I really liked this essay from Cyndi @ http://YayGod-Sagas.Blogspot.com
I'm sure http://SaintsforSinners.com "forgiveness patrons" Saint Dismas and Saint Maria Goretti would too. Thanks, Cyndi! "YayGod!"
"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean."
Dag Hammarskjold
"By your capacity for forgiveness shall I recognize your God."
Meister Eckhart
As the story goes, a frail elderly man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson. The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, making eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon, his milk spilled on the tablecloth, he broke a dish or two, and his place at the table was always a mess, irritating his son and wife. So they set a small table in the corner where Grandfather ate alone from a wooden bowl while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner.
The four-year-old watched it all in silence. One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor. He asked the child sweetly, "What are you making?" Just as sweetly, the boy responded, "Oh I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food from when I grow up."
Whether we know it or not, we are forever modeling to the children, grandchildren and the more impressionable hearts of each other how to enhance or diminish the Light in the world, by our actions and attitudes, regardless of the words we speak. Earlier in the summer, Michael pressure-washed our patio, walkway and driveway, oblivious to the fact that he was thereby destroying and drowning the garden and plants I had laboriously spent two days putting in just after we arrived. We were both snarky with each other, feeling under-appreciated, neither of us able or willing in the moment to acknowledge the role of ego in our stand-off. Eknath Easwaran tells an amusing story about two people arguing, pretending to listen, when all they really needed were signs to hold up as the other spoke: "I'm right. You're wrong." The blessing of getting older is that these moments pass quickly, with grace and humor and, hopefully, lessons learned. (Note to self: do not plant garden until after the pressure-washing; also, plants are more easily replaced than husbands.)
One blessing of getting older is that we find if we wait 24 hours or so before reacting and then tell a story about what happened, the feelings are usually universally shared, and more humorous than aggravating, one story begetting another as our life dramas unfold. My niece's mother, Donna, was caring for her mother with Alzheimer's. Donna went into the garage, and her mother locked her out of the house. The mother then kept telling Donna, who was banging on the door to get back in, that she had to go find Donna to unlock the door. After a few days, the story could be told with laughter instead of frustration, fear and irritation.A friend, unaware that the answer machine on her neighbor's phone had not disconnected after she left her message, proceeded to complain to her husband in rather disparaging terms about the neighbor - until she heard the heart-stopping 'beep,' indicating the machine had recorded it all. When the friend called me in horror for advise, I was not much help because I couldn't stop laughing, even as we both recoiled at the thought of her innocent neighbor's eventual pain. They have since reconciled though not without difficult lessons.The thought occurs to me now that we are sending and receiving constantly in life; with every thought and every word, we leave messages of our choosing: joy or despair, lightness or gloom, hope or cynisicm, acceptance or rejection. How many of these would we want to be overheard or recorded? How much forgiveness and reconciliation are we open to in the relationships offered to us as gifts in our growing?"Engrave this upon my heart," Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, writes: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story." I have a friend who, a few years ago, told me sometimes she just throws her hands up in exasperation and says, "This is for EVERYONE who has EVER asked me to pray for ANYTHING." We could say the same prayer for forgiveness, in following Rumi's advise to be like the night in concealing the faults of others. For everyone who has ever harmed us, we offer forgiveness; for anyone who has suffered from our thoughts, words or actions, we ask forgiveness. We forgive ourselves and each other, because the tender grace that comes from being in such a place brings peace and well-being, until finally we remember who we are, and our place in the world.
That act of forgiving those who trespass against us doesn't come out of fear of a higher power out there, but because we are connected to that deeper place within that tells us we are not so different from those who hurt us, reminds us that we have hurt others, and accepts the Love that masks itself behind the forgiving heart.
We return in prayers of blessing and forgiveness, not once and for all, as the saying goes, but time and again. The Sufis say that reconciliation is simply remembering how far we've strayed from our original goodness, our feelings of remorse already a return to the Divine. I like to think that the grandfather in our story waited silently, knowing that his son would realize the goodness of his own heart and return his father to a proper place of respect, not out of guilt, but out of remembrance, in answer to the call to Love.YAY GOD
