Forgiveness

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
- Anne Lamott

A friend of mine recently posted this on her Facebook status. Anne Lamott is one of my favorite authors and coming to grips with my own past one of my greatest challenges. So this really touched me.

Forgiveness is both about me and others. I have to forgive myself and those who wrong me. As Anne Lamott points out so well, it’s about coming to terms with my unchangeable past, both my actions and the actions of others.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time coming to terms with my actions. With letting go of the guilt and not living in regret. I did much wrong, and yet that past is filled with blessings that came out of the wrong I did. I still struggle with regret, with opportunities missed or squandered. But I can forgive myself.

I can usually forgive others. And sometimes easily, or relatively easily. Even for some pretty bad things. My problem is that I can’t forget. Being reminded just brings the hurt or anger back, and I have to go through forgiving again. Over time, it becomes easier and eventually the pain fades.

But some things don’t work like that. They always hurt, and they always will. My struggle is how to move forward, knowing that those memories will always be there and will always be painful, but knowing that I cannot change the past and that the past is not my present nor my future. It’s a challenge to not allow those feelings to continue to affect my relationships. To remind myself of forgiveness, despite the memory. It is so hard to let go of some things which hurt us, even though by doing so we only hurt ourselves over and over.

I don’t really know what to do about it. I think it’s normal. And we find ways to deal with it or we let it continue to screw up our lives. I just sometimes wish there were a way to truly forget. Forgiveness is having to remember, but let it go. To really know that the past is the past.

-David

Spring

Spring is my favorite season by far and it is well underway here. Trees are budding and flowers blooming. Bees are everywhere. Life is emerging from the gray and brown winter.

As the seasons change, I remain in the midst of transition. I am still jobless, but financially ok for some time yet. I am slowly moving toward realizing some of my own dreams for my life, trying to let go of the fears that have held me back. I am feeling my way into and through what is proving to be a remarkably complicated relationship; one intended to be totally uncomplicated. But, and I’ve known this for a long time, all relationships are complicated, at least if they are rooted in genuine care and love.

Spring reminds me of the fundamental generosity of life. Scarcity exists when we become selfish, when we focus solely on our own wants and needs rather than understanding where we fit in the beautiful unity of creation. Jealousy emerges when we fail to realize that there is an infinite source of love in each of us to give to one another.

Life is gift. This was the theme of a stewardship campaign at my former parish. It echoed a theme of my priest who often referred to God as the Generous One. God’s very being is Love and love is generous. Creation isn’t so much a work of God as it is the natural result of God’s nature. It is total gift, total generosity.

During Lent, I’ve been trying to give love with this attitude. With no regard or expectation of return. To just give. To give because there is no limit to the love within me because that love draws from the infinite spring of God’s own being. I don’t know that I’m being especially successful, but I’m trying. And that is all we can really do. Try. But we can choose to try harder or not. And surrounded by the glory of Spring, the reminder of the generosity of life itself, I know that I need to try harder.

-David

Living without Fear

A very special someone gave me a copy of Living Without Fear for Christmas, one of the books on my Amazon wish list. I’m reading it not straight through, but more like a devotional. Little bits at a time. Giving me enough to chew and think on for a while.

I realize that I live much of my life with fear. And many of my actions are taken in response to fear. Fear of being hurt. Fear of failure. Fear of not measuring up. Fear of not having enough. So very many things of which to be afraid. Rationally, I know that most such fears are baseless. Either the risk is so small it’s not worth considering, or the result so unimportant in the grander scheme it’s foolish to let it shape my life.

My life is littered with missed opportunities and with second-bests, because of fear. At the root of much of this fear is worry about what others think, about how I measure up in their eyes. In that way, I live not for myself, but for them. I let them tell me of what I should be afraid.

There is no easy way, that I know of, to simply cast out that fear. Even knowing that it is irrational does little to remove its power. I know that the more I rely on my own inner sense of worth, the less fear I feel because the less I look to others for validation. But that only works for some fears.

What if I could live without fear, what would I do? Even though I cannot eliminate fear, just thinking about that question for a few minutes is liberating and powerful. I can, for a moment, contemplate life without fear.

What would I do? I would be more bold, more friendly, speak out more, have more pride. I would plunge wholeheartedly and without reservation into going back to school. I would take an art class. I would dance. I would stand up for myself more.

Life without fear is pretty impossible. But stopping to think about what it might be like gives me a vision of the true potential of this one human life. Maybe, if I can remind myself of this, I can begin, bit by bit, to live into this authentic vision of who I am called to be.

-David

Chasing the Moon

When my first born daughter was just a toddler, we lived on a university campus as staff. Our apartment was in a sprawling Georgian Colonial style residence hall housing hundreds of freshmen women. The building was built with huge wings stretching off to either side, five stories high. Not only was it an imposing structure, but its length gave it huge lawn space. Our entrance was a great set of double doors in the center of the building facing away from the Quad. Only we had keys to these doors, with the result that our daughter had a huge yard to play in, all to herself, since students never came that way. As a stay-at-home dad for the first two years of her life, I loved watching her run back and forth.

When we would come in at night from being out to dinner or visiting friends, she would run ahead of us, down the sidewalk that bisected that great open space. With no trees, she had a clear view of the starry sky. On those occasions when the moon was somewhat lower in the sky she would run toward it, chasing it, never understanding fully how it always ran ahead of her. She was convinced she could catch it.

A gifted friend of mine who is a pastor recently preached about reconciliation and relationships. What is reconciliation, how we achieve it. Whether or not it’s always possible. Sometimes I feel like seeking reconciliation or pursuing relationship is like chasing the moon. You can see clearly to the goal, but try as you might, you don’t ever reach it.

I’ve had remarkable moments of reconciliation in my life. The most remarkable is that which my ex-wife and I achieved, a friendship and relationship which puzzles all those closest to us, family and friends. I’ve also known incredible relationships. The time spent caring for and conversing with my mother over the months of her cancer left me with an understanding of who she was and the depth of her love that I couldn’t have imagined.

But sometimes reconciliation seems impossible and relationships seem destined for failure. I think that it is perhaps a reflection of the unique otherness of each of us. In one sense, we will always be strangers to one another. None of us can have the same experience as another or hear the bare thoughts of another. And yet we grope toward each other in a desire to share, to feel another’s presence, to give and receive love, to be with another. It’s the way we are made.

How much of myself do I give up in seeking reconciliation or relationship? There are those who would say none. But I don’t agree. In the face of our own love and care for another, and that other’s needs, we do yield up some of what we desire in order to meet those needs. I can remain true to myself and yet find ways to live with others. How far do I go with that? I know that I will know it when I have gone too far. But what about before that? How do I know what is just selfishness on my part and not a true desire to take care of myself? I don’t think I have a good way to answer that.

I do know that I like chasing the moon. And I know that sometimes you do actually catch it.

-David