The Role of Forgiveness in Evolution
Few of us will exit this world without having made some enemies, or at least pissing some people off from time to time. As humans, we may strive to be good, kind, uplifting people, but we are a multi-faceted human family with widely differing needs so we won’t please everyone, and we all make mistakes.
If we view others’ mistakes as reason to wish them suffering, then we are lost. Working toward fairness and justice in our institutions and cultural practices is best done from a heart free of the need to punish. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” In a nutshell, that’s why an Agent of Evolution actively practices forgiveness. In order for the story to continue, forgiveness must be present. Hardening our hearts ends the story.
So we have a decision to make – do we want the story to continue? If so, may life grant us the strength to forgive. Even preemptively. All the seemingly unforgivable things this world can dish up. Through others, and through ourselves.
We know forgiveness is possible because many great beings before us have hewn a path of forgiveness for us to walk.
In their combined effort, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu van Furth spell it out like this:
…there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one undeserving of forgiveness. …. in South Africa there would have been no future without forgiveness. Our rage and our quest for revenge would have been our destruction. This is as true for us individually as it is for us globally.
Forgiveness takes heart muscle strength.
We gain strength to forgive others in direct proportion with how fully we forgive ourselves. Knowing ourselves like this helps us know everyone else.
The father-daughter Tutu team explains:
We are able to forgive because we are able to recognize our shared humanity. We are able to recognize that we are all fragile, vulnerable, flawed human beings capable of thoughtlessness and cruelty. We also recognize that no one is born evil and that we are all more than the worst thing we have done in our lives. A human life is a great mixture of goodness, beauty, cruelty, heartbreak, indifference, love, and so much more. We want to divide the good from the bad, the saints from the sinners, but we cannot. All of us share the core qualities of our human nature, and so sometimes we are generous and sometimes selfish. Sometimes we are thoughtful and other times thoughtless, sometimes we are kind and sometimes cruel. This is not a belief. This is a fact.
(emphasis mine)
During a time when all the hurts of the world, the deepest hurts of our collective heart are placing themselves squarely in the path before us, we would be well served to adopt the awareness the Tutus point to. From this place we are naturally moved toward reparations that bring wellness to the whole.
We can start small. Before looking at who is right and wrong and where guilt and blame should be assigned, before humbly facing the need for reparations, before even attempting to change our ways, we can cultivate a forgiving heart.
Inspiration for this writing taken from the “Daily Meditations” newsletter by Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation.