Forgiveness means letting go of a hurtful situation and moving on with our own happiness. Although it is true that it doesn't take strength to hold a grudge but it takes strength to let go of one. Forgiving is not forgetting; it is letting go of the hurt and forces us to grow beyond what we were. Here's an article about forgiveness inspired by the writings of an unknown writer.

Is forgiving an honorable way to come to terms with the pain we feel when a responsible person stings us deeply and unfairly? Well, what is the alternative to forgiving?

Must we freeze ourselves in the unfairness of a cruel moment in the past? Do we want our private world to stand still at that wretched incident in our irreversible history? Or are we ready to find a better way? Better than what? Better than the pain of a memory glued forever to the unfair past.

But suppose we do refuse to settle for the past and we neither refuse to forgive. Is there another option? Maybe revenge? Vengeance is a passion to get even. It is a hot desire to give back as much pain as someone gave us. An eye for an eye! Fairness!

The problem with revenge is that, it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score. Fairness never comes. The chain reaction set off by every act of vengeance ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as long as parity is demanded, and the escalator never stops, never lets anyone off.

Why do family feuds go on and on until everyone is dead—or gets too old and too tired to fight? The reason is simple: No two people ever weigh pain on the same scale. The pain a person causes me always feels heavier to me than it feels to the person who caused it. The pain I inflict on you always feels worse to you than it seems to me. Pains given and pains received never balance out.

If you hurt me and I retaliate in kind, I may think that I have given you only what you deserve, no more. But you may feel it as a hurt that is too great for you to accept. Your passion for fairness will force you to retaliate against me, harder this time. Then it will be my turn. And will it ever stop?

An eye for an eye becomes a leg for a leg and, eventually, a life for a life. No matter what our weapons are: words, clubs, arrows, guns, bombs, nuclear missiles, revenge locks us into an escalation of violence. Gandhi was right: "If we all live by 'an eye for an eye' the whole world will be blind. The only way out is forgiveness."

Forgiveness has creative power to move us away from a past moment of pain, to unshackle us from our endless chain of reactions, and to create a new situation in which both the wrongdoer and the wronged can begin a new way.

Forgiveness breaks the grip that past wrong and past pain have on our minds and frees us for whatever fairer future lies amid the unknown potentialities of our tomorrows.

Suppose we never forgive, suppose we feel the hurt each time our memory lights on the people who did us wrong. And suppose we have a compulsion to think of them constantly. We have become a prisoner of our past pain; we are locked into a torture chamber of our own making. Time should have left our pain behind; but we keep it alive to let it destroy us over and over.

The only way to heal the pain is to forgive the person who hurt us. Forgiving stops the reruns of pain. Forgiving heals our memory as we change our memory's vision.

When we release the wrongdoer from the wrong, we cut a malignant tumor out of our inner life.  We set a prisoner free, and we discover that the real prisoner is our self.

By Tim Pedrosa

 

Tim