Creative forgiveness

We need to find truth, love and forgiveness even in the midst of hatred, destruction and pride. Napoleon said, “What astonishes me most in this world is the inability of force to create anything.

 

In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the spirit.” In so saying, Napoleon touched upon an important principle of forgiveness. That forgiveness is creative and it springs from love. It is the ability to embrace the pain of injury to oneself while extending one’s hands in love.

 

Forgiving is not easy. The hurt that others inflict on us haunts us from the past and sullies our future. Unfortunately, we tend to identify forgiving with only forgetting. But by learning to live in the present, we will enable ourselves to embrace the pain of the infliction and heal ourselves as well as others.

 

Often, we let painful memories inflict pain. There’s so much negativity attached to the memory. To release the memory, Raymond Studzinski says, is to see the injuring party as a human person who, like oneself, lives in an imperfect world fraught with stress and conflict. Forgiveness is to accept what has happened in the past and not as the final word on the other or oneself.

Edward Guinan says, the heritage that martyrs, resters and saints have left us is: “Love can and must be lived today, despite the pain and difficulty of life. Tomorrow will carry the tenderness and peace which we live now.”