The Healing Power of Forgiveness
By Rita Schiano
Sermon given at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 14, 2014
When I was young, I was fond of saying, “If someone hurts me, I can forgive, but I’ll never forget.” And I’d speak those words with a certain air of hubris, and an implied forewarning: “Don’t mess with me. Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
When I was young, I had no idea what forgiveness was truly about. Truth be told, I didn’t have any real clue about true forgiveness until I was in my early 50s, when I began writing the story about my father.
Until that time, I didn’t understand that my issues around trust, and intimacy, and honesty had little to do with the actions of the people in my life, and everything to do with my thoughts, beliefs and judgments about them, about myself, and about me in relation to them.
Yes, when I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “Don’t mess with me.”
When I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “I can never again trust you.”
When I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “I can’t trust myself that I will not let you hurt me again.”
When my father’s life was taken, I fell into a deep and dark emotional state; an existential depression. I was 21 years old. Everything I believed about myself, about my life seemed meaningless and hopeless.
And while I did eventually find that “invincible summer within me” that Albert Camus spoke of, the metaphysical metamorphosis would later prove not to be enough.
Hurt, anger, confusion, distrust were just a sampling of the negative emotional energies that kept me bound to my past and captive to my future. The circumstances may have been different, the situations were different, the players weren’t the same, but I kept experiencing the same lamentable outcomes.
In my work as a teacher and resilience strategist, I often hark back to the teachings of Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that there are two times in our life when our character is shaped. The first is when we are children. At that time, our habits and attitudes are shaped by our parents and our early teachers, who taught us the best they knew how based on what they had learned.
And while these early messages and habit formations were central to our character development, sometimes these lessons were negative.
As a child I was, like most children are, a keen observer. I witnessed first-hand the hurt, the betrayal, the humiliation my father inflicted upon my mother. And I witnessed first-hand the suspicion, the mistrust, and the self-loathing my mother absorbed into the deepest fibers of her being. And as a child I was, like most children are, a poor interpreter of what I observed.
Children do not have a well-developed emotional language that adequately identifies their reactions and responses. Iyanla VanZant in her course on forgiveness explains that as children, we’re taught to identify an emotion or feeling as right, wrong, good, bad, nice or not nice in response to the behavior most often associated with it.
For example, it’s not right, good or nice to express anger. We are told not to be afraid. Sadness is often addressed with sweet treats (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pastries, as was in my case) or some other distraction that makes the adults feel comfortable, yet fails to address what the child thinks and feels. This use of misdirection is what keeps us emotionally stuck.
When as children we are humiliated or are witness to humiliation by a parent or caregiver or bully, we carry that emotional energy in the body. We perseverate on it, allowing the emotion, the hurt, to linger and fester, becoming a benchmark for the way we deal with others, with failure, with criticism.
And these repeated reactions and negative responses strengthen the neural circuitry in our brain, and shape our attitudes, our settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, which is typically, then, reflected in our behavior. Different set of circumstances, different situation, different players, same old crappy outcome. We get stuck repeating the same patterns — dating losers, marrying alcoholics, or cheaters, or the emotionally unavailable — because it is familiar. It’s dealing with the devil we know, rather than the devil we don’t know.
However, our adult conception of the world comes from within and is self-directed. And so, as Aristotle writes, when we reach adulthood we are obligated to look back at those early lessons, those habits we developed, and determine if they serve us, or if they are habits that do not serve us. And then we must ask ourselves, “Is this the kind of person I want to be?”
That question was my awakening: Did I want to continue to be bound to my past, and captive to my future? Or was I ready and willing to do the soul-searching work that would ultimately free me? And once I embraced those questions, the channel was incontrovertible: forgiveness.
I had to forgive my father for putting me at risk; I had to forgive my father for not demonstrating to me how a lover properly and respectfully treats his beloved; I had to forgive my father for broken promises that caused me to feel hurt and angry and unworthy of his time and attention.
I had to forgive my mother for subjecting me, her child, to her hurt and humiliation. I had to forgive my mother for not being strong enough to say to my father, “Enough. I won’t allow you to treat me like this anymore. I am worthy of respect. I am worthy of devotion, I am worthy of love.” Those are the messages a child needs to learn.
