Forgiveness is not what I thought it was. I had been wondering why we seem so compelled to understand the true meaning of forgiveness. Is it perhaps because we sense that within forgiveness there is a mystery that holds the key to something we all yearn for? Peace. Peace of mind and heart. A silencing of those thought-forms rising and falling, twisting and turning, curating those objects in our ‘hurt museum’.

Forgiveness is more than I thought it was. If we should leave it up to the philosophers and spiritual teachers to tell us what forgiveness is, it will remain at best an uplifting thought, a mind meme. Each of us must grapple and tussle with it, resist its implications, succumb to them, and finally to embrace them with all our heart. Forgiveness is a path. Peace is where it leads. And on the way we have all kinds of wild adventures with demons and monsters and creatures from the deep.

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Is forgiveness no longer holding a grudge against someone who hurt us? No longer feeling triggered by them? No longer wishing vengeance if we (and they) had gone that far? Is it accepting what happened to us and releasing the grip of the past on our hearts? Is it all of these things, and more? At the very least, it seems to me, forgiveness involves the following five steps, which are less sequential steps than they are features:

1. Seeing forgiveness as something desirable, wanting to forgive.

2. Accepting that the negative event happened, however terrible, as an unchangeable event. Making peace with circumstance.

3. Ceasing to emotionally relieve the event and the injustice of it. Being able to think and talk about the event without becoming captured by negative emotions or thoughts of revenge.

4. A willingness to explore the possibility that you played a role in the event (if an adult).

5. Becoming able to separate the act (of harm) and the person – often described as separating the ‘sin from the sinner’.

Depending upon the severity of the harm, these 5 features can represent a lifetime of inner work. And yet, if we walk this path with sincerity, we discover that these 5 features lead us to more of a neutral position. A neutral place can feel like paradise after a sojourn in hell, but is not the catalyst for the transformation that true forgiveness can bestow. It is the wide path, where many fellows travel. When this path begins to narrow, becomes blocked by fallen trees and thorny underbrush and frequented by bandits and dangerous animals. Here, the spirits of loneliness and despair whisper to us to give up, to turn around, and true companionship is very hard to find. This is indeed “the road less travelled” in the words of M. Scott Peck.

The above 5 steps can be wonderful, edifying, noble indeed. They can provide us with a sense of freedom from the past that we never thought possible. But there is more, and when we are called further, something deep within our heart cannot help but respond, despite the challenges that lie ahead. One of the most helpful definitions of forgiveness for me has been that “forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past” (variously attributed). It took me years to unpack this and find the truth treasure buried within. How can the world go back to the way it was when this wrong has happened? I discovered, in trying and failing miserably to fully forgive someone, that it is not just that we need to let go of the hope of a better past, but to let go of the hope that the person who hurt us was better.

This putting of the world back together in a way that includes the injury and the perpetrator but is no longer defined or defiled by either, is vital but it is not the whole story. Anne Bronte wrote that “He who dares not grasp the thorns, should never crave the rose.” The peace earned from such a giving up hope for a better past, works to silence the demons, but it takes more than this to anoint the angelic. Those of us that crave the Rose of Forgiveness, have more thorns to grasp.

Even after these five steps, forgiveness remains immature, lacking full agency, not yet a proactive force that can act as a solvent on the tiniest speck of judgement or resentment at the instant it emerges. Imagine the following scenario: that the person you are struggling to forgive was a thief who had stolen money from you. And then, you find out, this same person has fallen into crippling debt. Scenario two: the person who stole money from you wins the lottery.

When we run these two scenarios – the person who harmed us falls upon hard times/the person who harmed us falls upon good times – and we genuinely explore our thoughts and feelings around them, we will discover things about forgiveness we had previously overlooked. For one thing although we may not consciously seek revenge, we feel validated when the Universe dishes it out. It is only human to do so. And here lies a key piece of forgiveness code. Our humanness. Because to forgive others more completely requires that we dig into the dark and grubby corners humanity where the satisfaction over another’s bad luck is just the tip of the iceberg. Forgiveness is more human than I thought.

We come to realize that we are poor judges and even poorer ministers of divine justice. When we come to understand just how poor, the conviction in a higher justice that rings out from eternal natural laws, grows naturally, the way that water fills whatever is fit to hold it. The source and design of these natural laws? Call it God. The Tao. The Universe. The Infinite. The Divine. Call it what you will.

If we simply step back and allow for that space that is consumed by our pain, resentment and righteous indignation, to be filled by the flow of unmanned activity of these natural laws, then we can rest in the knowledge that a higher justice will sort them out. Just as it is sorting us. Right at this very moment. Everything is coming to rights, even though it may not look at all like this and may very well look like the opposite.

When we cease to see ourselves as deliverers of Divine Justice, but more as resonant frequencies of natural law, the hard boundaries of our egos are softened. Forgiveness shifts from a neutral or neutral-positive to a positive-positive when we truly want the best for those who hurt us, and this ‘best’ must include an internal orientation towards goodness which cannot be achieved without some personal inventory. In this way, a feature of divine forgiveness is to sincerely desire salvation for the perpetrator. This does not at all imply condoning their bad actions. It simply means an aspiration for their meaningful reorientation towards the good, and a realignment with divine law so that they can realize their worth and responsibility.

And only when I came to understand something of the extent of the harms I myself caused others and made contact with that which includes me in the circle of forgiveness, that I was able to follow the pathway that calls me to forgive others to wherever it leads.

It is said that to err is human, but to forgive is divine. But forgiveness is more divine than I thought. We are stepping now into forgiveness beyond the mere mortal, into the particle-wave activity field of the immortal. We feel unworthy, we feel shame, we feel dirty, we feel lost, and yet the lonely call within the heart of our existence begins to be answered. Shyly, hesitatingly at first, and then with ever-increasing strength and power.

Making peace with the circumstance then making peace with the condition of the person. Resisting any temptation, however justified, to further resentment. Surrendering any idea of ourselves as instruments of justice while embracing a higher justice (call it karma if you like). Then allowing the love that replaces the hurt to penetrate it all, the conflict, the memory, the aching betrayal, the violation. This destroys the strongholds of the powers that hold us back from our higher selves with their water-tight arguments of earthly justice that keep us forever chained to what happened to us and never free to step into what can be. This is the deconstruction. Then there is the rebuilding. The reaching out in love, the revisioning of the pain giver as afflicted and the resulting compassion that protects any further hurt from occurring. The continuous rubbing out of the reforming egoic borderlines until the dissolution of any sense of being a ‘target’ is fully revealed by the failure of the next arrow to find a place to land.

Forgiveness is more mysterious than I thought. Forgiveness is not something we ‘do’ with our puny egos. Forgiveness is a force, a function of a higher order but it can only become so when we have emptied ourselves of that which restrains and cripples it. This is the forgiveness of Christ consciousness, which at first seems almost impossible to believe because it not only requires spiritual effort that seems beyond our capacity, it bestows spiritual boons beyond our present abilities to fully accept them. It is a story with many chapters, hinting at the Deep Magic immune to our childish negotiations and appeasements. And there are even more than I can express here, that hint at even greater mysteries, of quantum entanglement. I am certain that some of you know where the thorny path goes….

Forgiveness is a softening, a spaciousness, a new possibility. When we cease to try to ‘do’ forgiveness, but simply work to open our hearts, this is when it opens up before us, and we get to behold the ‘Rose we crave’, whose scent turns the stomachs of those pesky demons and sends them packing. The Rose of Forgiveness that blooms eternally in the hearts of those who dare to tread the thorny paths of Love.