Paul Please note: Due to the large amount of email Paul receives and the limitations of his physical condition he can no longer respond to all email. But please keep sending — he reads them all.
Unhappiness about being unhappy is a tremendous source of human suffering. It magnifies suffering of every kind. It can turn potentially small and transitory discomforts into torments and can make major pain unbearable. It can even refract and distort light from odd angles, so that we are unhappy not about unhappiness but about lacking things that we only imagine would make us happy.
A note to regular readers/commenters: If lately I seem slower than usual visiting your blogs/replying to comments, I am – my condition’s progressive and it’s cutting into my time online. I appreciate your patience and the fact that you keep on reading/commenting. ___________
We find that we exist; we don’t choose existence.
This is to say that we are not the primary source of either the good or the evil that comes from us.
Therefore: No one is blameworthy – or praiseworthy?
Therefore: All praise – and blame – belongs to God?
Therefore: Praise and blame are problematic concepts?
How can any of us possibly be in a position to judge being for being being?
A baby’s born – a unique set of genetic predispositions enters a unique environment. Even identical twins growing up with the same parents don’t end up becoming identical persons. The complex paths of their experiences over time, even within the same family, are nowhere near identical, and result in the creation of two unique human beings despite their similarities. In infancy, a person’s potential is vast.
Now, picture Adolf Hitler as an infant. Yes, I know – it’s hard to get around the moustache. Yet surely it wasn’t congenital…
And surely that baby only could have developed into the Adolf Hitler the world has come to know and hate under the specific familial, social and historical circumstances in which he found himself.
Or picture a William Wordsworth or Robert Frost born one or two centuries from now, when the likelihood of finding woods to stop by on a snowy evening will be remote. Someone with the potential to become a great nature poet can’t become one after we’ve decimated our environment to the point where people lack access to relatively unspoiled nature.
Isn’t every one of us a kind of crystallization-in-context – something that develops when a certain set of genetic predispositions enters a specific and highly complex set of circumstances?
We need to make moral discriminations about human conduct as harmful or helpful, good or bad. But who are we to judge the very being of another – or ourselves – as either “good” or “evil?” And not because good and bad don’t exist; moral discrimination concerning human actions and failures to act, and on a global scale, is arguably needed more urgently today than ever.
But because when you look around for someone’s essential self to judge – where’d it go??
Thanks for your thoughts about forgiveness last post. Here are a few additional ideas that impress me:
Martin Luther’s Attitude Adjustment
Forgiveness is not an occasional art, it is a permanent attitude.
I found this online attributed to ML. It calls to mind the Buddhist concept of compassion and the Christian concept of agape or universal love. It also places forgiveness in the larger context of overall spiritual development.
St. Paul and the Beatles: “All You Need Is Love”
Love… does not take offense. –from I Corinthians 13
There would be nothing to forgive if we didn’t react to others with bitterness and resentment when personally wronged. “But how could a person not react that way?” anyone might ask. That’s because living from beyond our egoism is often an unfamiliar idea. Although I think that every one of us has at least had intimations of it, “picking up our cross and following” – or walking the walk – is often emphasized much less than worshipping the person of Jesus Christ for having walked the walk. But the New Testament doesn’t present “Love one another and love God” as things that Jesus alone must do.
Forgiving Debt – and Letting your Accountant Go…
Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors comes from the prayer, so familiar to Christians, that Jesus teaches his disciples in the New Testament.
I like the debt analogy for the impact on our inner lives of another’s wrongdoing. When a monetary debt is forgiven, it’s really forgiven – gone. If the creditor decides to let it go, then there’s nothing left. Not a cent.
One way that a creditor might forgive a debt would be to notice that the other person never owed him anything to begin with.
Certainly if people are owed anything by other people, it’s hard to tell. Children, the elderly and the disabled are routinely neglected and abused. Warfare creates mass refugees living and often dying in miserable conditions. Every day large numbers of people die from preventable illnesses and starvation. Innocent people languish in secret detention centers for years, sometimes committing suicide.
