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July-September, 2005

Retroactive Forgiveness

by Rev. Myron Jones, O.M.C.

Forgiveness is my purpose in life. It is what I do. Anytime I feel anything less than joy about whatever circumstances pop up, I know that I have before me another chance to forgive. It is through forgiveness that I am healed. If I have held onto a grievance, then that grievance has had time to play itself out through my body, and so when I forgive, I give my body a chance to heal. Holding a grievance affects my mind. It holds me prisoner to raging emotions- anger, fear, built, vengeance, despair. Forgiveness frees me an dallows me to experience joy again.

Retroactive forgiveness is the idea that we can forgive today what has happened in the past and so be free of its effects. I have wasted a lot of time on regrets. I am sorry for things I have said and done in the past. I am burdened with grudges I hold against people for things they have done in the past. I want to clean up all of this detritus.

I have been keeping these grievances imprisoned in the dark cellar of my mind, bringing them up from time to time to reexamine; to revel in righteous anger, or to wallow awhile in guilty regrets. Now I am ready to “clean up my act,” as folks say.

Even the oldest unforgiving thought still affects my life, and so I want to be free of it. There is a most powerful passage from A Course in Miracles: The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love. (T.26.IX.6.1)

Forgiveness will dot his for me. It will free my mind. It will create in my life the holiest of spots. Forgiveness works just as well on past regrets as it does on what is happening in my life today. It is never too late to forgive. It doesn’t matter how ancient the grievance. Nor does it matter at all how big or how small the unforgiveness. Each is just as destructive to my peace of mind. If I hold a grudge because my ex-husband said an unkind word to me, I have lost my peace. If I am angry because I think that someone has ruined my life, I have lost my peace. Either way, I have lost my peace.

To start the forgiveness process I must first understand what true forgiveness is. Most commonly we look at forgiveness as a mercy we bestow on someone who doesn’t deserve it. We say to ourselves that this person did something wrong, they don’t deserve my forgiveness because they truly wronged me, but I am a big person so I will go ahead and forgive them. It feels like I am sacrificing my own best interests so that this person can be forgiven.

For example, about 30 years ago I worked for a doctor. He was a real horror to work for and eventually he just got to be too much. He was angry at me for quitting and held it against me.

While I did not like working for him, I did love working in a doctor’s office. I loved helping people, and I was good at it. When I applied for a similar job in another city, the doctor gave me a bad reference. I had done such a good job fo rhim, and even after I quit, I came back on my own time and helped his new employee learn her job. I did not deserve the reference he gave me. Because of the bad reference, I did not get the job I applied for, and never tried for another job with a doctor.

Conventional wisdom holds that to forgive him fo rhte bad reference would mean that I first I recognize that he wronged me, and then I decide that, being the better person, I will let him of the hook for what he did. What happened is that I found I was not that good of a person. I resented what he said. He embarrassed me. He also kept me from a kind of job that I would have enjoyed and been good at. Every time I thought about him, I would feel a surge of anger. From time to time, I would bring out this old grievance so I could experience my righteous anger all over again. It sounds funny to say that I got something out of this and that I somehow enjoyed my anger, but I must have because I kept doing it. For thirty years!

Whatever little satisfactions I get from replaying in my mind my little drama with the doctor does not come without a cost. I can have my grievance, or I can have peace. I cannot have both. We tell ourselves that we can compartmentalize our anger but this isn’t true. Anger at anything is going to spill over onto you. You say something to me and I snap at you. Later we are both left wondering what happened.

I have chosen for peace often enough now that I want peace all the time. I really miss my peace when I choose against it, so I want to truly forgive the doctor. I am no longer willing to give him my peace in exchange for anger no mater how righteous I think it is. Can I forgive him at this late date, I wondered? I doubt he is even alive now. But here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter when I forgive. It doesn’t matter if he is in his body to accept my forgiveness. Let’s face it; he isn’t interested in my forgiveness.

I am not forgiving him because he needs my forgiveness. In fact he lived on blissfully unaware that I harbored a grudge against him. In truth, it is only I that am prisoner to my grievances. Do I believe that he walked around burdened with this heavy guilt about how he wronged me? It is only I who struggle through life under the burden of my perceived grievances. I am not choosing forgiveness for his sake, but only for myself.

