The Unforgiven

Why do you choose not to forgive? What is it that you think you are gaining from dragging your sack full of resentments with you everywhere you go? Your judgements, your condemnations, your comparisons, your moral superiority and your righteousness; may I ask how it serves you?  Is there a human alive that is not aware that forgiveness is the highest virtue?

“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” – Matthew 6:14-15

I will start to help us answer those questions with a Bible versus – just a place to start. One out of hundreds on forgiveness and mercy. The entire message of Jesus, the Gospels and even the foundations of Christ consciousness clearly revolve around forgiveness, yet the message seems to have been completely missed by so many people that call themselves Christian and go to church every Sunday. It makes me wonder what message they are hearing. Jesus forgave the people crucifying him from the actual cross because he understood the flawed nature of their unconscious conditioning, yet you still choose to reside in your unforgiveness because you have never sought to understand your own guilt and fear. Can you see that so long as you are choosing to blame someone else for your problems, you are refusing to offer forgiveness to yourself.

What if I were to tell you that the whole scenario of your life is for you to learn forgiveness.  Well, I am telling you.

“To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.” – Alexander Pope

 

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you” – Lewis B. Smedes

“Resentment is the number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick” - Anonymous

 

“The mystery of forgiveness is God's final entry in powerlessness” – Richard  Rohr

Please understand that in times, that you won’t forgive someone, this is your final attempt to claim power over them, and it cuts you off from the powerlessness that leads you to Divinity. It is seeking the moral high ground over another person. “I am going to withhold forgiveness from you, and you are going to know about my silence, my coldness and my persecution”. Non-forgiveness is a form of power over another person to manipulate them, shame them, control them and diminish them and, not surprisingly, it comes at the highest price in the world. The price of your soul. Why does God forgive unconditionally but you can’t?

I forgive you for everything and I am telling you that you can forgive too.

The more I look within, the more I understand the conditioned nature of my past movements. My actions, words and thoughts are just the waves on top of an ocean of fear, shame, guilt and limiting beliefs that were unconsciously driving my life. Imprinting’s from a childhood I didn’t choose and an operating system I didn’t write. The greater clarity I have in seeing it in myself, the greater clarity I have in seeing it in others. How can I not forgive them – they know not what they do. Like me, they are caught in their own unconscious melodrama. Forgiving and being forgiven is the dance between humanness and Divinity. It is the dance between addiction and grace, sin and belief.

 

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” -Matthew 5:8

I keep coming back to the book of Matthew in my writing because it is a metaphysical gold mind.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” might be a more general way to say the same thing. Because are they eyes not the windows of the soul? If your heart is cold, even unconsciously, if you are wanting to hurt someone because they hurt you, or to get even, or to punish someone, your heart will be cold, and you will not be able to see clearly. You will see the world that your heart has created. When the heart is right the seeing will be right.

Unconditional forgiveness is the only path to unconditional love.

The world you will experience from that pure heart of love is all you could ever want. Forgiveness is not condoning any actions – your own or another’s. Forgiveness is choosing love over fear and freedom over suffering. And the choice is entirely yours to make.

With Unconditional Love,

The Way