About wisdom and Forgivness...

There are so many good reasons to settle into an unforgiving mood. For a start, most of the bad things we see are so far removed from anything we could ever contemplate doing, it feels like there is simply no point attempting to understand or to empathise with the wrongdoers. We shake our heads and wonder how some people get to be the way they are. We use words like weirdo and pervert. The conclusion is that these people must just be ‘bad’ and that it is a delusion of the liberal mind to insist on anything more complex.

The path to forgiveness always begins in the same place: with the recognition of one’s own sinful nature. Certainly one may never have done this or that truly dreadful thing upon which one’s sense of outrage currently rests. But, so the forgiving attitude insists, one has done something, indeed many things that are on a continuum with, or in some ways related to, the horrors one is currently condemning with force.

With life experiences, we learn to be more realistic about other people, to recognise the extraordinary pressures everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their interests and seek their own pleasures.

It can make others appear extremely ‘mean’ and purposefully evil, but this would be to over-personalise the issue.

The most hurt is not intentional and that it’s a by-product of the constant collision of blind competing egos in a world of scarce resources.

The wise are therefore slow to anger and judge. They don’t leap to the worst conclusions about what is going on in the minds of others. They will be readier to forgive from a proper sense of how difficult every life is: harbouring as it does so many frustrated ambitions, disappointments and longings. The wise appreciate the pressures people are under.

Of course they shouted, of course they were rude, naturally they want to overtake on the inside lane…

The wise are generous to the reasons for which people might not be nice. They feel less persecuted by the aggression and meanness of others, because they have a sense of where it comes from: a place of hurt.