in my life. I have been working on them for the past several years and your article gave me some much-needed direction. Now that I realize the power of forgiveness, I realize how not forgiving has held me back in my spiritual growth. There were people I didn't realize needed forgiveness and they should have been forgiven many years ago.

Question in Article: Can I realize the precise role forgiveness has played in holding back my growth?

Reader Response: Not really. It seems to be everywhere. Must forgive myself, my parents, old friends, new friends, coworkers seems no one is exempt. The best method for me so far is to focus for a period of time on why they do the things they do, then my anger goes away and forgiveness arrives. The closer the person is or was to me the more time is required. Seems to work so far.

Question in Article: As you think about who you are, what role do you feel forgiveness holds in your process of advancing as a spiritual being?

Reader Response: Forgiveness seems to be the prime, (role or factor) in me advancing as a spiritual being. Without forgiveness, there is no spiritual growth.

Question in Article: Can you visualize what your life would look like or how you would feel if you entered into forgiveness?

Reader Response: This question is the reason for this communication. No, I do not know what life would look like or feel like if I was able to succeed in forgiving everybody. Or even most people. As with just about everybody, I have some very deep wounds that do not easily respond to healing attempts. They are beginning to lighten up now after quite a bit of focused work. However, what the end result would look or feel like is an unknown to me at this time.

Would you please send me a clue?

Most facets of my life are wreckage right now and I am beginning to rebuild my entire life. Feels like I am trying to get a method of feedback to find out if this is being done correctly. Seems this is a path that must be traveled very much alone.

I do not want to go through this again.

Thanks.

Here is my response to the first email.

I must say, in your responses to the questions, I can sense the deep work you are doing on your spiritual path. Congratulations. I know how hard the inner work is from my own life experience. As a spiritual man, I consider all of my life — events, work, relationships, etc. — to be my path to a deeper understanding of the Divine. I work on my path from an intellectual point of desiring a "personal relationship with the Divine." I am too much of a man — flawed in so many ways — to be so arrogant as to say I know the Divine up close and in a truly personal way. I tell you all of this because that connection is the purpose of my life. In other words, there is nothing more important than achieving this experience. Everything else is secondary or at best an illusion."

When I think about the content of my everyday life and the days that have come before today, much like you, there has already been "hell" to pay in my life. I search for those things that continue to hold me in my own personal created hell and work to grow and move beyond those limitations. One of the hells is the emotional boil we all have that comes from events we need to release and people we need to forgive. I always remind myself there is nothing I can do about yesterday. Tomorrow is not here. That leaves me with today. I have worked long and hard to develop self-talk about any given day. It goes something like this. Do I want to spend my day in anger about my parents, brothers, sisters, or past events? Do I want to spend this day being angry and critical of myself? In the end, the answers to all of these questions are based on one thing. What do I want for me as a spiritual person? What is it that I am after? Forgiveness is important because the act of forgiveness is one type of action we can take to stop our lives being overrun by the events of the past — and to stop them from absorbing our consciousness and affecting our subconscious actions in the present day.

Nevertheless, what are we really after? For me, there is only one goal — to deepen my relationship with the Divine. Everyone and everything else is secondary.

...you are so clear. I want to encourage you to take your next step. Determine what is going to be your top-priority for the rest of this lifetime. Get focused. Stay focused. Stay focused especially in those moments when you catch yourself consumed with anger or regret about the past.

One last thought. When it comes to parents, or anyone else for that matter, very few people in our lives are going out of their way to hurt us. They are people just like us, doing the best they can. Where our anger and disappointment arises is when they are not fulfilling our needs. I remind myself that this is the place in my life where the only relationship that can fully cover all that I need is the Divine.

I hope this is helpful.

A few days later, I sent another email asking the writer if my answers were helpful. Here is their response.

Yes, your email was helpful and in response I wrote this long thoughtful email, got to the end and realized, I have been looking at God and my relationship with God in completely the wrong way.

The last of that email is: I am aware that my relationship with The Divine is the most important 'thing' in my life. In looking over our emails, maybe I have been wrong and arrogant in thinking I had a good relationship with The Divine (God) and the wreckage of my life is his way of telling me this. Most important question is 'Do you know how I can fix this?

You have some excellent points. What if all of these 'negative' or unwanted events and actions in my life are in fact my Divine purpose? Nietzsche wrote, "What does not destroy me makes me stronger". I am now a spiritual heavy weight lifter!

... I can get all intellectual and philosophical about God and forgiveness but in the end, I must stop talking and actually DO SOMETHING.

... ceremonies or meditations about forgiveness which I have been using. They have been very helpful and I feel successful in helping me to forgive.

"I do meditate at least once a day, my goal is twice a day for 30 minutes each 'session'. Now, if I go for more than 24 hours without meditating, I actually physically do not feel well. This has not happened before."

Here is my response to the final email in this series.

I can see from your writing that you are doing a lot of really good and deep spiritual work. Congratulations. I think you are very brave and strong to be doing that level of work.

I agree with you that we can have the intellectual information, but the challenge remains for each of us to take some action. I try to remember each day to ask myself to identify what I have done to prove what I know through some type of first-hand experience.

There is no line between our spiritual life and the material world. They are both one. There is only one path and all of life's events lead us in one direction. The decision each of us face every day is about how we want to spend our day. Can we find a way to let go of the past and gain the spiritual freedom that comes with forgiveness? The act of forgiveness frees us up to focus our thoughts and actions in the direction of deepening our connection with the Divine.

Here are a few questions to use for meditation, prayer or journaling during the next few weeks:

When I think about my spiritual journey, is forgiveness such an important issue?

If I chose to enter into forgiveness of people and life events, how would my life change?

How would I feel on an emotional level each day if I no longer spent most of my day living in the past?

How important is it to be at peace within myself?