Embracing forgiveness is easier said than done, for we cannot enact successful change in our lives unless we breakdown the process of forgiveness into small segments. To begin, I had to learn what forgiveness is, and what forgiveness is not, and what it meant to be unforgiving.
Forgiveness is not weakness; it is not acquiescing to someone else’s bad behavior.
Forgiveness is not condoning their actions; it is not saying ‘That’s okay.’
Forgiveness is not excusing what happened; nor is it a pass for bad behavior.
And forgiveness does not mean that we are obligated to continue a relationship with someone who has caused us hurt or harm. Many times these are the people we find the hardest to forgive, for we feel we are then obligated to “let bygones be bygones" and allow that person full access to our lives. We do not.
Regardless of the reason, rational or irrational, when we choose to be unforgiving we choose to remain stuck. Being unforgiving gives the other full power over our future choices, decisions, and actions.
We’ve all heard one script or another…
“I’m not going to my niece’s wedding because my sister, who caused so much disruption in my family, will be there. I feel badly I won’t get to see my niece get married, but if she’s going, then I’m not going.”
“I’m not going to my uncle’s house for Christmas because he owes me an apology. So I’m just going to stay home. Everyone there will miss me. That’ll show him.”
In each of those scenarios, and all the other similar situations at play in the lives of the unforgiving, we think we are hurting the offender. But who are we hurting, really? We’re hurting the niece, we’re hurting the uncle, we’re hurting the aunt, the cousins, all the family and friends with whom we won’t share those life events and holidays. And most importantly, we are hurting ourselves by denying ourselves those precious moments in time with those we love.
What keeps us stuck in the pain both emotionally and at a cellular level — what we FEEL in our bodies — is the choice of unforgiveness. This emotional energy becomes a driving force that sustains our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments, and strengthens in a negative way, what I call our HABITUDES© — patterns of thoughts or behaviors affecting our attitudes towards life.
While our attitudes influence our behavior, it’s our habits — those recurrent, often unconscious patterns of behavior — that direct our actions and ultimately shape our character.
“I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive,” said Henry Ward Beecher. “Forgiveness” he went on to say, “ought to be like a cancelled note — torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.”
When we do not forgive and release that negative emotional energy that is attached to an experience, we remain emotionally stuck in the experience.
Once the situation is over, once the interaction between you and the other person is over, it’s done. It no longer exists. Forgiveness does not change the past, but it opens the door of our hearts, allowing us to build upon the future. “Anger” Cherie Carter-Scott said, “makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.”
Another important and critical step in the process . . . is self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is having the courage to face the reality of the impact of our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments on others and on ourselves. Self-forgiveness arises when our hearts yearn to relieve the suffering, the hurt we caused another or ourselves. And just like excusing others, it doesn’t excuse or justify our bad behavior.
Even if someone is no longer alive or an active part of our lives, we must acknowledge the truth of their hurt, intentionally take responsibility for our actions, and offer them (or ourselves) a proper apology.
Randy Pausch in his book, The Last Lecture, writes: “A bad apology is worse than no apology.” When we hurt each other – intentionally or unintentionally — it is “like an infection” in our relationship. Offering no apology would be like letting the infection continue. And a bad apology is worse because “it is like rubbing salt in the wound.” Giving a Real Apology, he writes, is like using an antibiotic ointment.
Pausch provides these examples of bad apologies:
I’m sorry you feel hurt by what I have done. This statement, he explains, indicates that you really aren’t interested in putting medicine on the wound; it has no personal acknowledgement that one’s words (or actions) were hurtful. It says, in other words, “You’re too sensitive. Get over it.”
I apologize for what I did, but you also need to apologize too for what you’ve done. In saying this you are, in actuality, wanting an apology, not truly asking for one.
A proper apology, he writes, has three steps:
Forgiveness is not something that just happens; it is a choice we make, a shift in perception. When we can open our minds to a higher way of thinking, when our hearts are open for giving and receiving love, that’s when we receive the grace of forgiveness.
