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LightHearted Musings - Forgiveness is an Attribute of the Strong
Posted by Dr. Molly Roberts on October 13th, 2008
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
–Mahatma Gandhi
I love everything Mahatma Gandhi has ever said! Just reading his words creates an internal shift for me, where I feel myself getting calmer, more loving and more peaceful, as if I am standing in his presence somehow. What a powerful force for love and peace, and yes, strength too, to have that kind of an effect 60 years after his death. His comments on forgiveness bring to mind some of the difficulty in describing what we really mean by forgiveness.
I was recently at a conference on death and dying, giving a talk on how to help couples and families deal with cancer and other life crisis. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a number of other sessions, and in one, we talked in depth about the concept of forgiveness. The discussion was animated as we tried to figure out exactly what we meant by forgiving someone. We realized that forgiveness is a complicated term and that it was important to be clear on what we all wanted to convey.
When you forgive someone, there is the potential to create a power differential between yourself and the person you are forgiving. An example was of one woman who told her abusive mother that she forgave her for being such a terrible parent and then felt good when her mother was hurt by this statement. Forgiveness of this kind may give you power over them and put them in a weakened position, but is it really forgiveness if it is still playing power politics? If the goal is to let go of the psychic energy around an event, that “power to forgive” still seems like a trap capable of keeping you sucked in.
In addition, forgiving someone might be construed as an acceptance of unacceptable behavior. Nobody in the room felt this was the intention. You may be able to forgive a sexual predator from your past, but you would not condone or tolerate them doing this to someone else. When boundaries have been crossed, forgiving someone shouldn’t mean that further boundary violations are OK.
It seemed that forgiveness had more to do with finding internal and external peace with the person and the hurtful memory than simply letting the person off the hook. We decided that the true goal of forgiving someone was to free up the energy you have been using to be angry about the past in order to make it available to help you bring love, peace and joy into your present.
In Gandhi’s quote above, he wasn’t advocating simply bucking up and forgetting about the bad times. Instead, he was discussing the strength needed to tap into the deeper nature of letting it go. For Gandhi, forgiveness comes from finding the strength to embrace both your humanity and your sacredness and then to discover those dichotomies in those who have hurt you. Understanding, accepting, and even embracing these two aspects of our nature is one of the most difficult and important tasks of our earthly existence and well worth the effort and strength needed to live it.
Dr. Molly
I treasure all of these musing, but the forgiveness one is probably the most difficult to accomplish. Thank you both for who you both are…..I will miss you, but hope to visit personally.
Love you both lots………LuAnn Peters
Comment by LuAnn — October 18, 2008 @ 11:22 am