Forgiveness restores our hearts to the
innocence that we knew — an innocence
that allowed us the freedom to love.
— Robin Casarjian
author of Forgiveness: A Bold Choice
for a Peaceful Heart
Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. Mark this as one of the great truths of the collective wisdom passed down through the centuries: life can be lived most abundantly as an adventure in forgiveness.
But what is this thing called forgiveness? Really? Forgiveness is a quiet miracle. It is done alone. When we pardon, we give up our resentment toward a perceived offender in the silence of our heart and mind. No one can record our miracle on videotape. Our decision is private and invisible, a sincere whisper heard deep in our spirit.
Nothing clutters a life, or the life of a nation, more than the three R’s: resentment, remorse, and recrimination. These three emotional responses to life are based in anger, guilt, and hostility. When held in the mind and in the heart, they occupy a fearsome amount of space, coloring our perception of reality to an alarmingly large degree. They block our potential. They drain our life of any chance for joy and peace.
Enter the great non-negotiable Law of Forgiveness — the one and only key that opens the lock of hostility. Forgiveness of others and forgiveness of ourselves. We all have the power to do this here, now.
Forgiveness frees us from the perpetual self-punishment that the decision to hate demands. Forgiveness allows us to neutralize the toxic emotional investment that keeps us in shackles. Our decision to forgive allows us freedom. It is the only key on the ring that unlocks the shackles of grudge and guilt.
Forgiveness. Understand the depth of what this law is asking of us. We forgive not to let the other person off the hook. No. We forgive to let ourselves off the hook. And magically, almost mystically, we receive a new life, a healed life.
The consequences of not forgiving are high. The person who hates by constantly carrying a toxic attitude of resentment into his or her relationships, who goes through life spreading animosity, has chosen a distorted and darkened lens with which to view life. Hate is the death of wellness. The inevitable results include marriages that lack trust, jobs that create situations of constant friction and interpersonal relations filled with toxicity.
Life is filtered through our perceptions, shaded with whatever colors we choose. Choose the color of hate and the penalty is a life experience filled with acid rancor, deep disappointment, and self-pitying paranoia. We fear what others may do, or fail to do, to us and for us. Our response: hate. Through anger, through attack, through defense, we feel we find a certain, though unstable, sense of safety.
This behavior is everywhere. Recently, I was deeply saddened to hear that some young Jewish friends had been chased by two boys wielding wooden sticks. Our friends were targets of religious hatred perpetrated by children too young to really understand the meaning of their actions. One can only assume that the two young boys learned this hatred from their parents.
As much as I wanted to encourage our friends to fight back, I recognized that this would be a decision to hate. The decision to hate only perpetuates the problem. Only forgiveness can conquer the hatred.
Marilyn was recovering from treatments for ovarian cancer. Her parents wanted to visit, an event that invariably left Marilyn ill at ease. Marilyn and her mother made noble efforts to get along with each other but they seldom succeeded fully. Old behaviors of attack and defense eventually came to the surface. Child care, cooking, homemaking, religion — it was all fodder for conflict. Her mother wanted a more conservative daughter. Marilyn wanted a more enlightened mother.
“It was driving me crazy,” said Marilyn.
“During her last visit, I was ready to throw her out. But then it occurred to me, God isn’t looking at my mother and thinking, ‘Mildred is such a bitch.’ How could I pretend to want to get along with my mother if I was so consumed by judging her errors? I needed to practice forgiveness, to work on acceptance and get off my fixation with approval.
“So I said to myself, ‘I’ll try this for an afternoon. I will put my energy into accepting her, no matter what.’” The experiment was life-changing. From that moment on, the relationship started to shift. “As I silently forgave her and became more accepting, she became more accepting of me. We’re a long way from best buddies,” conceded Marilyn, “but there is a growing bond between us.”
I am a student of forgiveness, not a master. We recently purchased a new home. In the course of a couple of visits that took place after we signed the offer, we learned of several major problems that had not been disclosed during inspection: the basement filled with water when it rained, and water seeping through the leaky roof had damaged the rafters.
I responded in all the wrong ways. My ego roared. My emotions surged. I felt I had been lied to. I believed people were trying to cheat me. I became determined to “get even.” So I hired an attorney: I’d threaten to sue and drive the seller and the agent to the bargaining table.
