Stone Songlines

Years ago, when I'd been doing Tarot readings for a while, I did a reading with a woman in which we covered the issueof mutual forgiveness involving a relative.  She listened in silence and then, as she got up to leave, said: "Thank you, anyway", a sure sign that the idea of forgiveness was for her, at least in the immediate future, a dead duck. Lluckily I had enough readings under my belt by then not to get disheartened.  A friend also told me recently that a shop owner she knew had glass stones with words engraved in them like "love", "faith", charity, and so on.  All these walked out the door, but the ones with "forgiveness" on them stayed put.

So I'm adding on a bit more here about forgiveness because in my experience this is one of the biggest challenges for us - to let go of past wrongs, to forgive the person (which does not mean approval of what they've done, by the way) and to cleanse ourselves of any bitterness or anger from the past.

A lack of forgiveness, to me, does not affect the person we need to forgive.  It affects ourselves deeply.  It prevents us from moving forward in our lives free of the burden of anger about the past. And I think many people misunderstand forgiveness.  It does not mean that we say what a person has done to us is okay.  It means we can acknowledge that harm was done to us but that now we need to let that person go to their own lives, while we cleanse ourselves of the burden of being unable to forgive.  The only person dragged down by an inability to forgive is ourself. 

But also another myth is that we ca nforgive overnight and perhaps that's why people are reluctant to takeon board the idea of forgiveness becaue of misconceptions.  I don't think in most cases it's possible nor desirable to forgive in one shot at it.  Forgiveness should not be a mechanical act where we really haven't forgiven deep within.  It needs to be an ongoing process to which we return with dignity and grace, to tell ourselves we have forgiven, until that point when we can look within ourselves, take a deep breath and feel so much lighter because now we know thatf orgiveness has happened. 

It is an act of grace for ourselves and, with any luck, it's an act of grace for the person to whom forgiveness is being extended.  Not that we can ask for repentance as a return for forgiveness.  If we do get repentance, that's the icing on the cake.  But forgiveness is not a quid pro quo - it's an unconditional act which opens us up to greater things in our heart than were previously possible when the weight of an inability to forgive acts like a crushing stone on  our heart. The process of forgiving my father for the wrongs I've perceived has been long and painful.  I think my series of paintings have brought forward the blessing of forgiveness and letting go and now, synchronistically, my father has turned up in spirit to ask for an act of forgiveness which I can now willingly, gladly and lovingly extend to him, from my heart to his.