Practice 16

Forgiveness and Redemptive Love

“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love”

~ Bryant H. McGill

What is your relationship to forgiveness? Are you someone who finds it difficult or easy to forgive others for transgressions? How about when it comes to forgiving yourself? If you are someone who has difficulty with forgiveness, you are likely someone who struggles with unresolved anger and hurt which eventually can become chronic depression and anxiety. You suffer more because of your relationship with forgiveness.

Forgiveness requires a deep inquiry within yourself about the stories you are living by. Stories you place yourself in about victims and villains, right and wrong, and what is acceptable and unacceptable—ensconced with emotions along the spectrum of anger, shame, guilt, and fear. By clinging to these stories, you make yourself a prisoner who has to live out a sentence of suffering under your own authority. Forgiveness is a form of letting go and inviting in a love that sets yourself free—enabling you to move forward in your own life and allow others to do so in theirs. But the actual process of doing so is often much more difficult than that sounds.

Of course, there are a whole host of actions humans enact upon one another that are unacceptable to most but it doesn’t mean these manifestations of human weaknesses are unforgivable. The difficult journey from feeling and believing you were wrong or were wronged, to forgiveness, has much to do with your ability to give up.

A position of non-forgiveness means the lines are drawn and nobody had dare cross them for fear of retribution or for signaling a sense of weakness or an invalidation of the offense. The victim is stuck where they are and the perpetrator has no opportunity to make amends and this self-reinforcing structure leads to suffering for everyone involved. The difficulty for you, whether you don’t forgive yourself or someone else for what was done, is to make the first move toward loosening the attachment you have to the story that keeps this power dynamic in play. To your ego that looks like giving up and giving in. It looks like admitting that someone was right who you’ve narrated as wrong, and that is a challenge to the moralizations your ego needs to support the non-forgiveness story.

Forgiveness means giving up the suffering of the past while being willing to forge ahead to gain a far greater potential for inner freedom and presence.

Anne Lamott declared, "Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past." We often don’t forgive ourselves or others for past transgressions because we lack empathy and compassion in the stories we tell ourselves about ‘what happened.’ We jump to conclusions that reinforce a narrative that fits our self-image and the image of ‘how other people are,’ both of which are often loaded with fictions based on our brain’s negativity bias. These narratives are unreliable, and yet we cling to them as if they are truth.

When we are identified as the victim of a story, wishing things were different without taking action, we are living the ego’s grievance story. Your grievance story is the one you tell over and over to yourself, and possibly to others, about the way you were maltreated, or maltreated someone else, and the way you became the victim. If told enough, over a long enough time, this story becomes part of your ego-identity and locks in more permanently your emotions of fear, shame, guilt, and anger. The way out is to open yourself up to examining your grievance stories.

Take some time to examine them to ask yourself what story is supporting my sense of unforgivableness/unforgivingness? What am I telling myself that makes me feel unforgivable/unforgiving? This will serve to bring the cause of your suffering into your own awareness. It's important that you begin to exercise your own initiative making the choice to really examine the stories that you live by, that are supporting your suffering. To ask yourself and be open to the answers to; “is my story, my narrative really true? Do I absolutely know that my story here is true?”

Through those places where we begin to doubt, or lessen our attachment to, the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives regarding our unforgivableness/unforgivingness, about whether we’re deserving or not of the peace and freedom on the other side of releasing these stories—cracks begin to form. When you start to open to the possibility that your conclusions might not serve the conscious life you aspire to, cracks in the storyline form spaces that a special kind of love can enter—Redemptive Love.

Is there a grand purpose to human suffering? I believe so. I believe one divine aspect of suffering is that it’s an attempt by The Universe to break our ego stories by putting stress cracks in them. The Universe is always trying to get love to flow into every space possible, and suffering is one way we can become open enough to give up clinging to our storied realities and allow the penetrating light of Redemptive Love to flow in to ourselves and out to others.

One of the most poignant and common points of entry for Redemptive Love is when someone is dying. It is often the best opportunity for the person dying and everyone around them to come out of all the old stories and the wounding that those stories have caused. When someone is dying, often there will be a sense not only for them but for their family and friends that there is no time to carry the old stories of resentment, of unforgivableness, of hatred anymore. That someone is dying here and there is no more time to keep holding these old stories so tightly as our protective armor.

