The Age of Miracles (7 page)

That is the miracle of forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t just about being
nice
—it’s about being spiritually intelligent. We can have a grievance or we can have a miracle, but we cannot have both. We can build a case against someone, or we can be happy. Any justification I come up with for an attack on another person is just my ego’s ploy to keep
me
in pain.

A concept it has taken me years to embrace fully is that I am 100 percent responsible for my own life. 100 percent responsible doesn’t mean 34 percent responsible, and it doesn’t mean 96 percent responsible. Unless you’re willing to accept that you’re
100
percent responsible for your own experience, then you can’t call forth your best life.

Some people nurse grievances that go back 20 years. At a certain point, however, it becomes harder to blame all your problems on what someone did to you that long ago. No matter what they did, the real culprit is the one who’s let 20 years pass without getting over it.

Some awful things might have happened to you during the years leading up to this moment, but
you
are still responsible for how you choose to interpret them. And how you interpret your past determines whether it will uplift you or emotionally sink you. Yes, there may have been some people who viciously wronged you. I understand that. But it serves you to realize any of the ways you might have made it easy for them to do it. Yes, there may be aspects of your life that are lacking, joyless, chaotic, and disappointing. But it is your responsibility to own every dark corner of your life and transform it.

I’m not saying forgiveness is easy; I’m simply saying it’s imperative.

My friend Gina went through a terrible divorce, giving her plenty of opportunity to choose between forgiveness and blame. After 11 years of what she had thought was a good marriage—what anyone who’d ever seen them together assumed was a great marriage—her husband wanted out. I’ve never seen a relationship that was all one person’s issues, so I’m making no judgment here on either person’s behavior. But I can say from having walked alongside her that her path was the path of forgiveness … and it paid off. Did she go through a year of hell? Yes, she did. But her consistent efforts to bless and forgive her ex-husband—a man whom she refused to cast out of her heart, although he seemed to have cast her out of his—was not only inspiring to witness, but demonstrative of the way that forgiveness works miracles. She continued to lay claim to the love between them, regardless of the fact that the form of the relationship was being torn apart. She was hurt, but not bitter. She continued to have faith. He could leave the marriage, but she would not give up on the love between them. And within 18 months, they’d swung full circle. They were no longer married, but the friendship survived.

That was important for Gina, not just so she could be at peace with her past marriage but so she could be at peace with any man she met afterward. If bitterness in our past is brought into the present, it then sabotages our future. Even in the midst of her divorce, my daughter and I would joke that Gina was a man magnet. And we could understand why. Allowing herself to feel her pain without defending against it, she grew suppler instead of tougher. She didn’t harden at the loss of love, the way some people do. I watched her mature, but I never saw her harden. And love kept rushing in.

You can live the rest of your life reacting to and replaying what went before, but that won’t serve you or deliver you to the shining place. And everyone you meet will subconsciously know how you’ve responded to your past. They will know whether you’re stuck there or better for having been there. “Forgive and forget” is not mere platitude. Many say, “Yes, I do forgive, but I will never forget.” Beware that sentiment, for it leaves you subtly in the thrall of suffering. Do forget what was done to you; just remember the lessons you learned from it. Drop the cross. Embrace the sky.

Dear God,

Please teach me

how to forgive.

Show me the innocence in others,

and the innocence in myself.

I surrender to You

my judgmental thoughts.

May see beyond them

to the gentle peace

that only forgiveness brings.

Amen

T
HE FEAR-BASED EGO GATHERS EVIDENCE AT EVERY TURN
, making forgiveness hard. The ego is obsessed with two big cases: one against everybody else, and one against you.

Sometimes the face at the center of your bull’seye doesn’t belong to anyone else. Yours is the name on the docket of the case you feel compelled to prosecute—you, for your past errors; you, for your past stupidity; you, for your past immaturity; you, for your past irresponsibility; you, for just being you.

