Self-Forgiveness As A Form Of Therapy
As someone with a rather moralistic way of thinking, I have found focusing on love, despite faults and flaws to be liberating. It is hard to be so gracious when you are the one getting hurt, or when actions hit your sore spots or threaten to overturn your carefully ordered life. The truth is that my reality will never be perfect, but the goal will always be to evolve to Elysium. I expect many tumbles and falls, and I pray for the grace to be forgiving of myself. Moralistic people are often their own worst critics, sometimes, we judge ourselves harsher than God judges us. In so doing, we cage ourselves with bars of unworthiness.
One great paradox of Christianity is in the rising to life of Creation in the death of the Creator. Another is in the cleansing of the soul from all sin, yet the vulnerability of the saved man to sin. “Shall we now continue to abide in sin that grace may abound,” is a statement worth pondering. The moralistic man often holds it dear, upholds it as a call to be perfect, and that anything less than perfection, any smudge of unworthiness must be crushed. Treated with tearing of clothes, donning of sackcloths and rolling in the sea of penitence and sorrow. Where the moralistic man falters is often in the length or extent of his penitence. How much repentance is enough? And how can I be truly sorry when I sinned with full knowledge of its wrongness.
Isn’t it taking advantage of the benevolence of the Maker to ask for forgiveness for a sin committed in full knowledge? Especially an act that will most likely be done again? Logical at first, but what man can take advantage of his Maker? If the fullness of all that is good and wise about man comes from Her, then isn’t it arrogance to think that you can outsmart Wisdom? You can delve into the idea of lesser sins and greater sins, but to the moralistic man, all sin is sin, its wages remains death and the resounding gavel of his self-sentencing is often his condemnation. So, what can he do? How can he be free of the prison he has built?
Herein comes love, the enigma that is the lifeforce of existence. Theist or atheist, you cannot deny the power of love, love in its purest form cannot be put into neat little but inadequate boxes like eros and agape. This is the love that is found in the ferocity of a thunderstorm and the docility of a blooming flower. Love is anti-fragile, undefined and untethered by creed or race. Love breaks the chains of the moralistic man. It says, ‘My grace is sufficient for you,’ when the conscience of the self-righteous seeks to condemn him. It also says, ‘Accept your weaknesses, be made humble by your failings, pick up your cross as many times as it falls.
Focus not on the hardness of your heart or your proclivity for sin, look not at the spectacle your cross makes every time it falls’. It can be embarrassing, to stumble at so great a height. To falter on a large stage, to be disgraced from pedestals you worked so hard to reach. Sometimes, the stage is in your head, and the pedestal is the way you esteem yourself. How wise you think you are, how open-minded you pride yourself on being. Or simply how good you believe you are.
It is okay to fall. It is okay to realise that you are not as strong, kind, loving or generous as you thought. Whatever you do, when your mistakes send you clattering to the floor, and the resounding silence of your embarrassment rings loud, take a deep breath. Wallow a while if you must, then stand up and keep going.
Also, pour upon your person and soul, a copious amount of forgiveness. Forgiveness has a way of gently transforming you from within. Softening the hard edges, and rounding your protruding corners. The work of forgiveness is often silent and can go unnoticed, but it is potent and indeed redeeming. Forgiving yourself is not copping out, or making excuses for your weaknesses. Rather, it is removing the weights that hold you down from becoming that person you are aiming to be. No one is perfect. No one. Unforgiveness, just like grudges burdens our souls and hearts, and it restricts us in ways we often fail to recognize until we let go. What does it cost you to forgive?
Remember, Elysium is not for the faint of heart.