Where are the debtors of all these folks? What is the meaning of a “debt” that can’t be collected – of being “owed” when there’s no enforceable law requiring payment of debt?
Maybe you and I aren’t exceptions. Maybe we’re not “owed” anything any more than the millions of folks around the world who don’t get what they deserve. Maybe our indignation and resentment when it’s us who happen to be wronged are profoundly unrealistic.
The preceding posts and comments suggest that forgiveness is a process and often a major struggle, but one that’s worthwhile. If we can let go of resenting someone who has wronged us, then our freedom from bitterness enhances our own quality of life and can only improve our ability to relate to others. So how do we do it?
The kind and degree of wrongdoing, whether we were close to the wrongdoer prior to the harm done, where we happen to be in our present circumstances and overall view of life – such variables assure that a “one size fits all” approach to forgiveness won’t work.
Your Practical Thoughts
What are some things you’ve told yourself that have helped you let go of resentment and bitterness? Your thoughts may be useful to someone else.
Conversely, what are some things you’ve told yourself to help hang onto bitterness and resentment? How has hanging onto it help you – or hasn’t it? If it has, can you identify how it's helped?
Forgiveness is something that people can struggle with for years, decades or even a lifetime. Recent posts have included looking at factors that can affect how hard we find it to forgive – for example, whether the harm was serious and lasting or whether the person is someone with whom we continue to interact.
Psychologically, perhaps what makes forgiveness so hard is that if we have something to forgive, then someone’s gotten the better of us. If someone has in fact managed to hurt or wrong us, then the other guy’s “won.” And the more certain we are in our judgment that this individual should have known better or in fact did know exactly what he or she was doing, then the more we experience the matter as a full frontal assault with victory by their ego over ours.
We feel like striking back – and at least as hard. There’s nothing like serious one-upmanship to fuel our own ego reactions. ___________
Thought for Today . . .
Few of us possess an encyclopedic knowledge of anything; yet each of us may have a Wikipedic knowledge of everything!
Religion, Spirituality, God, Faith, Interfaith – & Wikipedia
Forgive Me, but I Don’t Feel Like Thinking Today
And so I just wanted to mention that if anyone hasn’t noticed by now that the words “religion,” “spirituality,” “God,” “faith” and “interfaith” are crammed into as many post titles as I can manage, it’s because I don’t know what I’m doing, but somebody else does. That is, my webmeister tells me she’s optimized my whatever for these words – my search engines? Browser? Cache? Cachet? Tricorder? Anyway, I’m told that for technical reasons, it’s a good idea for me to use those words in blog post titles, and so I do.
Like most semi-bedridden guys trying to launch a book, I want to do what I can to help people who might be interested in my topic locate this site. But those particular words for titles are becoming so much mental mush. Some days I have to wonder if I can come up with another bunch. I feel out to lunch - or sometimes, in my darkest hours, like I’m alone on the decks of the Titlanic.
Normally, I like doing titles; but who likes the feeling of having his titles constrained? It would be so titillating to title more expansively. As it is, I feel that my titles have become merely titular – and just at a time when, owing, perhaps, to my condition, I desire to impregnate them more than ever with warmth, creativity, verve, vernacular, joie de vivre, double entendre, je ne sais quoi. Or at least a greater variety of vocabulary words, perhaps French.
But no such scintillating titles for me; I’m on a diet – not entitled. It feels like a diet of worms. Diet of Worms?? What was “The Diet of Worms?” I should know that, even if it does sound bad... let’s see… click… type… enter… oh, yeah - thanks, Wikipedia.
But I digress . . .
Thought for Today
Thanks to Wikipedia, the many free associations still rattling around in our heads from college have become the seeds of Knowledge.
Yes! Those long years of multiple choice tests were worth it after all... Wire mesh monkey! Stanley Milgram! Tricorder!
Up Next, Back to Seriousness – What makes forgiveness so hard?