There are some things in life that seem so hard to forgive when we look at forgiveness in the way I just described. Well, no problem is so big that it can’t be solved by a good miracle, and what is more miraculous than a change of mind?

So, how do I change my mind? Before I pull anything up from the dark places in my mind to really look at it, I ask the Holy Spirit to look with me. The Holy Spirit brings light to my mind and that light shines away the darkness. If I try to look on my own, I only see what I remembered storing there. Nothing changes. I see his error, and my anger. I didn’t get vengeance in the moment and so I seek for it in my imagination. This is all I see. With the light the Holy Spirit brings, I am able to see this differently.

Here is what the Holy Spirit showed me when we looked together. He showed me that the doctor didn’t really hurt me. He spoke some words. They were not true. That really happened, and it would be silly and ineffective to try to say it didn’t. But what he said is not what caused me pain. It is how I felt about what he said that was the problem.

There was something in his owrds that brought up for me a feeling of unworthiness. There was a part of me that believed I was guilty, if not of this, then of something. I didn’t want to feel guilty and unworthy, and I didn’t want to look at those feelings, so I projected them onto the doctor. There, now he is the guilty one. He is to blame for this bad feeling in me.

The problem is, as long as I think he is responsible for my feelings, I have given him all the control. He can keep me feeling bad about myself for 30 years. Forgiveness shows me that he is not guilty. He is not to blame for my feelings. Through the process of forgiveness, I am able to take complete responsibility for my feelings.

I also thought that the doctor robbed me of my future. I wanted to be part of a healing palce and his bad reference kept me from doing this. The Holy Spirit also toldme that I wound up exactly where I need to be. I thought that the doctor prevented me from experiencing my destiny, but the Holy Spirit said that he put me on the road to my destiny, and that I owed him only thanks as I owe only thanks to all my brothers, without exception.

Through the process of forgiveness, I am able to give the belief system that supports unworthiness to the Holy Spirit for correction. Through the process of forgiveness, I am healed. I did not do the healing myself. All healing is of God. My part was to be willing to accept the gift of healing, and forgiveness was the way I did it. I traded my righteous anger for the peace of God. It was a good deal. I don’t miss that drama at all.

True forgiveness happens as I become willing to see this differently. I become willing to see that I chose to feel anger at his words and actions. I accept full responsibility for my own feelings and I stop trying to make them someone else’s fault. The process of forgiveness forgives not the person or his actions, but rather it sees that it is only my perception of what happened that needs to be changed.

In the old way of perceiving forgivness, I was making what the doctor did real, and then was trying to forgive it. It didn’t work. Through the miracle of true forgiveness, I recognize that he didn’t do anything to me, and I am forgiving the thought that he did by seeing the situation differently.

Forgiveness is all inclusive. In order to experience the peace of God, I forgive everyone for whatever I thought they did to me. I make no exceptions. That is its beauty, I don’t have to take each instance and decide which is deserving of forgivenss. I don’t have to figure anything out. I love the absolutes, the “nevers” and the “always.” They take the guess work out of it. I already know that I want to forgive, whatever the circumstances. I only need to bring God into the process and it is done.

So what I have learened about forgiveness is this: 1. Forgiveness is retroactive. It doesn’t matter how old the perceived wrong, it can be forgiven in the present moment.

2. Forgiveness is the way to peace. It is all inclusive and no one or thing gets left out. There is no place in my life where I will say everything else gets forgiven, but this one grievance I am holding onto.

3. Forgiveness is not about anyone else. It is about changing my own mind with the recognition that I alone am responsible for my feelings. I am always free to change my mind about how I feel about my grievances. I am always willing, with the Holy Spirit’s help, to see this differently.

4. And most important of all, I am not alone in this process. I give to it my willingness, and God does the rest. When I fail to accept forgiveness and have to repeat the process, I forgive myself and just get on with it. I do the process as often as I must in order to fully accept forgiveness.

5. And finally, as forgiveness becomes my goal, and the way I live, I live in peace.

© 2005, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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