It’s hard to tell if you have done a thing.
Well, not always.
Yesterday, I trashed one of my Christmas angels. I knew I’d done it because I could see it. Unscrewing the motor that ran her wings, pulling the bulbs off her trumpet, stuffing her head first into a dumpster — it was fairly definitive.
I told her, “You’ve served well honey, but you’re done. Rest in peace — in the dump.”
Then I put the body parts I had harvested from her in a drawer in the garage — ready if needed — to patch up my other angel, the one lighting up my driveway these Christmas nights.
It’s done, the body’s gone.
Not every body is like that.
Forgiveness is not like that. You do it, you dismember the offender in your mind, you dump the body in the river Lithe, and then it floats to the surface again, bloated and horrible in the backwaters of your mind
“What? I just can’t get rid of this guy!”
That is because forgiveness can’t erase the past. It was what it was and forgiving someone doesn’t dispense with the memory or emotion of their offense — the attendant regret, the sadness, the anger.
Forgiveness is no eraser.
Then what is forgiveness?
Forgiveness is keyboard, a keyboard that can write the present and also write the future.
Forgiveness is the agency that allows us to positively address the issues of the present without being controlled by a residue of anger and resentment from the past.
Forgiveness is the ability to love again.
Sometimes we think we haven’t forgiven because we haven’t been able to dismember the bodies and tossed them in the River Lethe. But getting rid of the bodies is not forgiveness. They won’t go. We will lug our heaviest offenders to our graves with us.
Forgiving is not forgetting; it is thriving, while not forgetting. We know we have forgiven when we find ourselves harvesting a special awareness and sensitivity from what we have learned from our past wounds and bringing that into the present to love and care for others again.
Forgiveness is the freedom to enter the present with fresh eyes and an open heart and ready hands.
Sometimes you can tell you are doing a thing when you are doing it without thinking of the things that could keep you from doing it.
With divine assistance, choosing to exist existentially and exponentially within the forgiveness available to you, forgive the dark angels and the even darker humans of the past; do this by taking loving care of the bright ones of your present.
Thrive! 