FORGIVE AND BE RECONCILED
Through the Gateway of Forgiveness, We Enter unto Compassion
Forgiving. Humanly, this “simple” thing cannot be done.
Beloved, we must be sure we genuinely reach this profound forgiveness which only enters us deep in our chamber of communion.
We forgive seventy times seven as our judgments repeatedly drop, we realize there is nothing to forgive, and we’re brought into compassionate Love.
Inwardly, our core is inviolate. Outwardly, forgive us, we know not what we do. In our amnesiac state, we are God embarked on missions kept secret from ourselves.
Whether it’s our “enemies” who’ve hurt us, or our dearest ones:
The Other is really the Beloved, whose nature is to give, but we are withholding the flow from ourselves by blaming, keeping at arm’s length. When we give first, fore-give, that God-recognition, then we let it flow back from the Other.
Forgiveness includes our forgiving of debts of any kind.
When we forgive those Others we’ve held in condemnation, make a free gift of their debts, and appreciate what they have taught us, then we let holiness enter and envelop us, erasing our karmic burden of debts as an added thing. And any debts that we ourselves owe outwardly, any injuries we’re party to, we try to make good. For the flowers of ecstatic contact are fulfilled when they bear fruit in holy Love.
No praise---no blame---only praise of Being.
No blame: the “evil” people, in our shared problems: if there weren’t the saintly ditches serving us, the muddy water would hide the footpaths. No praise: I don’t do it and can’t even help, except by getting out of the way, so the Revealer can live and love As my life and love.
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Our Own Faults
In our own sufferings, our crucifixions, we need to be saved from our self-blame as well as from the feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, humiliation because we have a problem. We have a crying need for divine love and its resultant compassion with the eyes open.
We all give way at times to grievous faults. We cannot of ourselves be good. We are Goddies, not goodies. Not only do we resist not our evil, but we resist not resisting not evil. Sadly, we do not merely accede, but at times we run to do evil, knowing better. There’s a razor’s edge between resisting not, and entertaining evil. Yet, attaining the sacred viewpoint with our compassionate meditation, we must again surrender to Forgiveness, which even forgives ourselves. (Fore give: Give first, before we seem to deserve it in any way. God does not need to deserve, even when appearing as me.) I have no faults except such as are common to humankind, picked up in the air; by my struggle with an angel are we all reborn. We want to be constant goodies, but through the Consciousness granted in contemplative prayer, we honor our lapses and find compassion for ourselves.
Each fault is the excess of a virtue. (Self-acceptance can breed conceit; delight with the world’s bounty gives way to greed or lust; giving ourselves a break, to laziness; fairness all around wavers into selfishness; kindness or optimism can devolve into white lies; seeking knowledge, into self-distraction; informing and coordinating, instantly into gossip or bigotry; taking action, into violence; hard work and prudence can avoid our meeting and relying on the divine. These problems can result from fear and pain as well.)
Or when our sense of separation causes anxiety, we may take ourselves further away by increasing our errant behavior. But we learn if we persist in our folly: Excess “old yang” becomes yin. The world is round, space curves; going away in a straight line finally returns us Home.
So each virtue is Self-corrected and must reverse its course; each evil is a crisis presenting the door to humbling ourselves and turning. The caduceus: The snake ascending the staff fluctuates and provides feedback again and again, from good to bad to good, not merely circling but rising to realization. While all these difficult classes are necessary, the staff underneath the sturm und drang of appearances runs straight to God, its gravity pulling everything back in.
In the assigning of blame, we can easily direct our hatred against ourself. No one’s going to run up shouting, “Blame me instead!” We’ve walled off this guilt, a secret hopeless and neglected wasteland. So we also work on naming and understanding our rejected issues. In compassionate contemplation we honor them, absorbing our lessons, repairing, completing and integrating our broken places. So we move through this level, completing it, reaching the Renewed World. Now the paradox:
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” All my sins are taken away. What does this mean? Due to meditative awareness, we experience our Real Being, we rest ourselves in our instant freedom from our sankaras, our conditioning, and from the limited beliefs, the inaccuracies underlying those routines.
Way
stations: We hit the note C to rest at the top of one octave, then run up
the aural spiral of music, through another octave to C, and another. Both
in our microcosm and the macrocosm, we continue evolving before and after
spiritual awareness is attained, in prayer we contemplate the Principles ever
unfolding, finding fresh reconciliations at new levels along Buddha’s
Middle Path. So some of those sankaras resume activity as our energy is again
stepped down into the perceptible. Form’s inherently limited, this/not
that; it’s always something! And that’s good. In sensing the divine
activity of this spiritual universe, we catch the drift
of
what’s going on, the underground river, as modeled in the myths and
metaphors we embody in our lives. Even as we return again and again to this
world, we are upheld, innocent and inviolate always, by Everlasting Arms.