Prosecutorial witnesses are everywhere, and the courtroom is in your head. The ego is not on a search for justice but for guilt, for that is what it feeds on. Its case against you is not just based on the notion that you did something wrong, but that in some fundamental way you
are
wrong. That’s a hard rap to beat. Who could ever sleep well if convinced that everything about them is just
wrong?

You feel you’ve blown it on so many levels, in so many ways, and on some nights for whatever reason it all comes back so clearly.
… What a lovely life, having 20-year-old bad memories shooting through your brain like bazookas from hell—which, in a way, they are. And you have nowhere to put them except in that big fat file called “All the Ways I Screwed Up.” How can you feel that there’s goodness ahead when you feel that in the past you have been so bad? How can you have much hope for the future when your take on the past is so relentlessly vicious? And how can you really defend yourself against a ruthless prosecutor who is an aspect of yourself?

You know the religious image of “burning in hell forever”? Well, now you know what it means: anxiety and guilt and self-hatred without end. It wasn’t God who sent you there, but rather the enemy in your own mind. The ego, the fear-based self, the shadow—whatever name you choose to call it—is on active patrol to burn down your peace of mind.

The reason for faith that you can and will escape those flames is that God guarantees your fundamental innocence. He created you innocent, and what He creates is changeless and indestructible. Have you made mistakes? Who hasn’t? But God’s will is to correct our mistakes, not punish us for them. We are punished
by
our sins, not for them. It’s the ego that both sets us up to do the wrong thing and then punishes us savagely for having done so.

An all-merciful God has already dismissed every case against you before the ego has a chance to mount it. Your mistakes, no matter how bad you might think they were, did not emanate from your self as He created you. That’s why remembering who you truly are is the key to deliverance from the flames of self-condemnation.

You’re no better or worse than anyone else. No matter how much you might regret your past, there’s someone out there who regrets his or hers more. The path to happiness is not determined by whether or not we made mistakes in the past. What paves the way to happiness is whether or not we turn our mistakes into catalysts for personal growth and illumination.

Think of everything you’ve ever been through, and try to reinterpret it gently. All the love you ever gave was real. All the love anyone ever gave you was real. Everything else was simply an illusion, no matter how bitter or cruel it might have been in your experience.

I’m not going to insult you by saying, “Just forgive yourself.” God forgives you, because He never saw you as anything but innocent. Your mistakes did not change the ultimate truth about you or alter the permanent nature of God’s universe. Your ego is not that powerful. Truly atone for your errors, make amends where possible, and you’ll be free to begin again.

According to
A Course in Miracles,
in the moments when you were not your best self—when you didn’t stand up as the most loving you could be—then all the good you deflected is being held in trust for you until you’re ready to receive it. God will return to you the years that the locusts have eaten. And the past as you know it shall be no more.

Wherever there was fear, love will ultimately prevail. Whether in response to your own mistakes or to the cruelty of the world, God will always have the final say. And His say will always be how very much that you are loved.

Dear God,

Please help me to forgive myself

for what I did and did not do.

Pour forth upon me

Your infinite mercy,

that my life might be redeemed.

Take away my shame, dear God,

and heal my broken heart.

Amen

W
HENEVER I FEEL AT THE EFFECT OF MY PAST
, I try to remember people whose experiences have been not only so much worse than mine but worse than any I could even imagine. And yet they rose above.

My friend Naomi is an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor. World War II began on her 19th birthday, as German troops crossed the Polish border on September 1, 1939. Living in Warsaw at the time, she went from enjoying the life of a young woman preparing to go to college in England to hiding from the Nazis with her mother, husband, brother, and sister-in-law. Her father had already been arrested by the Russians and sent to Siberia. In 1943, having survived the bombing of Warsaw, Naomi and the other members of her family were huddled into a cattle car for a horrendous trip that many didn’t survive, and taken to a concentration camp at Auschwitz.

