Last Sunday, we traveled into the realm of gratitude and forgiveness. Forgiveness. It's such an overworked word. And an underused experience.
We talked about forgiving other people; we talked about forgiving our own selves. We talked about the reality that, sometimes, it's damned hard to forgive. Plus, there's the responsibility to learn from that forgiveness and to continue to live it every day.
During our time together, I randomly opened to a page in the book and found the following on pages 197-8:
"Honesty gets us sober," Bill Wilson once observed, "but tolerance keeps us sober." Such tolerance, A.A. members know, is not a grudging putting-up-with but a loving identification with—the Tolerance that is the antechamber to Forgiveness, the tolerance that is the flowering of a spirituality of imperfection. When we accept ourselves in all our weakness, flaws, and failings, we can begin to fulfill an even more challenging responsibility: accepting the weakness, limitations, and mixed-up-ed-ness of those we love and respect. Then and only then, it seems, do we become able to accept the weakness, defects, and short-comings of those we find it difficult to love. [Italics original]I spent several years of my 40s in an experience that I have ultimately decided was a teaching/learning experience for myself. Why else would I have chosen that particular path? Or been led along it if not to learn something, one of which was to accept that my sense of the moral way to live can be severely compromised by emotional neediness. That my supposed strength of purpose could be severely sidetracked.
Neale Donald Walsch's Conversation with God books were helpful in opening my mind to the idea that we live on this earth in order to learn what our soul needs to know. And to accept that that episode in my life was part of the learning.
Nudging my mind for the past seven years is the thought that I need to forgive the person who lied to me and stole from me and abused my trust. And I need to forgive myself for trusting the person and for enabling the person's behavior. I haven't gotten there yet. Sometimes I think that I might be able to get there if I ever saw some repayment of the money that got poured down that rat-hole. And then the thought comes that forgiveness cannot depend upon that.
There are other things that gnaw at my mind at times. Other actions that I find it difficult to forgive myself for. Imperfections abound within me. I guess that is what makes me … me, and, at times, difficult to live with.
the morning after, I saw spots on the upholstery
what carelessness!
and the spots and stains of this recent past
floated by unseeing eyes
imprinted on car upholstery
forever in memories
when I laboured under the delusion of love
faced rejection every other week or so
fought as never before
and toughened myself to say "leave''
when the lies shattered