What Would It Mean To Forgive?

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake

back

What Would It Mean To Forgive?

What would it mean to forgive if I have been hurt?

Forgiveness after being hurt requires tending to a wound. Forgiveness after being hurt minimizes pain and scar tissue to form. Forgiveness after being hurt is often a collective process where we venture outside of the toxic boundaries of our injured mind and seek loving support. Loving support is the antiseptic, the salve, the bandage for wounds. When given time and care, forgiveness is possible. When practiced again and again, with an open and honest heart, healing can occur. Forgiveness is a path to healing ourselves and our world.

What would it mean to forgive someone I do not like?

Forgiving someone I don’t like requires grappling with the idea I don’t like everyone. I want to be a beacon of love, able to live in this place of clarity and compassion and thankfulness, but that is not always possible. That requires excavating my role in conflict. That requires heading toward right livelihood and justice. That requires understanding another’s perspective. That requires letting go of ego and the need to be right. That requires remembering that is often the things that I don’t like in others that I don’t like in myself.

What would it mean to forgive myself and others for failure?

I give lip service to the value of failure. I talk about the wisdom that comes from failure. I talk about how each failure is a step toward success. I talk about how failure builds strength. That all sounds good, in theory. In practice, I often replay moments of failure in my mind, reliving the pain. I hear awful failure messages – even the exact words – like a symphony of truth. I transport back to the moments when I have lost my mind, set things on fire, or ran away so fast that my memory has left a hole. Fiction mingles with fact as blame and responsibility fight: finding fault joins in. Forgiveness has no role in the fight. The fighting, the replaying, the hearing, the fire setting, the mind losing, and the running simply stop when I forgive.

What would it mean to accept the quiet of forgiveness?

Forgiveness is quiet. There are parts of my brain for which chaos feels normal. There are parts of my brain that must have a villain, either myself or someone else. There are parts of my brain that shake my cage just to keep me off balance. Chaos and villains and cages don’t allow forgiveness. They feed off each other, to make peace and quiet unattainable and other worldly. Forgiveness reclaims peace and quiet. Forgiveness is a choice toward peace and quiet.