Forgiveness is hard for me, I’m a Scorpio and I’d rather draw and quarter someone than forgive them. However, I’ve been along the spiritual block enough times to know that holding on to a grudge or sending angry energy at someone usually just ends up hurting me. My forgiveness efforts usually start out with my rationalizing why someone did something, then talking myself into believing that they had a good reason for hurting me, so it must be okay. My mom had a hard life, she didn’t mean to hurt me, so it’s okay. Although that sounds good on paper, it never ends up working, because then I feel like I’ve sold myself out and feeling worse.
I’ve spent seven years trying to forgive my ex for walking out on me and the kids and a whole host of other nasty things. I’ve tried praying, I’ve tried writing nasty letters and not sending them, I’ve tried ignoring his existence, and I’m sure I’ve tried a few more things that I can’t remember right now. I even tried my rationalization trick and that backfired because there is no way in hell he “deserves” my forgiveness especially because he has no remorse and thinks he did nothing wrong by leaving me, beating me with a baseball bat, etc.
All the times I’ve tried to forgive, I’ve gotten hung up on the fact that he doesn’t deserve my forgiveness. It’s that Scorpio nature that wants revenge. However, after a lot of reading about forgiveness I honed in on something that I hadn’t really read before: Forgiveness is a Choice I make for me. It is a choice that I make to relieve myself of resentment, anger, and a whole host of other nasty emotions.
Forgiveness has nothing to do with my ex, it is all about me. As I thought about that I realized that I’d been waiting for deity to all of a sudden take away the anger and the pain, but I hadn’t actually made a choice to let it go. A part of me still wanted to wallow in my victimhood. Realizing I actually had a choice in the matter means I have to take responsibility for my choice to forgive or to wallow.
So what does making a choice to forgive look like? I’d love to say that making the choice has instantly removed the pain and anger, but it hasn’t. However, I feel lighter and if the anger is receding. Once I made the choice to forgive, I prayed. I said the following prayer, which was adapted from Edward Hay’s great book Prayers for the Domestic Church: A Handbook for Worship in the Hope:
Dearest Ones,
You who have expressed your divine anger in brimstone and lightening, look down with understanding upon my anger. I am in pain; a wound in my heart caused by another is the source of this suffering.
That heart of mine, Dearest Ones, is filed with anger so that I am unable to be loving and caring. I feel a need to return injury for injury, pain for pain, and so cannot truly desire to forgive the other.
Dearest Ones, you and I both know that such an attitude is wrong; yet it is very real, and its pain overflows into the rest of my life. Before I can come to the point of wanting to forgive—and be forgiven if that is necessary, I just find an antidote for this poisonous attitude.
Dearest Ones, I need your help for my feelings are confused, and so I need to find some order among them. I need to see how this anger has come about and how I can take steps to bring peace into my life. I pause now to examine my heart.
Dearest Ones, you are beings of compassion as well as holy anger, may I see how that which angers me in the other is also a part of my person which I repel. Help me own that part of me and thus begin to know my oneness with the other. May this Passover of mine to the other‘s side make me ready for a solution to this division and my desire for peace soak up the poison in my heart.
Lead me, Dearest Ones, to the peace of forgiveness and help to release the pain I hold in my heart.
Blessed Be,
Praying has brought some relief and peace to my soul and has opened my heart and mind to the idea of forgiveness.
Consciously choosing forgiveness over and over has also helped. When I feel the need to start trashing my ex, or complaining about something he has done, or even just thinking negatively about him. I take a deep breath and say to myself, “I choose to forgive and let go of the anger and the pain.”
Forgiveness truly is a choice and I know there will be days when I will have to consciously choose to forgive over and over again, but I am hoping that those days become fewer and fewer.
Cairn by Cairn 