A settlement was reached. But I found myself unable to give up the anger. I knew what I should do: forgive. I was unable to do it.
The Law of Forgiveness is a tough taskmaster. It forces us to examine our motives. It requires us to look deep within. The work of forgiveness demands that we give up the need to always be right. That is a big request.
The Law of Forgiveness can be misunderstood. It is not asking us to betray our deepest beliefs or disregard our principles. We need not compromise our personal integrity by failing to stand up for what we hold to be true. The law does not imply that we are to live our lives trying to please everyone at the risk of being untrue to ourselves.
However, the law does ask us to become keenly aware of how often we engage in verbal and emotional combat that has less to do with higher principles and personal integrity than it does with our perceptions of being right.
In the larger scheme of my life, how important is it, really, that I get to be “right” in a real-estate transaction? And once a settlement has been agreed to, how important is it that I keep rehashing the experience?
The Law of Forgiveness demands that I come to a very important realization: in these matters, it is not my spirit that demands to be right, it is my frail ego.
In fact, it is probably my ego that has backed me into this situation in the first place. And my ego is not the most reliable source of guidance in getting me out of the situation.
Realize that this law and its demands are as true of marriages as of real-estate transactions. Forgiveness is for the workplace and for parenting, for young and old, for black and white. Forgiveness applies to everything, to everyone, all the time. This is what is meant by life being lived most abundantly as an adventure in forgiveness.
Nothing contaminates the life of wellness more than resentment, remorse, and recrimination. These states of heart and mind do more to stand in the way of our wellness than virtually any other dynamic.
If the daily practice of the Law of Forgiveness is the only way out, what does this law look like in action?
I know from vivid personal experience. I can trace the absolute turning point in my own illness directly to the work of forgiveness. Weak, emaciated, lying at home in constant pain, I was going downhill rapidly by all physical measurements. Doctors, family, even my own mind — all believed I was about to die.
Yet something kept driving me. I would place phone calls to organizations all over the country, seeking others who had gone through a similar situation and lived. I wanted to learn from their experience.
I kept hearing people talk about forgiveness. “You need to forgive,” said a woman in Boise, Idaho. A man from Tennessee put it plainly: “The difference is forgiveness.”
My first reaction was “I probably don’t have many issues of forgiveness to deal with. Forgiveness isn’t my problem.”
I was wrong. Forgiveness was my issue. My critical attitude was first. Why did I look at a situation and always pick out what was wrong? I’d do it constantly. People were my favorite target. I would make a quick study of someone and actively seek out his Achilles’ heel. “What’s wrong with him?” I’d think. It was all an effort to put someone else down in order to build myself up. Distorted thinking, bereft of charity and compassion.
The worst example was my behavior at work. When a new controller was brought in, and I suddenly had to seek approval for all our division’s expense budgets through this new “intruder,” I saw the whole setup as a huge threat to my position. So, without really making a conscious decision, I began to attack. I became critical of the controller’s plans. I tried to undermine his work. I threw stones at his policies. I became critical of him personally.
My criticism led to condemnation. I set myself up as judge and jury. If I was superior, then I was right. In fact, I always had to be right. Therefore, the new controller was, by definition, wrong. I condemned him and then went about proving it to others.
As I look back, I see that it was only three months between the time the new controller came on board and the onset of my cancer diagnosis. I believe there was a link between my toxic behavior and the onset of my illness.
What I didn’t count on was a counterattack. The new controller fought back, pointing out my failures to institute more effective financial controls. He was equally skilled at finding a person’s weak point. And the battle between the two of us became a company-wide problem that began to drag everyone down.
I am saddened and mortified about how it came to a head. We were in a meeting with three other division heads and the CEO. My adversary the controller passed around a budget update. Trying to be flippant, I took my copy of the document, threw it across the table, and proclaimed, “These numbers are a crock of ____.” The report hit the CEO’s coffee cup, the contents of which spilled into his lap.
He jumped up, glared at me, pointed a finger, and said, “Get the hell out of here.” I went back to my office, then headed to my car. I began to see how absolutely ludicrous my behavior had been.