Confession is good for the soul. Our outer actions are the tip of the iceberg. With a
near and dear one, such as our partner in life or our teacher, we can dig down deep into ourselves and unblock all the hidden things that shame and torture us. Beloved, they may be outer actions past or present. Or they may be within: early traumas we feel again, so we can drop the conditioned responses and catch our breath; family dynamics; despising ourselves because we were mistreated; archaic sine wave struggles; feelings of utter abandonment and unworthiness; or being unable to ask for help; or hatred and guilt; or fleeing from the face of our constant Self. In every case, we treat our actions or thoughts gently, with great compassion for suffering and with honor. For with each unhappiness, we are searching for the golden thread of Love that will lead us completely out of the maze. And so we learn to let this divine forgiveness and Love open from within, and become so close to our friend that there isn’t a tissue between.
Our faults can be put to good use as we search. For instance, unconscious rationalizing can help us to keep forging ahead in our work. At some point we inevitably hit a wall, and in order to continue, those faults are transmuted (in us, or somewhere in the one Life).
We may feel vast conceit and hubris, or feel like a worm in the dust. Challenges from different angles.
French, blessé: wounded; “bless” derives from “blood.”
The person with impregnable self-assurance will eventually be blessed with enormous self-doubt. Self-doubt is a facet of self-awareness, and teaches us to surrender.
When I am as low as dirt, God says now you are the Earth. As low as nothing; well, God is Nothing.
If we’re a “good” person, Beloved, we may have more nebulous or hidden faults, which might remain unrecognized, unamended, unforgiven in ourselves.
When we see the faults of near ones, we can say I’m sorry---their flaws and sorrows are mine, and mine to take into prayer to honor, to uplift.
Neither can I be bad. My faults are redeemed and recycled again and again by the Spirit of Grace, forgiving and assuring as I look back and observe them, and God cannot fail me.
Neither can I be good.
When we make mistakes, which happens so frequently, and then we open out a way for divine Activity to emerge, It pulls our chestnuts out of the fire.
So when we’re tempted to fall off the beam, let’s be faithful in the smallest things, let in our compassionate meditation to forgive and cherish us all, then continue on the highest level we now can. Greeting our Self: Howdy, Pardoner.
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No Blame
This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
We revere and celebrate each precious life, we cradle every aching being in our arms.
We forgive humans. We also forgive God, without needing to see It as unaware and detached. We love our own divine Self as we love the God that It Is; we don’t condemn It because the human scene drags on. As we have compassion for our own smaller selves, we also love our divine Self, the very Self of this world, knowing things unfold and unveil as fast as they can for us to traverse the caduceus, flesh out our Sacred Hearts, really be where we always are.
And the Other has no fault either, no resistance; their reality is bright perfection, the radiant joyful face of our Lover.
We have no one to blame. We cannot blame God, we cannot blame the Other, we cannot blame our Self, and we cannot blame the collective “carnal mind.” There is no blame at all---our coming into this awareness was needful, to create the Greater Love from the Beyond-form; it isn’t inflicted on another, for we are the Beloved One that has entered this world. Where there was blame, sing praise.
If there isn’t any blame, maybe there isn’t anything “wrong.” We’re always afraid that something is going wrong, but actually everything is okay and cannot be harmed. We have our nightmares, but we get where we’re going, where we already abide. There are no bad ways and there are no good ways, there is only one way or another way. And so in our prayer we look back over our lives, and we find all our hardships have been worth the while, perfectly leading us across the swaying bridge.
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Principle and Practice of Reconciliation
When we meditate: “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”
We reconcile with our brother, give him our cloak, to transmute the material sense into the relationship of God to Itself. And if my brother hath aught against me, even if I didn’t cause the wrong, that person must be freed of anger, or I am not free. Healing is based on freeing all those who come to us. So this is not a way to be good; any goodness is only a by-product.
Principle: The only relationship we have is the sacred relationship of God to Itself.
Our conciliatory prayer reveals that every relationship, at every level, is held sacred with the Other. Only the One interacts, intertwines, interwaves in love, no matter how beneficial or destructive, how important or insignificant the picture seems.
We forgive internally. Building on that, we reconcile inwardly and outwardly.
We always respond to conflict, or any strain in connections large or small. Resistance, or mere passivity or avoiding the issue, limits us to the sense of separation. We answer with the immeasurable energy of prayer inwardly (which may itself yield the fruitage), and, when we are led, with active outward steps of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Keystone: In our centering, our reconciling meditation, we love our enemy. We reach God’s relationship to Itself. This is one type of compassionate meditation, which we always start by impersonalizing faults and flowering open to divine compassion, as we sink into Embrace. Our antagonist is one with us, united in our all-inclusive holy Identity.
And then in the heated moment, we agree with our adversaries, in empathy for our human suffering. Within us are secreted pearls of great price. There is no power or struggle. Neither friend nor foe can thwart us when we shred our own agenda and attend to divine purpose; no force exists to really ever injure us. We inwardly stand upon our real nature and are held strong and secure. We reconcile, sometimes just silently, sometimes also aloud, in action, always in Love.
Then we meet our Self everywhere, and divine chords and omnifertile nativity cascade forth, a world of sacred rejoining, in which to give and receive every level of healing Love.
