The Willingness to Forgive

Friday, September 13, 2013:

In Tibet we say: “Negative action has but one good quality: it can be purified.’ So there is always hope. Even murderers and the most hardened criminals can change and overcome the conditioning that led them to their crimes. Our present condition, if we use it skilfully and with wisdom, can be an inspiration to free ourselves from the bondage of suffering.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Glimpse After Glimpse

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There are those in my past that I have not been able to forgive. There are things I have done in my past that I cannot forgive myself for. There are things I have done in my past that I would rather be damned to hell for an eternity than to beg forgiveness. Forgiveness is second to admitting this condition… it is an illness… a mental and spiritual illness… to be unable to forgive. It takes time and treatment to get over these hurdles.

            Still, the center of my practice is to seek out the holy quality that would free me from this curse… the inability to forgive or to allow others to forgive me. I know that the grace of the Heart of Compassion is powerful enough to move my heart. We have a Step in AA that comes with a prayer saying: “I am now willing that you should have all of me, the good and the bad…” Willingness is the key and willingness is something I sometimes feel helpless to find in my heart. How can I break away from the bondage to self if the willingness to forgive evades me?

            For those of us who have had the miracle of recovery from a fatal disease can understand this willingness problem. I couldn’t break away from alcoholism as long as I wasn’t willing in my heart to do so. Willingness was fleeting… a window opened… sometimes with a hangover or a circumstance brought on by drinking. I suppose that I might have had hundreds of opportunities to leap through that window. I know that there were a few times I actually did go to the side of light but was drawn back. To stay out takes a miracle that is hard to grasp but is made possible by spiritual practice.

The trick isn’t to forgive as we meet face to face but to actually stay in a state of forgiveness after you walk away from me is another thing altogether. The Seventh Step prayer continues, “I pray that you remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and to others…” This perhaps is the greatest roadblock to freedom from self with which I have been challenged in the past thirty years… and certainly in the past fifteen years in recovery.

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