Want Peace? Try Forgiveness
By: Sharon
McElroy, Blogger
“The magic didn’t
happen to him. The magic happened to me.”
Amazingly, these were the words of abuse-victim Ben Bosinger
after letting go of years of resentment toward his father.
So what happened?
One day, fed up with pain he’d been carrying around for so long, he paid a visit to his dad. The
“magic” occurred while they were looking at Ben’s motorcycle in the driveway.
“In that instant, when we both were bent down looking at that
greasy engine, side by side, I forgave him,” he recalled.
He added: “It was something bigger than me that made me forgive
him.”
This really resonated with me, based on what I know from a book
key to my own spiritual practice -- that “the divine energy of Spirit” helps us progress and
see things anew.
Ben’s story is
from a different book -- it’s
just one of the many moving stories in the Book of Forgiving, recently published by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu and daughter Mpho Tutu. They’re certainly qualified to discuss the subject. Besides experiencing
the everyday hurts of the injustice of apartheid, they also had other
struggles. He suffered from an abusive father, and she and her family
experienced the devastating murder of their beloved nanny.
In humility the Tutus disclose how they have to continually learn
about forgiveness, sometimes in dramatic ways. But they also make it clear that
when we’ve been wronged we
can use these opportunities to transform ourselves by changing how we think
about others.
“No one is bad, and none among us should be defined as the sum
total of our worst actions,” they said.
This is another idea I’m familiar with from my own spiritual practice, but I didn’t find it easy to carry out during
a recent experience.
I’d just sat
down in a cafe next to two young guys. At first, I didn’t mind hearing their pleasant
conversation, but out of the blue they started talking about women in a
derogatory way. I couldn’t
believe it. I thought, “How can these American, hipster guys feel it’s ok to even think like this, let
alone voice it so publicly?”
I was angry about the injustice of their ideas, and three things
went through my head. First, I considered saying something. Then I realized
confrontation probably wouldn’t
make things any better. Finally, I wondered if I could actually love and
forgive them.
Led by this deeper desire, I leaned back in my chair, and a few
lines from a friend’s song came to mind: “Where there is hatred, let me
sew love. Where there is injury, pardon.”
This helped me quiet the reactive feelings of self-justification
and get on with more solution oriented thinking. As the Tutus said, I knew I
needed to see these weren’t
bad people, but they’d been
taken in by bad ideas. From my own practice, I knew there was a deeper, wiser
point of view of who they were -- so much more to what really defines
each of us than our worst actions.
“Material sense does not unfold the facts of existence; but
spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, my favorite author on how
best to connect with that “something bigger than me”.
As I yearned for this even deeper view, and contemplated the
divine source of that presence of good in each of us, I felt a kind of mental
and emotional shift. My anger and feelings of injustice drained and I suddenly
thought: “Their sense of God must be very small, if that’s how they’re thinking.”
My heart went out to them. It occurred to me these guys had
probably just been taught a different worldview than mine.
In the larger scheme of things, this was a modest spiritual
awakening. But the revised view gave me a palpable sense of peace, which had
seemed impossible just minutes earlier.
In their book, the Tutus refer to Dr. Fred Luskin, the Director
of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, who has seen the effects of forgiveness
on health. In an interview, Luskin said: “There are billions of people telling
themselves that somebody was a real [jerk] all day long. That’s really easy for human beings to do. That’s swimming with the stream. To
create peace, you need to swim against the stream sometimes, in fact, often.”
Indeed, it can be hard to “swim against the stream” of our
reactions to injustice. But heading down the path of forgiveness can be as
simple as knowing we each have this spiritual sense that can identify the good
that’s present even where it
seems far from obvious.
As we do that, we shouldn’t be surprised if we have our own Ben Bosinger moment and feel the
joy of freedom that can overtake us when forgiveness takes root in our lives.
Sharon McElroy writes about health and spirituality. She
practices Christian Science healing, and works in media relations.
