Understanding and Forgiveness

An old French proverb suggests that "To understand all is to forgive all."

In a time when circumstances affecting us seem to be nothing but bad news (worrisome, distressing, depressing, demoralizing...add your own adjectives), it is natural to feel anger, frustration, confusion, and many more emotions that are indescribable because language often fails our feelings. This much I know: I don't feel like forgiving people who have, through their avarice, selfishness, sense of entitlement, lack of compassion, cynicism, ignorance, and mean-spiritedness, hurt others in ways that are unable to be catalogued and unable to be known unless one walks in that person's shoes and experiences that person's fear, for all things take their nourishment from either fear or love. Think of any situation that is in the current news, and it will be hard to find the humility and openness to forgive these kinds of sins. Anger and fantasized revenge seem more appropriate, or we can choose to believe that God invented Karma so she wouldn't have to keep track of every little thing.

Sometimes, anger is a good self-protector, and unforgiveness is a necessary state of being (for a while). It is hard to live in a nearly constant state of fear, anger, irritability, and restlessness, however. It is at the times when we have reached a saturation point that we cast about for ways to restore peace or homeostasis inside ourselves. We seek a way of viewing the world, of reacting to the world and all that's in it (externally and internally), that will give us comfort and ease our minds. That is when instruments of change, such as the remembrance of an old French proverb, often appear to us. If we are both lucky and intentional, these reminders may compel us to think about (meditate on) their meaning in our lives and how we can use them to get closer to our goal of inner peace.

What if we endeavored to understand all? Unless we are God, we cannot possibly understand all. We don't have the capacity to do that, but what if we endeavored to understand, to look past the apparent behavior, the superficial impression? What if we used the compassion that is available to us to try to understand, or even imagine, what is going on inside another person, the one we judge as the sinner, the criminal, the loser, the hopeless moron? Might our efforts to try to understand, even though we can never completely understand, at least get us to a nonjudgmental point of view? Might it get us to a place of forgiveness? And is forgiveness a way to achieve wholeness, a way to diminish the psychoemotional distance between God and self? Between self and other?

Some of us do believe that we are all one, that there is no difference between us, that what we do as individuals affects the whole of the universe. But the world's sentient creatures do not seem to act as though what one does affects everyone else. From childhood on, we are taught to be separate, to be the "rugged individualist," to stand out and apart from the crowd, to compete with one another for market share, to achieve and be the envy of the unachieving masses, to reach our great and lonely potential. Under the umbrella of "love," competitiveness, self-interest, and contrived apartness often fuel our relationships. What will it be like when there is no distance or distinction at all between our separate, tiny selves?

Michael Chabon's book entitled "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" contains this passage: "But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. [Note: Chuppah is a Hebrew word for 'canopy,' under which those about to be married stand.] Between the commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall "the world." Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light."

Evelyn Waugh, in his masterpiece of literature entitled "Brideshead Revisited," said: "To know and love one other person is the source of all wisdom."