Forgiveness, the Recipe For Happiness

Sometimes there are quotations that come up my daily work that strike a responsive chord with me. Often, they're articles in the paper that grab my attention. Sometimes, they arrive from other random sources. This morning's stimulus was a quote from author Carlos Castaneda. He wrote, "Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone." The disease is hubris (an exaggerated sense of self-importance), the symptoms are anger, frustration, and discontent, and the cure is simple (but very profound): forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn't easy: It takes guts, humility and deep self-awareness Being able to release a hurt means that we've reached a level of spiritual maturity where we're able to accept that there's only one thing that we need to know about God: that we're not him (her)! If you can accept that God (however you define God) is in charge, and that you're not, then you've set out on a spiritual journey. No one can manage actually to 'let go and let God' and still think of him- or herself as the manager of the universe. Faith, in my book, is grounded in the acceptance that things are as they are for a reason - whether or not I'm aware of what that reason is.

The humility to accept your rightful place in the universe represents only the first stage of forgiveness. The second stage can appear equally as challenging: to recognize in an open and honest way your true humanity. In practice, this means shedding all semblance of denial, seeing yourself exactly as you are without masks or pretense, recognizing the part that you've played in each 'injustice' that's been 'done to you' and the resentments that you've carried as a result, and then asking for forgiveness of those you've wronged including yourself. This 'housecleaning' is not optional: it's an essential element that needs to include yourself, your God, and at least one other human being. You do not live in isolation, you do not act in isolation, you do no wrong in isolation; therefore you cannot seek forgiveness in isolation.

Amazingly, the capacity to acknowledge your own wrongs and to ask for forgiveness opens the only possible door to happiness for you. Until you experience forgiveness yourself, you can never truly grant it to others. You can say the words, but your heart, trapped in the cords of your own guilt and resentment, will never really be set free. In order to permit others to reestablish trust with you, you've got to experience others' renewing their trust in you. Don't worry about 'forgive and forget' - no one should be expected to 'forget' the past. The gift that forgiveness brings to you is the ability to remember the past, but without any of its bitterness. Forgiveness brings with it the gift of equanimity: calmness of soul.

The final stage of forgiveness comes when we've parted the curtains of guilt and resentment and are finally able to recognize our kinship to every other human being we encounter. Have you ever met someone who, at first sight, appeared very unattractive to you? Perhaps they had some physical blemish or deformity that grabbed your attention. Have you then ever had the experience of getting to know these people more intimately, when slowly their features take on a warm familiarity? Before long, don't those characteristics that first fixated you fade into the background and become, if not invisible, at least unnoticeable? Forgiveness opens us up to an empathy - a kinship - with one another that guilt and resentment can never appreciate. And, if the truth be known, it's in that experience of kinship with one another that we begin to see the true reflection of the face of the God of our understanding.

Where do we find happiness? It's already there, inside. All we have to do is to remove from it the nasty wrappings of our self-importance and its corollaries of guilt and resentment. Those feelings tell us something important about ourselves: that we're carrying around burdens that don't belong to us. Trust God; clean house; reach out to others. In those three phrases you'll find the road to happiness. Or, you can simply say, "I trust God: forgive me, I forgive you" (and mean it).