Perhaps some of you may be thinking, but what about the evils of rape, violence, and global horrors that are perpetrated upon the innocent? Are healing, justice, and forgiveness possible after such tragedy? Let’s go back to October 9, 2012. On that day a man boarded a bus and shot 15-year-old Ma-la-la You-saf-zi in the head. What prompted this horrific act? The young girl had defied the Taliban in Pakistan and demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education.
In circumstances like this, forgiveness seems like an unlikely choice. Yet, in her speech at the Youth Takeover of the UN last year, she said: “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”
Be peaceful and love everyone, she said.
“The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness,” writes ethicist and theologian Lewis Smedes. He goes on to say, “When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”
Forgiveness advances our capacity to be responsible and accountable for our thoughts, our beliefs, our judgments, and our actions. To again paraphrase Iyanla, “Forgiveness is a sacred practice, a spiritual discipline that allows our heart, our emotional being to remain open to a deeper understanding of ourselves and of others.”
In the forgiveness work I have done, which began when writing the story about my father, to the practice of forgiveness I continue to do, what I have learned, what I know, is that forgiveness has brought me inner peace, has given me a broader perspective on life, and has made me a person capable of giving and receiving genuine love.
Forgiveness is a gift that we give to ourselves.
To embrace true forgiveness, we have to take the time and make the effort to identify the feelings that we are holding to the thoughts, beliefs, and judgments about the harm, the hurt, the actions that live and grow and fester and keep us stuck in unforgiveness, that close our minds to new possibilities; that cloud our capacity to think clearly and soundly.
Forgive not the behaviors, but the thinking, the beliefs, and the judgments that are unkind, unloving, and unnecessary, and which hinder your personal growth and healing. The decision to forgive begins in your mind, threads through your heart, and rests in your soul.
“Forgiveness,” writes Mark Twain, “is the fragrance the violet shed on the heel that has crushed it.”
Inhale deeply.
So be it.
© 2014 Rita Schiano. Reprinted with permission.
By Rita Schiano
Sermon given at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 14, 2014
When I was young, I was fond of saying, “If someone hurts me, I can forgive, but I’ll never forget.” And I’d speak those words with a certain air of hubris, and an implied forewarning: “Don’t mess with me. Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
When I was young, I had no idea what forgiveness was truly about. Truth be told, I didn’t have any real clue about true forgiveness until I was in my early 50s, when I began writing the story about my father.
Until that time, I didn’t understand that my issues around trust, and intimacy, and honesty had little to do with the actions of the people in my life, and everything to do with my thoughts, beliefs and judgments about them, about myself, and about me in relation to them.
Yes, when I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “Don’t mess with me.”
When I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “I can never again trust you.”
When I’d say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget,” what I meant was “I can’t trust myself that I will not let you hurt me again.”
When my father’s life was taken, I fell into a deep and dark emotional state; an existential depression. I was 21 years old. Everything I believed about myself, about my life seemed meaningless and hopeless.
And while I did eventually find that “invincible summer within me” that Albert Camus spoke of, the metaphysical metamorphosis would later prove not to be enough.
Hurt, anger, confusion, distrust were just a sampling of the negative emotional energies that kept me bound to my past and captive to my future. The circumstances may have been different, the situations were different, the players weren’t the same, but I kept experiencing the same lamentable outcomes.
In my work as a teacher and resilience strategist, I often hark back to the teachings of Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that there are two times in our life when our character is shaped. The first is when we are children. At that time, our habits and attitudes are shaped by our parents and our early teachers, who taught us the best they knew how based on what they had learned.
And while these early messages and habit formations were central to our character development, sometimes these lessons were negative.
As a child I was, like most children are, a keen observer. I witnessed first-hand the hurt, the betrayal, the humiliation my father inflicted upon my mother. And I witnessed first-hand the suspicion, the mistrust, and the self-loathing my mother absorbed into the deepest fibers of her being. And as a child I was, like most children are, a poor interpreter of what I observed.
