Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Siblings!

Long ago I read "The Five Wishes" booklet, cover to cover. I'd read the critics' remarks, but not the booklet. For anyone who does not know, it is a booklet intended to provide a living will for people who would like to use it, and who live in one of forty-two states in the U.S. that accept it as a legal instrument. For many people, it is a helpful guide, particularly, for end-of-life issues. One of the questions it touches upon is forgiveness, but I don't believe the author(s) were addressing forgiveness in the context of religion. Rather it was in the context of reconciliation. You be the judge:

http://www.fivewishes.org. 

It seems to me there is generally a spiritual component to death, even sudden death, and dying. Regardless ... there are choices to be made.

Reconciliation with family members (and of family members) brings peace to many people facing death. For the living forgiveness is an everyday challenge, one we handle with varying degrees of success. Let's be clear. We are daily confronted with evil, with acts we do not consider worthy of forgiveness. What is your personal threshold for forgiving? Is it divorced from condemning certain behaviors, from forgetting?

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.  -Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees 


Withholding forgiveness can also be a curse on a person's life; it so often goes hand in hand with selective memory. As a parent my adult children's grudge matches overwhelm me with sorrow and a sense of helplessness. One thing I know, however, just as self-care comes before caregiving, forgiving oneself is key to forgiving another. 

With no siblings, living the military life, I knew how to adapt to nearly any environment, as well as how to handle bullies. One thing about moving constantly; it obviates the need to forgive classmates, friends or mean neighbor kids. For me, that left family, to provide role models. That was not to happen. Family did not speak to family. In speaking of other family members, there was plenty of judgment, but people tended not to reconcile.  If Christ's admonition of forgiving one's brother seven times seven hundred, does not speak to us, we can, at least, heal ourselves. "I forgive myself, not to say I am unaware of my faults, nor of misjudgments and consequent errors. Nor must I forget what I have learned from others."

Clinically depressed, I began mindful meditation in mid-life, as a single parent. Nothing else had helped, including crisis intervention and three years of psychoanalysis. Part of my meditation practice was to forgive, starting with myself. It proved to be a game changer, albeit subtle and gradual. I had been estranged from my mother for several years, when she died of a massive stroke. I had married two dysfunctional men, staying in the second marriage overlong. In the same timeframe I relinquished my profession. To say I was "on the ropes," would have been to understate. Part of my journey has been rebuilding, again and again, from ashes.

We have, in the life of Nelson Mandela, a model for forgiveness and reconciliation. His autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, is a journey worth taking. It speaks to evil and to forgiving what seems unforgivable. Now, when I err, the first question is what to take away, along with whom and what to leave behind. Meanwhile I work on forgiving constantly; it is not a sometime practice.