That kind of behavior consumes vast amounts of emotional energy. It produces a negative and contrary spirit that is toxic to us and to others. I had my entire sense of worth invested in always being right. I suppose it was an issue of perception. I was so concerned with what other people thought of me that I never considered I might be wrong. I needed everyone to know that I was right and to acknowledge it.
But the story takes an even more bizarre twist. Within thirty days of my diagnosis of lung cancer, my adversary the controller was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now, I have had medical authorities tell me that he probably had been carrying the cancer for years and it had just then been discovered, as had mine. But my intuition tells me that our toxic battle contributed to the onset of both illnesses.
I underwent surgery that removed a lung. But surgery was impossible for my nemesis the controller. The disease had already spread. As the weeks passed, both of us grew progressively worse.
Four months later, a second surgery confirmed that the cancer had spread from my lung through the lymph system. The following day the surgeon made a statement that is indelibly etched in my mind. “Greg,” he said, “the tiger is out of the cage. Your cancer has come roaring back. I’d give you about thirty days to live.”
It was at that moment that I began my journey in search of wellness. Lying in bed, at home, I continued to deteriorate physically. But I made those phone calls in search of survivors and I kept hearing “forgive.”
One morning I awoke and realized that I did have a monumental task of forgiveness ahead of me. I felt a deep conviction that this was the thing for me to do. From my sickbed I began the solitary work of forgiveness. I believe that this was the precise turning point in my illness.
The Law of Forgiveness carries with it the idea of process. That is, there are actions and conscious decisions that are integral to the forgiveness phenomenon. Any number of legitimate ways to proceed exist, but they each share this idea of helping us release resentment, express negative feelings, and let go of past wrongs, both real and imagined. Once the idea of process has been grasped, it only needs to be applied with consistency and sincerity to bring immediate results.
The essence of the various processes is quite simple: become aware of the person toward whom we feel hostility, express active release from that hostility, and picture good things happening to him or her.
In the privacy of my bedroom, I made a sign on a sheet of paper. It read:
NAME
RELEASE
AFFIRM
With that sign propped at my bedside, I started a list of the people in my life. I put my wife first. I closed my eyes, relaxed, and created a clear picture of her in my mind. Then, from my heart, I imagined myself saying to her, “I forgive you. I totally and completely forgive you for every perceived wrong you have done — and for anything you have left undone.” And I would pause, allowing ample time to remember and release specific instances. I wouldn’t dwell on the specifics. I would just recall them and release them, recognizing that it was I, not my wife, who was really being let off the hook.
I would end the work with each person by picturing something good happening to him or her. I knew that my wife wanted and needed to receive continual reassurance of my love for her. I pictured her receiving that. I knew that another person with whom I’d had a falling-out wanted a new sports car. I imagined him happily driving down the freeway in his red Porsche. The point is, part of the process I used was to actively see something good happening to the person I was forgiving.
This was not always a smooth experience. It became fascinating for me to watch my own resistance. It was relatively easy to express forgiveness and mean it. To actively release the hurt was more challenging, but repeating the release three or four times typically helped me make the emotional and spiritual shift that was required. Many times I would say, “God, you take this. I cannot handle it anymore.”
The third element of the process was the real test for me. It was difficult to envision good things happening to many of the people I wanted and needed to forgive. But I was sincerely committed to the process. I did not have an expectation of ease. I would see this through.
I discovered I was intensely angry with my father. He never was able to express his love. In fact, his approach to child raising was to emotionally put down and never, not once, build up. I found it very difficult to totally release my perceptions of being wronged. And I found it next to impossible to imagine, with sincerity, something good happening to him. I spent nearly two days just on the work of forgiving my father. Tough stuff.
The work on forgiving my father taught me an important lesson. His actions resulted from huge hurts of his own. They had nothing to do with me. The inability to express love was a direct reflection of his own up-bringing. I shitted my perspective from blaming him for all that was missing to understanding how I may also have contributed to the situation. I was rebellious. I did not obey. I was sarcastic. Perhaps the only way to reach me was through put-downs.
This insight extended to other relationships. As I would forgive and release, I still might not approve of the way a person handled a particular situation. But after completing the process of forgiveness, I could generally understand the situation better and begin to see my own part in it.
