White-Knuckling It.

Holding Hands with Skeletons

I read something the other afternoon that had more than a small impact on me.

It said simply, resentment is the assassin of the soul.

I didn’t agree initially. I reasoned that every single one of us has people we have a hard time forgiving. And most of us have enemies, or at least people we view as threats. I think we have all have heard the hoopla about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek, but when it comes down to living this way, it just seems…impossible.

To be honest, I have glossed over this idea for years.

It never occurred to me that forgiveness is not just for the person who has committed the wrong.

I read this over coffee, and I had to think to myself: Is resentment destroying me from the inside out? Is my anger towards others: my feelings of being cheated or ripped off–dictating my decisions, feeding on my heart? Have I been damaged by something so subtly throughout my days that I’m not even slightly aware of it?

I decided to begin taking an inventory. I started thinking about people who had wronged me over the years. I started focusing on events, replaying them in my mind. I reflected on how I felt about these events and people and relationships. And something strange began to happen.

I began to realize that although I don’t walk around screaming in anger at strangers, or starting fist-fights at bars, I am harboring much more bitterness than I realized. There are many people I have not forgiven for what they have done to me. And I have made many a decision out of anger, out of wounded-ness, than I previously had been willing to admit to myself. I pictured the people who had wronged me and the resentment swelled and stung like salt in a bleeding wound.

In fact, I realized that this parasite had, in fact, been living in me. And it had been thriving.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. It turned out that I have been carrying a weight of titanic proportions.

I started then to think about all the people I had wronged over the years. The list was long. Longer than I would be willing to admit in casual conversation. I began making a list of events and people again. And many of them were people I hadn’t seen in years. It was scary. And I began to feel sick at the thought that there were people out there who just might, when they recall me, have a fresh surge of strong negative emotion as well.

I was feeling very sick.

But maybe that was the answer…

To be honest, I have never really understood forgiveness. I have never really known how to do it or how to receive it. Maybe you are like me and you have a hard time with this concept as well. Oh, I say I forgive people when they ask for it. and I say I forgive myself when I make mistakes. But when I say those things there has been little heart behind it, little emotion. It’s like I am just reciting scripted lines.

Then it hit me: I feel sick because I am sick. I feel sick because I am sick.

I have a disease, an addiction. There’s no getting by it. A real, true, living emotional/mental/phyiscal disease. And every time I act out in selfishness against someone else I am manifesting this disease. We refuse to accept this most of the time. It isn’t until we realize there are people out there who are angry with us for what we have done to them that we begin to realize who we really are. There is something sobering about realizing you have transacted so much wrong. That you have altered someone else’s life through your actions in a negative way. And all you want in the whole world is to know that person forgives you.

I thought about my sickness more, and how it’s infected the core of who I am. And my core is ugly.

When someone hurts us, we want to blame them, we want to hold onto what they have done to us. We want to make them pay. But ultimately, they are just acting out the wounds that they have been inflicted with, just like we do. They are acting out their pain, their disease. Their genetic predisposition toward selfishness, triggered by other people harming them.

When you see that the playing field is even, it makes it a lot easier to forgive others. And a lot easier to ask and receive forgiveness ourselves. Only then will we stop acting out of our disease.