She was at Auschwitz from the age of 22 to 24. My problems at that age? Romance, career, and the like. Hers? Adolf Hitler.

Naomi’s husband, mother, and sister-in-law all died at Auschwitz. Her mother died in a crematorium; then her sister-in-law, having told Naomi one morning that she simply would not go to work that day (“I cannot stand it,” she said. “I cannot live like this.”) disappeared and never returned. My friend and millions of others lived in Nazi concentration camps under conditions as horrifying as any forced on human beings by other human beings before or since.

Ultimately, Naomi survived the war. After emigrating to the United States in 1946, she married and was widowed a second time, leaving her with three young children to raise as a single mother. If anyone might have been given a pass, forgiven for just giving up, it would have been Naomi. Yet that simply isn’t who she was, or is. Her character is bigger than her circumstances. She raised her children beautifully, started an import-export company that eventually became phenomenally successful (at a time when not many women were doing that, by the way), and has lived through the years as an inspiration to countless who have known her—including myself.

In 2002, Naomi went back to Germany with her son. As their plane approached Berlin and she sat looking out the window at the land below, he asked how she was feeling. Her response, she said, surprised even her: “It’s very strange, but I feel good about this. I am here on my own terms. I am not being brought here by anybody. I am coming of my own free will.”

Visiting Wannsee—where in 1942 Hitler and his top aides made plans for “the final solution,” or complete extermination of the Jews—Naomi collapsed. Yet her reconciliation with her past continued. In 2003, she made an emotional journey back to Auschwitz. After having cried the entire way there, she had a strange experience once she arrived. Upon entering the gate with its famously ironic inscription, “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”), she felt herself becoming very, very strong. She didn’t feel the pain she’d expected. Rather, she said she felt a spirit of victory move through her as she realized: “Oh my goodness, I’ve come back—and I survived! I came here to perish, but I did not! He who wanted to destroy me was himself destroyed, but I survived. I am a survivor!” In that moment, she knew what it meant to
be
a survivor—not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually as well. And she was free.

“I felt I could build on my past,” she has said, “but I knew I could not live in it. In spite of the fact that I lived through the Holocaust, I have never dwelled on it.

“I went through something so terrible, but I like to think something good can come from it. I have so much more empathy. I like to think I’m a better person because of it.

“Hope is always in us. In spite of the fact that everything looks so bleak, there’s something in all of us that keeps thinking things are going to get better. I knew I had to look to the future. I had to always ask what I could do
now
to be more productive. I wanted to live for the future, for myself and for my children. And I did.”

Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself, I remember Naomi. I remember those in the Holocaust who did not survive. I remember those people who even today—in Somalia, Darfur, and elsewhere—are experiencing atrocities like she did. And in the gratitude I feel for the relatively extraordinary ease of my life so far, I am lifted to a place where I understand that my life—although it might not be consistent bliss—is still indeed worth thanking God for, every minute of every day. And I do.

If my friend Naomi could rebuild her life after what she went through, who among us doesn’t have in deep reserve the strength it might take to rebuild ours? We have a moral responsibility, not only to ourselves but to a rising tide of collective hope, to do everything in our power to rise up from whatever ashes might litter our past. Yesterday was yesterday, but yesterday is over. Today is today, and tomorrow awaits.

What happened to you yesterday might not have been wonderful or even under your control. But who you become because of it, or in spite of it, is completely up to you. I’ve known people who lived through a fraction of the trauma that Naomi lived through, yet stayed in the muck of their grievances and victimization for decades. What her story proves, like that of many others, is that we are not our past. It’s not what life threw at us that determines what our life will be now, so much as how much of ourselves we’re willing to throw into life.

If my friend Naomi could move on after Auschwitz, then who among us, for whatever reason, can claim we cannot move on?

Dear God,

Please take away from me

the pain of my past.

Remove the arrows

that have pierced my heart,

and heal my open wounds.

Amen