Forgiveness in Four Acts/Act IV

To Forgive: to abandon the debt

“Forgiveness is an act of creation,” says Clarissa Pinkola Estes. We get to choose how best to forgive—in whole or in part, for now or forever or some time in between.

There is a moving story from the life of Mahatma Gandhi. As the newly independent India was dividing it’s country to form the Islamic state of Pakistan, violence broke out and former neighbors were killing each other. Gandhi went into another fasting, refusing to take nourishment until the violence stopped. A Hindu man came to Gandhi, in a state of grief and rage over the killing of his young son by a Muslim. The Hindu wanted blood to quench his rage, and came to Gandhi to vent his pain and confusion and to challenge the holy man to sanction his need for vengeance. How would he live if he did not kill in revenge for the loss of his son; how could he live if he did?

Gandhi met the challenge with compassion, and through the principles of passive resistance now applied to the human heart. He instructed the man that the only way out of his dilemma, the only road to forgiveness, would be to go into the Muslim sector and find a boy who had been orphaned at the hand of a Hindu. He was to adopt that boy, care for him and love him. And he was to raise him as a good Muslim.

In 12-step parlance, we would advise, “Pray for the SOB.”

The return to compassion is perhaps the greatest sign that we have forgiven, truly released the self from the bondage of resentment and the need for payback or penance from another. Again, from Estes great work, Women Who Run With the Wolves, “How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to remember to say about it all. You understand the suffering that drove the offense to begin with. You prefer to remain outside the milieu. You are not waiting for anything. You are not wanting anything.”

Forgiveness allows us access to higher levels of consciousness, unavailable when energy is wrapped up in resentment. Restoring us to clearer realms of consciousness returns our energy from negative missions, which restores our vitality. With energy flowing in the present, the body can heal itself.

As Carolyn Myss puts it in Anatomy of the Spirit: “The fourth chakra (the heart) is the center of the human energy system. Everything in and about our lives runs off the fuel of our hearts. We will all have experiences meant to ‘break our hearts’—not in half but wide open. Regardless of how your heart is broken, your choice is always the same: What will you do with your pain? Will you use it as an excurse to give fear more authority over you, or can you release the authority of the physical world over you through an act of forgiveness? The question contained within the fourth chakra will be presented to you again and again in your life, until the answer you give becomes your own liberation.” In other words, until we begin to accept that we are spirit having a human experience.

The return to compassion is a return to equilibrium, a restoration of the heart and the heart energy of love, compassion and prosperity, the feeling of equality and goodness extended to all. Through conscious forgiveness, we are re-included in the all of humanity.

 Many Blessings!