Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
-- Rumi
Last month I woke up from a ghastly nightmare about two former friends, filled with anger and despair – flooded again with the same miserable emotions that had overwhelmed me throughout the end of both friendships…
I had a whole long section here originally detailing the loss of these friendships, and the overwhelming pain caused by the breakdown of another vitally important relationship as well, but I kept feeling troubled by what I had written. Perhaps it was that I am unable to write clearly or well about sorrow that is too close and immediate. Perhaps it was the sense that, as the West African proverb says, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.” (In other words, despite my repeated rereading of the messages at the heart of both stories, and my attempts to be fair in the retelling, none of the people I was writing about had a voice in the essay, and that felt strange to me.) Or perhaps it was just that it is hard to write ugly stories without sounding ugly, and I want this newsletter to be about Beauty, even when Beauty hurts. Whatever the reason, the telling of those stories unsettled me, and so I removed them. But I like the moral, so I’m sending this with a big chunk missing, and with the hope that you will substitute in any relevant situation(s) in your own lives, and find meaning in what I’ve written. But if not, please accept my apologies for the omission, and this excellent SNL skit as recompense.
…I am contemplating these losses because, in addition to the lingering, nightmare-brewing trauma of how and why these relationships ended, I have frequently pondered how to move on from the hurt they caused. And I have realized that I have to do a much better job in my life of distinguishing between forgiveness and letting go.
In the months before the pandemic, I was starting to set up my own mediation practice, and as part of my networking I met with the wonderful pastor of a local church. During our conversation, the topic of forgiveness came up, and the pastor shared that he really struggled with his church’s doctrine on that topic. He said that when he was counseling parishioners, sometimes he felt that forgiveness wasn’t appropriate; that what the person needed most was the ability to achieve peace and move on without offering the gift of forgiveness. What he said was the echo of many advice columns I have read (I am a bit of an advice column junkie), and that message has always resonated with me. Yes, forgiveness can bring peace, but not always, and we can still move on in healthy ways without concerning ourselves overmuch with the needs of the person/people who hurt us. Forgiveness can be transformative, in the right circumstances. But it is not always a prerequisite to healing, or even to being a good person in the world.
In the past months I have talked quite a lot to a number of friends who are going through separations and divorces that are truly ugly (unlike mine). And over and over I find myself preaching the gospel of letting go rather than forgiveness, of releasing anger and expectations and regret and resentment in favor of waking at ease and maintaining that peace until the moment of sleep each evening. It ain’t easy - far from it - and as my dreams and the stories I’ve told here show, I am still miles away from that goal myself, but I do find it so much easier to aim towards a horizon of letting go rather than the sometimes impossible frontier of forgiveness.
“Resentment,” a dear friend told me recently, “is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.” And that’s what I’ve felt too often when I have contemplated these hurtful experiences; I can sense the venom coursing through me, and somehow I cannot stop drinking from the contaminated cup. But I believe in that field, out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. I believe in it with my whole heart. I’ll meet you there.