Forgiveness
Maybe forgiveness isn’t something you give without looking back. I’ve always had the mentality that we must forgive and forget in order to move on. But I think I’ve come to the realization that one can forgive another without working through the pain, but then we’re stuck. We cease to grow altogether. It is possible that the person can be completely relinquished of all guilt, however, the forgiver is not allowing themselves to feel their pain, plumb the depths. Maybe forgiveness isn’t so much as something we arrive at but a journey that we set out on in hopes that we might become whole again. Thomas Merton wrote, “Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new”. Maybe in order to grow, we need to think but we also need to learn how to live in spontaneity and freedom. And maybe that means delving through the pain so we might live more freely without it.
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