On Forgiveness

By Hera Barrameda

 

I like randomly asking God questions. I was hugging my sleeping daughter in the bed one evening when I suddenly felt a pang of sadness hit me. Surprised, I whispered, “What do you have for me today, Sadness?” no voice answered, but right after I asked I saw all the faces of people who have hurt me looking me in the eye. Before I can even make sense of what I was doing I felt every pain I associated with each of those people.

Finding my breath again, I asked God, “Why did you have to bring all of these people and catalysts to my life?” And right after that, he answered, “So you can find your way back to Me.”

Amused thinking I was imagining things I tried to throw another question, “I can still remember all the hours spent forgiving these people, why did You have to remind me of them again?” Then I realized, had I truly forgiven I would not have felt the pain.

I decided to probe further and asked: “Why did you choose to reach out to me in the darkness when I’ve been here all along chasing your light?”

The answer came as swiftly as the question: “Isn’t it that you only seek for and feel My embrace when you are in the dark?”

While back then I would reduce these as products of my imagination. Nowadays, I would say answers are way too good to come from me and therefore of the divine.

I have always struggled with forgiveness. I can still remember all the times I (tried to) forgive my ex-husband, below are some of the examples:

A week after the falling out. I told God I will forgive him because that was the right thing to do. A week after that I would cuss nonstop at the slightest thought about him.

A year later he survived a chopper crash. So I took the liberty to take our daughter to see him and make him feel better. We agreed to be friends and I decided to forgive him. The following week he changed his mind about being friends, so I changed my mind about forgiving him too. We have all the time in the world, after all.

I chose the peaceful route and refrained legal proceedings as that will cause both of us more pain. That day, I said I will forgive him and was somehow proud of myself.

I can get spiritual too, having tried releasing all my anger and pain in a healing ritual by the beach. I thought, with the ocean’s limitless power to cleanse and purify, one can never go wrong. Felt good until I tagged him as a negative thought a month after.

As I said, these are just some of them. All these faces of self-righteousness are masked as the act of forgiving someone. When I thought I was coming home to God, I didn’t know I was only hovering around Him.

When I was little, I would always hear the church and my elders say, “Forgive your enemies, and love God above all.” As a child we have to say sorry when we did something wrong and as the offender will not be forgiven until we sincerely asked forgiveness. So there I was, holding that teaching close to my heart in the first twenty years of my life as if it was the highest law of the land.

I was raised to “only do good to others, so only good things will come back to me.” Given that, a core shattering devastation occurs when somebody does something wrong to me. By the time I was twenty years old, I had a list of people who haven’t asked for my forgiveness. A separate list was kept for those who did me wrong when I was so good to them. Back then I thought they are to bear a more difficult sentence.

Because of two words that were left unsaid, I played the victim and legitimized their role as my oppressor. “Better the victim than the criminal,” I thought. Little did I know, I was drowning in my pride. I brought that long line of oppressors and pain upon myself, because, as the victim, I allowed them to energetically have power over me. If we keep on acting like sheep, we will keep on attracting wolves.

Shortly after that, I read that a higher form of forgiveness is one that is given to a person who did not ask for it. When you forgive only after an apology, you look down on the other by taking on the self-righteous stance of being morally higher than the one being forgiven. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and therefore equally responsible to take accountability over our choices. While playing the role of the victim made me feel good about myself, it stopped me from taking responsibility and atoning for my own shortcomings.

It wasn’t until the waves of anger kept on re-surfacing that I felt I was doing it wrong.

My years of search ultimately led me to self-forgiveness. While forgiveness is a deliberate intention to surrender resentment and anger towards another, forgiving oneself is work that is often swept under the rug and most difficult to face. It would be pretentious of me to say I have fully figured it out. A week ago, my guest in the show “Tea Time Tita” said the last person she forgave was herself. It was a lesson I share with her, having realized how there is no room for blame, shame, and guilt, and only room for loving, honoring, and accepting ourselves.

“Isn’t it that you only seek and feel my embrace when you are in the dark?”

God was right, although I have been very faithful to Him, I have only loved half of Him when I only chased Him in the light. For God is in us, in everyone, and everything – even in the darkness. All those years I searched for the light, God sent people to “hurt” me for the sole purpose of telling me that to be in total union with Him is to see Him in the eyes of my enemy.

People say the future looks bleak with all the things the world is experiencing right now. I say the future looks bleak in the eyes of those who can’t forgive because the world in the eyes of God is a world where everything is beautiful because everything has been forgiven.