FORGIVE BEFORE YOU SEE ERROR
A number of years ago, I read these words in Gary R. Renard’s The Disappearance of the Universe: Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness. It’s a book that touches upon many teachings from A Course in Miracles. I haven’t read A Course in Miracles yet, but I have read lots about it, and I have to say, this is one of the most powerful insights or kizukis that has altered my understanding of the world.
What do you think it means, to forgive before you see error?
For me, the first thing that came to mind is the parent-child relationship.
As a parent, it is common that you start loving a child long before you have any idea who he/she is. Even before birth. It just doesn’t matter. It’s like there is no prerequisite to love. It’s like, you love because you love to love. And that’s all you need. You’re just bursting at the seams for more and more opportunities to love.
The child is born, you give him/her a name, and love him/her some more. They can poop, cry, scream, pull your hair, and make you really, really tired. None of it matters. You go on loving them. Helplessly, like water flows downstream, loving comes naturally to you. It’s as though all the pooping and screaming is just to show you that you’re STILL capable of loving. Yup, you’re THAT GOOD.
Then they grow up a little. They might get bad grades, or get in trouble. Or fight with you, talk back at you, disrespect you from time to time . . . sometimes it hurts. And you know it hurts precisely because you love them so much. But at the end of the day, always, you go on loving them. As if to show yourself, you’re THAT BIG.
That’s not always the case, I know. But very often it is. In the bigger scheme of things, we’re all headed in that direction.
Whatever your child does, says, wears, lives, chooses, YOU are happier to love them than to not love them. Sometimes you frown, sometimes you cringe, sometimes you revel in pride; but always, you feel so good when you are loving them. The way the sun bathes plants and flowers in its light, you let your loving gaze fall upon your children, allowing them to flourish in their own might, in their own life.
Maybe . . . I am thinking, it’s something like that; to forgive before you see error.
Another way to put it is, to be ready to love him/her no matter what they may do.
That sheds a lot of light upon our regular day-to-day mindset, where we have already drawn boundaries around “What is right and what is wrong,” and “What is forgivable and what is not.”
Today I am feeling like that is all so old paradigm.
It’s a little scary at first, for all of us who have relied on the old paradigm understanding of things for so long, to shake up those very boundaries that we have lived by.
But I’m just saying . . .
What if . . .
What if we decided first, “I can forgive anything . . .” before things even happen in our life?
Or, alternatively, if that feels like too much of a leap, let’s begin by saying, “I am ready to spread the boundaries of my OK-zone a bit,” or “I am willing and wanting to become more and more of a forgiving person.”
And isn’t that enough, to change things up in the way that we are seeing and being in this world?
Because,
To say, “Forgive before you see error,” or,
To say, “I am ready and wanting to love more and more,”
signifies the departure from that limiting point of view that assigns prerequisites to love, to forgiveness. Within which, I might add, you are bound to find yourself feeling confined. Feeling very small and limited. Which really isn’t comfortable for you.
We can ALL benefit from such a departure.
I can personally promise you, it most definitely FEELS better to live that way.
More than a self-dignified sense of right and wrong, I choose to free myself.
To encounter my more expansive sense of self.
To let my gaze fall upon the world and others, not for some habituated purpose of judging them, nor even for classifying right from wrong, forgivable from unforgiveable; but to point that finger of attention to the state of being of the observer instead—that is on me.
And the power in saying,
I am not the judge of that.
Since I am not the judge of that, then, who am I?
I am a loving person. A loving person in the becoming.
I am a forgiving person. A forgiving person in the becoming.
I am an expansive person. There’s always going to be more.
I am an evolving person. It’s only going to get better.