Forgiveness is tough, probably one of the hardest things any of us is ever going to have to do. It is also so completely necessary and vital to our survival as a species. You heard me the first time! Without forgiveness, as a species, we could be well approaching our best before date. There are lessons to be learned, from history, and throughout the world. I will focus on just one, a very familiar, for some a tiresomely familiar theme: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It doesn't look like it's going to end.
Here is a refresher. Arabs had become in that region the dominant culture over the course of two thousand years, since the displacement of the Jews by the Ancient Romans at around 70 AD. European Jewry became the dominant strand of the Diaspora, and they were subjected to century after century of brutality and ruthless persecution by the so-called "Christian" host countries where they were living. Finally came the ultimate assault on the Jews of Europe, the Shoah, or Holocaust, where Hitler's thugs systematically murdered six million Jews in as many years, as well as millions of other people he did not happen to like much.
Jews had already been returning to Palestine since the nineteenth century, and already the foundations were being laid for the modern state of Israel. Meanwhile, there were already people there. Those people, in the millions were violently displaced by the colonizing Jews and have lived on their own land in refugee camps ever since. Under their very noses, they and their descendants have had to watch helplessly while the newly minted Israelis ploughed their houses, fields and villages to the ground in order to set up their own dear little nation-state.
Who wouldn't be pissed? Add to this mess, neither Muslim Arabs nor Jewish Israelis have a culture of forgiveness and reconciliation. To many it is a foreign concept. It is all tribalism, it is all vetting and clinging to ancient grudges, maintaining and defending their honour, no matter how many heads get blown off, heads usually belonging to innocent bystanders.
Agreed, this is an oversimplification, and I might appear to be taking sides, even if I am not, but that is what happens when you pit against each other two cultures of grudge holding and blood feuds. Neither am I going to presume, in this post, to solve the problems of this conflict. It is here only as an example, Gentle Reader, nothing else.
Throughout history and all over the world are innumerable examples of this. Nothing gets healed. Nothing gets restored, and people go on dying. And now that our weapons of mass destruction have become, well, weapons of mass destruction, so the ante is raised and the stakes now are higher than ever. We cannot afford to continue in this kind of direction.
It has long been my belief that change on the macro level only occurs once it is well underway on the micro level. We cannot expect cultures, tribes or races or nations to reconcile without reconciliation and forgiveness really occurring between individuals. In fact, I will even say that every time we forgive, truly and really forgive others, we are also helping to heal these much wider, more festering, and gaping wounds in our common humanity.
I am not offering here an easy solution. But forgiveness alone is going to bring healing to our suffering, wounded, and broken humanity, and forgiveness comes only out of love. If we do not feel the love, and usually we are not going to be feeling the love, then we have to will the love into existence, by at least giving our consent to forgiving, and to reconciling. This requires hard work and excruciating self-examination, and we have to be ready for this.
To live in a better world, we first need to become better people. If you are really serious about becoming a better person, as I am serious about becoming a better person, then here is our challenge. Think of one person, just one single person, who has hurt you, who has left a scar, who has traumatized you. Even if you were fired from your job, cheated, lost your spouse to that person, even if that person has defrauded you, has physically injured and disabled you, even if that person has raped you, completely ruined your life. now, close your eyes, and hold that person up to the Light. Don't try to forgive them, simply offer and release that person to the light, and let that same light set you free from the outrage and the injury, and that light will fill you, and will begin to heal and restore you. Every time that person comes to your mind, no matter how painful, see that person being lifted into the light, repeat and keep repeating, even if it takes weeks, months, even if it takes years, and you will be free. Not all at once, but you will be free.
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