Isn’t it wonderful and profound how the Universe and the Ancestors circle around and bring us exactly what is needed? And then remind us again and again!
My lovely daughter called it the “new car syndrome” where you start noticing all the cars that look just like the one you just bought. 😉
Maybe so, or perhaps this is just the most important message for us all right now.
I would tend toward the latter, as that has been my experience – the lessons I need most tend to show up and keep sending reminders.
Thus, this week’s post comes from one of my favorites, Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, which not surprisingly had the theme this week of forgiveness and mercy!
Enjoy – and let me know your thoughts.
When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us.
—Richard Rohr
Grace re-creates all things; nothing new happens without forgiveness. We just keep repeating the same old patterns, illusions, and half-truths.
—Richard Rohr
I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness, but now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding. Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness. More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who God is.
—Richard Rohr
Practice – Praying to Forgive
Brian McLaren identifies how prayers of petition help us to experience forgiveness:
Since being wounded or sinned against is a terribly common experience, I suspect we need to pay more attention to it. In fact, being wronged is directly linked in the Lord’s Prayer to the reality of doing wrong; we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Father Richard Rohr says it well: Pain that isn’t processed is passed on. Pain that isn’t transformed is transmitted. So we need to process our woundedness with God, and that processing begins by naming the pain and holding it … in God’s presence:
Betrayed. Insulted. Taken advantage of. Lied to. Forgotten. Used. Abused. Belittled. Passed over. Cheated. Mocked. Snubbed. Robbed. Vandalized. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. Excluded. Disrespected. Ripped off. Confused. Misled.
It’s important not to rush this process. We need to feel our feelings, to let the pain actually catch up with us…. I’ve found that it takes less energy to feel and process my pain than it does to suppress it or run away from it. So, just as through confession we name our own wrongs and feel regret, through petition we name and feel the pain that results from the wrongs of others…. We translate our pain into requests:
Comfort. Encouragement. Reassurance. Companionship. Vindication. Appreciation. Boundaries. Acknowledgement.
It’s important to note that we are not naming what we need the person who wronged us to do for us. If we focus on what we wish the antagonist would do to make us feel better, we unintentionally arm the antagonist with still more power to hurt us. Instead, in this naming, we are turning from the antagonist to God, focusing on what we need God to do for us. We’re opening our soul to receive healing from God’s ever present, ever generous Spirit.