There's an intuitive sense and intuitive way we are around death. People either react with fear because they are resisting the death and resisting going through the process of releasing the stories they are trapped in, or they react with love because all the stories are complete. Because nobody has any more time to continue to play out the old patterns anymore; they get in contact with what's really important, with what they really want to express, and so much healing occurs because people step through their stories, step out of their personas. The death has provided a crack in the story, and love begins to flow into the hearts and minds of those who have the courage to not get lost in fear at the impending death.

So for many people death's one of the times in life where there will be a great opportunity to experience the Redemptive quality of love, but for you now, you don’t want to wait for a death. You don’t need an event like this to get ruthlessly in touch with a love that would tear down your own walls, your defenses. What I'm inviting you into is to not wait to run out of time. To not wait for some other moment but to allow yourself to run out of time right now.

Give up using tomorrow as an excuse to not confront your stories of forgiveness and redemption.

Stop wasting the time that you have and let time run out so there is no other day than this day. There is no other time than this time to open. To let the cracks appear in the story you've been telling yourself about yourself. About the story you've been telling yourself about others and the world and maybe even the story that you've told yourself about God because this is an opportunity to run out of time. To realize that tomorrow just leads to another tomorrow and another and another and another and another. When you acknowledge that, then you can begin to make a different choice—the choice to be completely present. The choice to begin to be vulnerable to yourself, even if it is frightening. The choice to allow something in that may completely surprise you. Something that may not be within the framework of your understanding or perhaps even in your framework of what you imagine to be possible, but just to hold the idea that, by running out of time and by letting the cracks appear in the old stories—you can access something else. Something more profound that you can allow yourself to become open to receiving this Redemptive quality of love that I'm talking about.

Because it is there. It's always there waiting for its moment. Waiting for just that instant where you break down and accept you’re suffering and have lost your connection with the Divine, with your Soul. When you surrender and stop the madness of the never ending distraction of ‘doingness’ that has taken over your life, getting you to put off your meditation, your self-confrontation for another day. When you realize you’ve just gotten lost in the future of trying to outrun the truth of the pain and the confrontation waiting for you in the silent surrender of the present moment. When you open to something beyond yourself as you've known yourself, and allow the power of this grace to enter into the dark places inside and bring its healing light of restoration. When you offer that to the one who has wronged you, or for the wrongs you have done, and have forgiven with your whole heart in a way that releases them with you…that is Redemptive Love.

In our modern-day Western culture, we have very few names for the experience of love. We say I'm falling in love, or if you go out on a date and you're swept off your feet then you say, I think I'm in love with her or him. We attribute the same word “love” to romance, to hormones getting charged up, to long love affairs of the heart, to marriages, to people loving their children, loving their pets, their food, their friends but we use the same word when all of those are actually very unique and distinct experiences of love.

In Sanskrit, there's nearly a hundred different words to describe love. Many cultures have many more names for love than we do and thus because of our cultural limitations, we think of Love in this sort of very simplistic “Valentine” way but the truth is that it has many distinct facets. Redemptive Love isn't necessarily something like falling in love between two people. It's not the same as devotion to God. It is a very unique and specific quality of love and it is a love that also is synonymous with grace. By saying that Redemptive Love is synonymous with grace I mean that experientially it feels as though it comes as a gift. A gift that's bestowed and a gift that is received without reason, without merit, without earning it, and this kind of love can engender in you a deep experience of healing. Of healing this deep feeling of unforgivableness/unforgiveingness.

It brings you back to your condition of unforgivableness/unforgivingness because they are emotional experiences but are founded upon mental conclusions. They are founded upon ideas of unforgivableness, of a belief in unforgivingness. So when I say that Redemptive Love is given as a grace I don't mean that it's necessarily given to us by an outside entity although it may feel sometimes like it's poured into you. Redemptive Love is something that is actually part and parcel of your own being. It's a deep fundamental aspect of our own True Nature. The challenge is to unlock it. To make ourselves truly available to it. And the beginning of making ourselves available to Redemptive Love is knowing that it's there waiting for you. Knowing that there is a quality of love that reminds you of your own wholeness. To remind you that everything can be forgiven all at once if you just open to this very unique grace of Redemptive Love.