Children do not have a well-developed emotional language that adequately identifies their reactions and responses. Iyanla VanZant in her course on forgiveness explains that as children, we’re taught to identify an emotion or feeling as right, wrong, good, bad, nice or not nice in response to the behavior most often associated with it.
For example, it’s not right, good or nice to express anger. We are told not to be afraid. Sadness is often addressed with sweet treats (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pastries, as was in my case) or some other distraction that makes the adults feel comfortable, yet fails to address what the child thinks and feels. This use of misdirection is what keeps us emotionally stuck.
When as children we are humiliated or are witness to humiliation by a parent or caregiver or bully, we carry that emotional energy in the body. We perseverate on it, allowing the emotion, the hurt, to linger and fester, becoming a benchmark for the way we deal with others, with failure, with criticism.
And these repeated reactions and negative responses strengthen the neural circuitry in our brain, and shape our attitudes, our settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, which is typically, then, reflected in our behavior. Different set of circumstances, different situation, different players, same old crappy outcome. We get stuck repeating the same patterns — dating losers, marrying alcoholics, or cheaters, or the emotionally unavailable — because it is familiar. It’s dealing with the devil we know, rather than the devil we don’t know.
However, our adult conception of the world comes from within and is self-directed. And so, as Aristotle writes, when we reach adulthood we are obligated to look back at those early lessons, those habits we developed, and determine if they serve us, or if they are habits that do not serve us. And then we must ask ourselves, “Is this the kind of person I want to be?”
That question was my awakening: Did I want to continue to be bound to my past, and captive to my future? Or was I ready and willing to do the soul-searching work that would ultimately free me? And once I embraced those questions, the channel was incontrovertible: forgiveness.
I had to forgive my father for putting me at risk; I had to forgive my father for not demonstrating to me how a lover properly and respectfully treats his beloved; I had to forgive my father for broken promises that caused me to feel hurt and angry and unworthy of his time and attention.
I had to forgive my mother for subjecting me, her child, to her hurt and humiliation. I had to forgive my mother for not being strong enough to say to my father, “Enough. I won’t allow you to treat me like this anymore. I am worthy of respect. I am worthy of devotion, I am worthy of love.” Those are the messages a child needs to learn.
Embracing forgiveness is easier said than done, for we cannot enact successful change in our lives unless we breakdown the process of forgiveness into small segments. To begin, I had to learn what forgiveness is, and what forgiveness is not, and what it meant to be unforgiving.
Forgiveness is not weakness; it is not acquiescing to someone else’s bad behavior.
Forgiveness is not condoning their actions; it is not saying ‘That’s okay.’
Forgiveness is not excusing what happened; nor is it a pass for bad behavior.
And forgiveness does not mean that we are obligated to continue a relationship with someone who has caused us hurt or harm. Many times these are the people we find the hardest to forgive, for we feel we are then obligated to “let bygones be bygones" and allow that person full access to our lives. We do not.
Regardless of the reason, rational or irrational, when we choose to be unforgiving we choose to remain stuck. Being unforgiving gives the other full power over our future choices, decisions, and actions.
We’ve all heard one script or another…
“I’m not going to my niece’s wedding because my sister, who caused so much disruption in my family, will be there. I feel badly I won’t get to see my niece get married, but if she’s going, then I’m not going.”
“I’m not going to my uncle’s house for Christmas because he owes me an apology. So I’m just going to stay home. Everyone there will miss me. That’ll show him.”
In each of those scenarios, and all the other similar situations at play in the lives of the unforgiving, we think we are hurting the offender. But who are we hurting, really? We’re hurting the niece, we’re hurting the uncle, we’re hurting the aunt, the cousins, all the family and friends with whom we won’t share those life events and holidays. And most importantly, we are hurting ourselves by denying ourselves those precious moments in time with those we love.
What keeps us stuck in the pain both emotionally and at a cellular level — what we FEEL in our bodies — is the choice of unforgiveness. This emotional energy becomes a driving force that sustains our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments, and strengthens in a negative way, what I call our HABITUDES© — patterns of thoughts or behaviors affecting our attitudes towards life.
While our attitudes influence our behavior, it’s our habits — those recurrent, often unconscious patterns of behavior — that direct our actions and ultimately shape our character.
