Lesson 46: God is the Love in which I forgive.
As I stood before my father’s grave 20 years ago, intent on forgiving him for the divorce of my mother, his abandonment of our family, and the years of anger, rage and cynicism it had bred within me, I faltered. I had prepared for this moment with my therapist and by reading about forgiveness and release. But, in that moment, my grievance with him outweighed my intended forgiveness.
I let loose on him. I stood before that headstone and listed all of my grievances – the keen sense of abandonment, betrayal and anger his actions had stirred in me. My entire identity had been wrapped up in that moment when my father left our home, only to reappear through phone calls and infrequent in-person visits. My rage at him was palpable in that moment.
I knew nothing about A Course in Miracles during this time, but I believe that I was finally able to forgive my father through God’s Love and not my own. My own petty, small, conditional love could never reach a place of forgiveness for the man I blamed for my hard, cynical life that followed in his wake of betrayal and abandonment.
In that moment, even though I did not consciously know about this metaphysical law, God was the Love that enabled me to forgive.
This lesson, of course, reminds us that we only need forgiveness on this plane of existence. In God’s realm forgiveness doesn’t exist because condemnation doesn’t exist. God’s realm is one of peace that passes all the understanding we think we have in this bodily world.
As long as we are in this dualistic state of body and mind, however, forgiveness will be necessary – mandatory even – if we are to overcome the cause of separation and return to our natural unified state. There are still many people in my life that I need to forgive. For some people, I may have arrived at a partial state of forgiveness, but as this lesson says either we have forgiven others entirely, or we have not forgiven them at all.
This is not a chance to feel spiritually superior, though, wielding our forgiveness as some outward sign that we are better than others because we deign to overlook what they’ve done to us. This is not forgiveness, but spiritual arrogance. The ego loves for us to confuse the two.
I tried forgiving my dad to look spiritually superior – to give him something my ego told me he obviously didn’t deserve. As I stood at that grave, however, I felt all that egoic form of forgiveness drain out of me – replaced by God’s Love, which is the only power we have to truly forgive.
In that moment, what I realized is just what this lesson teaches, there was really only one of us that truly needed forgiveness, and that was myself. When I finally forgave my father – I really forgave myself, since there truly is only one of us here.
As Hafiz sees it:
“Forgiveness
Is the cash you need.
“All the other kinds of silver really buy …
Just strange things.
“Forgiveness is part of the treasure you need
To craft your falcon wings
And return
“To your true realm of
Divine freedom.”
Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash