Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
I’m introducing this week’s issue with my favorite version of the old Anglican hymn, “Amazing Grace.” I have always loved this joyous vocal prayer of thanks, and the story behind it. The hymn was written by John Newton, an Anglican clergyman and poet, in 1772. Before finding his religious vocation, Newton was a seaman involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The story goes that off the coast of Ireland, his ship nearly sank in a storm, during which he prayed to God for mercy and forgiveness. Not long after, he became an abolitionist. This rendition is sung by Judy Collins…and an unnamed choir. Sorry to say, I haven’t succeeded in tracking down their identity. I could blame the cats, one of whom has been having a fur ball night. Sigh.
Last week’s Odd Company was mainly about the concept of “not-self.” I don’t know about you, but I find that phrase completely indecipherable. So here’s a quick refresher. Buddhists (and they are not alone) believe that the “self” is an illusion. Everything is so interconnected that every action on my part affects everything and everyone else — over great distances, and great intervals of time. I don’t know about you, but to me, this rings true. Most of humanity’s greatest stories deal with this idea in some way. Our actions have consequences that are not always obvious and can’t always be predicted. The one thing we can be sure of is that they will affect someone and/or something besides us. As I said last week, we may look like individuals, but in fact we are all part of one vast organism that ultimately includes everything in the universe. When we do something kind for someone else, we benefit in very real ways. When we hurt someone else, it hurts us, too.
The Buddha once said that holding onto anger is like picking up a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at your enemy. Last week’s issue was entitled “The Slap,” because it was about a random stranger who slapped me in the face on a public thoroughfare for no apparent reason, and my effort to rid myself of the consequent anger and come to peace with it.
In one of those weird coincidences that crop up from time to time, last week’s Applied Compassion lesson (which happened after I published “The Slap”) was on forgiveness. Which dovetails nicely with that slap. To get myself free from that incident, I had to forgive the guy and move on. Forgiveness is a basic tenet of many different belief systems. Why? Because it’s one of the oils that keeps human interactions working smoothly. The poet David Whyte wrote, “All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” I’d say that goes for successful marriages, too. And partnerships of all kinds.
Forgiving is rarely easy. Our primate nervous system has a couple of default responses when someone or something injures or threatens us. One is to freeze and try to be invisible, or run away. (Which I think was my initial response to the slap.) The other response is to lash out and cause injury in return. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, fair is fair, right? Both responses leave us with lingering anger. Forgiveness is nowhere in this picture. It’s not a natural response. And yet, holding onto anger is like holding onto the Buddha’s hot coal. It adds to our suffering and the suffering of those around us. There will be many times in our lives when we must choose between pain and forgiveness; many times when we must forgive, and many times when we need to be forgiven. So how can we learn to forgive? Is there anything that makes it easier?
As with almost everything, practice helps. We can begin with small things. Just this evening I had to forgive the cat for interrupting me while I sat here trying to write. In almost every case, we are forgiving the transgressor for their own nature — for just being who or what they are. I mean…a cat is a cat. Every now and then they have to throw up. Possibly all the way down the hallway into the TV room, and then out again into the living room, across the dining room and into another hallway before finally running out of, well, all the things she ate for dinner, plus the fur ball. It does no one any good for me to be angry about it. The cat doesn’t understand. And in the end, if I’m angry about it, it’s only because I don’t understand any better than the cat. I’m unwilling to accept the terms of my friendship with sweet kitty Nellie. Which are, that Nellie’s a cat and can be expected to behave like a cat, indoors or out. All is forgiven. Nellie is purring in my lap.
Okay, small things. But what if it’s something bigger? Something that’s really hard to forgive, like a betrayal of some sort, or ongoing bullying or abuse? What if somebody hurts or kills someone you love? On a trip to Rwanda 20 years after the genocide, I watched people who had once taken machetes to each other walking down the street arm-in-arm. How can such things be forgiven? After years of violence, how did the South Africans do it? How can the Israelis and the Palestinians do it? The Turks and the Kurds? Suppose the person you need to forgive or who needs to forgive you is dead?
There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, forgiveness doesn’t always happen all at once. If the wound is very deep, forgiveness becomes a process that may take some time. Second, forgiveness and reconciliation are separate matters. And so is forgetting. We can forgive without forgetting. In fact, it is rarely a good idea to forget. Consider the Holacaust. Forgetting would allow people to repeat those mistakes. Forgetting that someone is capable of wounding us deeply might make it possible for them to wound us again and again. Sometimes, in spite of forgiveness, we have to remove ourself from a situation, something we can’t do if we’ve forgotten about it. Reconciliation requires some cooperation from the other party. If the other party is no longer alive or can no longer be found, or simply doesn’t want any part of it, there can be no reconciliation.
The amazing part is that there doesn’t have to be. The work of forgiveness happens within each of us. Sometimes we have to forgive someone else; sometimes we have to forgive ourself. This is not dependent on what anyone else does or doesn’t do. In the Applied Compassion class, we’ve learned that one essential component of compassion and forgiveness is realizing that the other person’s actions are not really about us. They are about what’s going on inside that person. In previous issues, I talked a little bit about how most of what we do day in and day out is automatic behavior, done out of habit or based on what we believe rather than on what things are really like. This is human nature. People are people, just like cats are cats. Our job as humans who want to be compassionate is to try to understand what went on in the other person. Once we understand, forgiving becomes easier.
I’m about out of oomph for this evening. So I’ll close for now with a poem I wrote almost exactly ten years ago. If you enjoyed this letter, please feel free to share it with others.
DEFINE: LOVE
That variety of weed
that brightens the bare earth
with edible greens,
the first of their kind,
after the dark, hungry winter;
that transforms the fields
into wide swaths of warmth --
a thousand small suns in a leafy sky,
too many for one heart to hold;
that blows apart and spreads
on the merest whisper
to neighboring fields and gardens,
and to those who plow and tend them;
that reappears, though chewed
trampled, poisoned, burnt,
all spines and pricks,
but deeply quick.