Down the list I went. Name people; forgive and release them; affirm them. Many times I went back to names, especially those where the memories created feelings of unease. And I offered my forgiveness with deep sincerity.
Sometimes forgiveness requires work above and beyond the call of duty. This was the case with the controller. I had spent hours forgiving and releasing and trying to imagine great things happening to him. About noon of the fourth straight day of forgiveness, I came out of the bedroom for lunch. It was then I realized that my work with him needed to take on a more personal touch. I needed to visit him and express my apologies.
This was not easy. I made a call to the office and found that he was at home, and not doing well. I phoned and his wife answered. Her voice immediately telegraphed surprise and shock to be talking to me; she knew full well the battle that raged between her husband and me.
I said, “I want to come out and visit, this afternoon. When would be a good time?”
She said she’d have to check. “I’ll hang on,” I replied. The time was set.
When was the last time your heart felt like it would pound right out of your chest? My emotions went on overdrive. On the way to his house, I wanted to turn back. My steps in making the short walk between the curb and his front door were some of the most difficult I have ever taken. The whole time, my heart was in my throat. But I pressed on. I felt that my life hinged on this sincere effort at forgiveness.
What do you say to someone whom you have previously considered an enemy? How do you communicate your changed feelings? Are words ever adequate to make up for the emotional havoc one has caused?
I was greeted and led into the bedroom, where my adversary was propped up in his bed with pillows. And with my heart pounding, adrenaline rushing, voice shaking, I barely managed to stutter out a few words to this effect:
“I have come to say I am sorry.” A long pause to gather some composure. My voice still breaking, I continued:
“I deeply regret the hurt I have caused you.” Another pause. I remember my right hand and arm were shaking, out of my control. I tried to steady them with my left hand.
In a whisper I finished: “I want you to know I wish you only the very best.”
Those words were imperfect, to be sure. They were delivered in a voice that was gripped with fear. But they came from my heart, sincere in every aspect.
They must have been effective. Because my adversary struggled to sit up, swung his feet over the edge of the bed, and motioned me to come and sit by his side.
“Greg,” he said, “I am the one who needs to say I’m sorry. I’m old enough to be your father. Yet I treated you like the outcast son. Please forgive me.”
His wife was crying. She knelt on the floor and the three of us embraced. We all cried.
Finally, it was my old adversary who found the strength to mutter a prayer: “Dear God, forgive us all.”
We said brief good-byes and I left.
As I started the car back toward home, I took a deep breath and said out loud, “Whew!” A weight was being lifted. I could feel it, sense it, was part of it: the clouds that had been tormenting me were beginning to part. The day seemed brighter. Was it the sun, or was it this catharsis that had just taken place?
My posture changed. I went from being hunched over to sitting erect in the seat. I held my head more upright. The tension in my shoulders lessened dramatically. The wrinkles on my forehead melted away. I relaxed. The pain was gone. The quivering hand was steady. A smile came across my face.
“I’m free!” I whispered. “I’m free,” I repeated, this time louder. In a crescendo I exclaimed, “I’m free! I’m free! I’m free!” I shouted it: “I’m free!”
Tears gushed down my cheeks in torrents. My vision became blurred. I quickly pulled off onto a side street, parked the car, and wept, out of control, for a long, long time.
I remember the eyes of a lad who came to the window. I wonder how long he had been watching me. “Hey, mister,” he said, “you need help?”
“No, no. I’m fine.” And I made my way home.
Release. Set free. I look back to my week of the sincere work of forgiveness and realize this was the absolute turning point in my physical healing. From that point in time, I began to gain back lost weight, manage pain more readily, and hold more positive thoughts about my future.
Do I believe there was a link between this deeply spiritual work and my physical improvement? Absolutely. I believe that practicing the Law of Forgiveness changes us biochemically. And in the process, the body is released toward its optimum wellness potential.
I know that my doctor and scientist friends get very uncomfortable when I share these beliefs. But it seems we can all agree on this: life quality soars when we sincerely practice the Law of Forgiveness. And this just may be an important determinant in releasing the body’s self-healing potential.
Life can indeed be lived most abundantly as an adventure in forgiveness. Forgive. Set yourself free.