Forgiveness...

"Out beyond right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Rumi

Jelaluddin Rumi, the 13th century mystic poet, was truly one of the most passionate and profound poets in history.  These hundreds of years later, his poems and quotes still find their way into the fabric of our world, still striking chords with those that read or hear them.  Still leaving people wondering what the intention of a particular quote may have been.  One of my favorites is this one...

 

"Out beyond right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. 
I will meet you there."  Rumi

 As with many of his quotes, there is still much debate of what he was referring in his poetry.  With this quote,  I like to think he means that there is a place where our limited beliefs and ideas on what is right and wrong are no longer important.  A place where we can communicate with each other. A place where we can leave our conditioning and old understanding behind, drop our defenses and open our hearts. A place where there is hope for reconciliation and mutual understanding.  A place where the first seeds of forgiveness can be sown.

In working with people through the Grief Recovery Method, although forgiveness is one of the three components of completion, it can be one of the most difficult concepts for people to understand.  Through time, we have confused forgiveness with condoning an act or event that impacted our hearts in a painful way.    We believe that if we forgive another, we are trivializing the pain that they caused us.  We feel that we are letting them off the hook for something horrible that they did, and  accept that their actions were okay.  That is not forgiveness.

The definition of forgiveness in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines forgiving as "to cease to feel resentment against."  When we think about forgiveness in those terms, we begin to understand that continuing to harbor the resentment and anger towards someone who offended us begins to limit and restrict our own ability to move forward and participate fully in the life we are living today.  That anger and pain continues to resurface and invade our life whenever something stimulates the memory of the event and the hurtful emotions that are attached to it.  We continue to hurt ourselves because we hold on to the hope of an apology...an acknowledgement...or some sort of retribution for what was done to us.  We continue to hope for a different or better yesterday when all we really have the power to do is the ground work for a better tomorrow. 

As people slowly come to realize the definition of forgiveness and to understand that we forgive in order to reacquire our own sense of well being and joy, you see the change begin.  That subtle shift where the anger starts to lessen, where the painful lines of hurt begin to soften a little and a different view of the world begins to seep in.  It is beautiful to be part of and to witness.  It is more amazing to experience within one's self. 

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong." Mahatma Gandhi

"The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong."
Mahatma Gandhi

When Gandhi said forgiveness is an attribute of the strong, he understood that forgiveness is hard work.  It takes intention, and commitment and it takes a strong person who is willing to revisit the pain of the past and make a decision to let that pain go.  It takes a willingness to let go of the hold that the past has on them, and build up from where they are today, without the pain of the memory dragging them back down. 

Often, the act of forgiving opens up the possibility of looking at the event through different eyes.  When you forgive and set aside the pain, there can be an new awareness develop as well.  Not always, but sometimes.  Sometimes the event was so horrific, that the perpetrator can only be viewed as evil.  Again, your forgiveness of them does not take away from who they are or what they did, it is solely to relieve your heart of the pain that it has carried.

But every now and then, I see Rumi's quote come into play.  'Out beyond right doing and wrong doing, there is a field.  I will meet you there'  Every now and then, by making the conscious decision to take the action that is forgiveness, we open our hearts up to something more.  Sometimes in forgiveness we see what happened, or what was said, was a difference of beliefs, education, life skills or upbringing.  It was not necessarily a matter of right doing or wrong doing, but rather a difference in understanding as a result our individual beliefs or stories, based on what others might have believed to be true at the time. Sometimes, if we can drop that view of rightness or wrongness...we can see the field beyond.  And in that field, there is hope and possibility.  In that field, by planting the seeds of forgiveness, there lies the potential for growth, reconciliation and a softer, kinder world than the one we often see today.  In that field lies the opportunity to seed change.