"People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, 'I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin."So let's kick forgiveness around for a while. What does the Goddess say we should do about it?
~from Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel, Waterville, Maine: Thorndike Press, page 426.
Four or five years ago, my dog Duncan killed my cat Margaret. She was old, he loved to chase her. She was great at hiding and running from him, but she kept getting older and older, and one day he caught her behind the toilet.
A mad chase, a scuffle, and the next thing I knew Margaret was convulsing and then still.
It took time for me to forgive my dog-son Duncan, but eventually forgiveness just floated into my heart. I didn't have to work at getting it. It wasn't a choice. I didn't ask for it, or pray for it. One day, forgiveness just happened.
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Thnx to j.labrado for the foto; go HERE to see more.
I'm not sure what Goddess says about forgiveness, but I know that when I have NOT forgiven, it does me more harm than it does the person who created the problem in the first place. Yes, there are situations in which anger at those who have done me wrong is certainly justified, but beyond a reasonable period of . . . for lack of a better term "processing" it, I think continuing to hold a grudge against someone who has done me wrong sort of prolongs or perpetuates a state of victimhood in me. So if I'm looking at it from the perspective of the pagan/wiccan principle of "harm none," then I think the Goddess says that forgiveness is good.
ReplyDeleteI find it hardest to forgive myself.
ReplyDeleteForgiveness just happened.
ReplyDeleteI wish it was that easy. I have hurts so deep I'm not sure it will ever happen without boatloads of WORK.
Foregiveness just happened.
Perhaps because your dog-child was truly an innocent. What of the one's that are NOT so innocent. The one's that have a CHOICE in how they treat you? Harder, right?
Ravenmoon,
ReplyDeleteI wonder if forgiveness is hard in many cases because we know (or suspect) that the person who did the hurt could turn around and do it again?
I think that's the case with me, at any rate. It's so much easier for me to forgive someone I'm sure will no longer hurt me or others.
About my dog-child: my theory is that it's easier for healthy moms to forgive their kids than it is for the rest of us to forgive.
And this gets to what I call "The Mother Rule," which says we should all strive to treat each other the way a healthy mom treats her kids.
If we all had this as a star-goal, beginning as children, I think we'd have a far safer, kinder, and closer-to-utopian world.