“I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive,” said Henry Ward Beecher. “Forgiveness” he went on to say, “ought to be like a cancelled note — torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.”
When we do not forgive and release that negative emotional energy that is attached to an experience, we remain emotionally stuck in the experience.
Once the situation is over, once the interaction between you and the other person is over, it’s done. It no longer exists. Forgiveness does not change the past, but it opens the door of our hearts, allowing us to build upon the future. “Anger” Cherie Carter-Scott said, “makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.”
Another important and critical step in the process . . . is self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is having the courage to face the reality of the impact of our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments on others and on ourselves. Self-forgiveness arises when our hearts yearn to relieve the suffering, the hurt we caused another or ourselves. And just like excusing others, it doesn’t excuse or justify our bad behavior.
Even if someone is no longer alive or an active part of our lives, we must acknowledge the truth of their hurt, intentionally take responsibility for our actions, and offer them (or ourselves) a proper apology.
Randy Pausch in his book, The Last Lecture, writes: “A bad apology is worse than no apology.” When we hurt each other – intentionally or unintentionally — it is “like an infection” in our relationship. Offering no apology would be like letting the infection continue. And a bad apology is worse because “it is like rubbing salt in the wound.” Giving a Real Apology, he writes, is like using an antibiotic ointment.
Pausch provides these examples of bad apologies:
I’m sorry you feel hurt by what I have done. This statement, he explains, indicates that you really aren’t interested in putting medicine on the wound; it has no personal acknowledgement that one’s words (or actions) were hurtful. It says, in other words, “You’re too sensitive. Get over it.”
I apologize for what I did, but you also need to apologize too for what you’ve done. In saying this you are, in actuality, wanting an apology, not truly asking for one.
A proper apology, he writes, has three steps:
- What I did was wrong.
- I feel badly that I hurt you.
- How do I make you feel better?
Forgiveness is not something that just happens; it is a choice we make, a shift in perception. When we can open our minds to a higher way of thinking, when our hearts are open for giving and receiving love, that’s when we receive the grace of forgiveness.
Perhaps some of you may be thinking, but what about the evils of rape, violence, and global horrors that are perpetrated upon the innocent? Are healing, justice, and forgiveness possible after such tragedy? Let’s go back to October 9, 2012. On that day a man boarded a bus and shot 15-year-old Ma-la-la You-saf-zi in the head. What prompted this horrific act? The young girl had defied the Taliban in Pakistan and demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education.
In circumstances like this, forgiveness seems like an unlikely choice. Yet, in her speech at the Youth Takeover of the UN last year, she said: “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”
Be peaceful and love everyone, she said.
“The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness,” writes ethicist and theologian Lewis Smedes. He goes on to say, “When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”
Forgiveness advances our capacity to be responsible and accountable for our thoughts, our beliefs, our judgments, and our actions. To again paraphrase Iyanla, “Forgiveness is a sacred practice, a spiritual discipline that allows our heart, our emotional being to remain open to a deeper understanding of ourselves and of others.”
In the forgiveness work I have done, which began when writing the story about my father, to the practice of forgiveness I continue to do, what I have learned, what I know, is that forgiveness has brought me inner peace, has given me a broader perspective on life, and has made me a person capable of giving and receiving genuine love.
Forgiveness is a gift that we give to ourselves.
To embrace true forgiveness, we have to take the time and make the effort to identify the feelings that we are holding to the thoughts, beliefs, and judgments about the harm, the hurt, the actions that live and grow and fester and keep us stuck in unforgiveness, that close our minds to new possibilities; that cloud our capacity to think clearly and soundly.
Forgive not the behaviors, but the thinking, the beliefs, and the judgments that are unkind, unloving, and unnecessary, and which hinder your personal growth and healing. The decision to forgive begins in your mind, threads through your heart, and rests in your soul.
“Forgiveness,” writes Mark Twain, “is the fragrance the violet shed on the heel that has crushed it.”
Inhale deeply.
So be it.
© 2014 Rita Schiano. Reprinted with permission.
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