My fifth grade teacher, a new grad, was acting very strict with our class, until one day I started crying on the cafeteria line. When my teacher asked why I was crying, I said “Because I don’t like you.” She heard me, and answered that you can’t like everyone. Immediately we began to love each other, and that turned around the year for the whole class.
The little thing we withhold keeps bearing repercussions. Our pride backfires, our fear calls forth threats. Finally, we pray. Then it may be solved without human hands. Or the way may be prepared for us to air it, dispatch it in fellowship.
Spiritual teachers observe strict confidentiality with students. Likewise, we try not to talk about people behind their backs. If we do, or we react in other ways, it’s an alarm bell. If we have an issue with someone, we meditate and make our crooked places straight. Again, we may be led to speak forthrightly with them without struggle, in restorative unity.
An ostensible disagreement often masks a different conflict. We are able to admit our mistakes and see through the other person’s eyes. This leads to unpredictable openings of the heart.
Even long extinct frictions, as from childhood, continue their underground influence. We don’t catalogue them, but when they pop up into view on their own, we’re called to the meditative work.
We may get angry during an emergency that reaches a happy ending. We don’t let our fault lie, we make amends.
We each have our peculiar interests, our trips, our pet beliefs. When we seem to argue over some outward “thing,” there can never be any outward externalized thing. In our great underlying work of synthesis upon the Middle Path, we are being called to conciliate our colliding jigsaw pieces, viewpoints we refine in the fire and fashion into a rose-window globe.
St. Peter said, Our truth, our good shall be evilly spoken of. So what? Opinions of us don’t matter. All this is brought to us to see through and begin the thankful hosannas.
From the Hindu: The serpent fell in the pond and was drowning. A swami was passing by, and set about rescuing him. Every time he reached out, the snake tried to bite him. A student said, “Why don’t you just let him sink?” The swami responded, “It’s my job to see we’re saved, and it’s his job to end my fear.” Then the snake came to his hand.
Elisha the Prophet
When the Syrians attacked Israel, Elisha the Prophet told the king of Israel all of Syria’s war plans even as they were spoken. So a great host came forth and compassed Elisha’s city about. Elisha prayed and the soldiers were blinded, in a daze. He led them into the midst of the army of Israel, and then cured their confused vision.
The king asked Elisha, shall I slay them? He answered, rather set food and drink before them. After everyone had feasted, he sent them home, and they never again invaded. (II Kings 6)
The words “hostile” and “host” share a common origin. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”
Forgive Us Our Debts
I have seen, for instance, if a person seeks to steal a fortune, and the intended ones give it away as truly a gift in their hearts, then another fortune flows to them out of the blue. And I saw also that the person received the Gift, and later went seeking spiritual help.
A dear friend had a housekeeper who stole a thousand dollars in cash. After meditating upon forgiveness and the woman’s real identity, my friend gave her a set of
housekeys to use. Then she shed her former habits and became a student on the path.
A very tough man once tried hard as he could to destroy me. Years later, a happy holy fool came by my business for advice. As we talked, we recognized each other. We hugged, and he told how he’d been injured and lost his job. Just as his disasters remolded the tough guy, I saw how his old attacks all had carried me further, too.
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If it is a spiritual solution, it will bless everyone involved.
Through prayer we can find such arrangements, revealing sacred accord unfolding.
For this is a world of concordance, God’s agreement with Itself.
No one is blessed unless everyone is blessed. So does miraculous healing function, and too, when we arrange a situation through our outward efforts after meditating, we can see to it that all parties are indeed satisfied, for a way is prepared. We can rest easy in the truth that it is better that others are blessed first, for our blessing is already here.
This is the balancing pole for walking the razor’s edge of Love in action.
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When I fall down and am crying, my good mother rushes to hold me very closely.
So do I run forward with all my heart to embrace any suffering being. No fear, no judgment, of them, of me. God As me surges forth, since it enters wherever welcomed.
Mother Teresa says, love the poor. Remember, we are all of us the poor. God too is poor. The Beyond Form has no shape, no weight, no time, no space, It has only absolute Love and It gives everything It has.
As light waves ray out from the sun, so we shoot out from our brilliant center, carrying holy Love to the world.
Our inner Self knows the sadness of our human self, knows that nothing can mar our being, and bathes us all in those compassionate tears.
We begin deep underwater, not even knowing which way is up, performing the awful rescue work of the skin divers. Decades without relief, running out of oxygen. We end up exhausted, drifting limp as jellyfish, yet our bodies are light and bear us skywards. After we break the surface, we start to breathe the air and we swim so much more easily.
To the human sense of awareness, well done, faithful servant. Amphibiously shedding our wetsuits, we are born, much more individual, alive, energetic, three dimensional and directed, and at the same time impersonal, porous, universal.
Now at every corner lamp post, we come together with everyone in the world, our oceanic partners, knowing each so much the more intimately and tenderly from every past act of compassion, of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of recognition. The great sabbath, our joyful reunion, a weekend dance.