Do You Have to Do Something Wrong To Be Forgiven?

...famous yoga blogger Brooks Hall wrote this lovely poem about forgiving the world, and I left a typically silly comment...

and the world forgives you, too...or, at least I do...or I would, if I was mad at you or you'd done anything I'd need to forgive you for...does a person have to do something wrong to be forgiven?

...then I thought hmmm...that might not be such a silly question...though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time acting silly led me to insight...

...I mean...forgiveness has been called divine...an incredible loving gift we give to one another... grace, itself...the very essence of love...representing the highest kind of interconnectedness between human beings...oneness...even, dare I say it, God...

...in that one long ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn’t and couldn’t last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
William Faulkner

...so...do I really need to piss somebody off to get me some?...

...of course, the question may be, ultimately, kind of academic, since, let’s face it, anybody who knows me well enough to love me has had to forgive me for all kindsa crap...

...and I’m grateful for that...

...so...for what it's worth...this blog sends out forgiveness to you who are reading it...regardless of whether you've done anything wrong...





*I also hereby forgive anybody who missed the irony in my latest Elephant article*

That Nelson Mandela Quote

...that Nelson Mandela quote in that last post had been sitting in my YogaforCynicsworking file for some time...that file’s kinda the womb of this blog....are you comfortable with me using that kind of metaphor?....I’m not...so I won’t do it again...anyway, I’d meant to bring it up when I had something more to say about the subject...without sounding preachy...

...there was something I wrote about a year and a half ago...just some personal writing...would never end up in a public forum...and that's a good thing...I charted a kind of emotional autobiography in the form of a kind of bar graph...yeah, I find strange ways to spend my time...a timeline at the top and then, along the side, seven levels of happiness and misery: 1) Nirvana 2) Life is good 3) Life’s okay, and I’m pretty optimistic about it getting better 4) Mid-line: life’s bearable 5) Life kinda sucks, but not too bad if I can keep myself entertained 6) Life sucks 7) Hell...

...the bar graph fell apart, and I started writing things out...like Seventh grade: big fat 7...and elaborated...writing out names, with four letter words as a kind of punctuation soon giving away to flat-out hatred and damnation...rage and hatred pouring onto the page...and it was rush...got me pretty wired, in fact...did a bit of yoga to try and mellow myself out...and then, unbidden, started thinking of other experiences...when I’d been nasty...cruel... inexcusably vicious...caring about nothing apart from making sure that whoever I was dealing with would feel as bad as I did...and I felt like shit...and then it occurred to me that if you don’t wanna hate yourself, you can’t hate anybody else either....that’s been recounted here before, but it seems worth mentioning again....

...another interesting realization was that my 20’s—in between spectacular backpacking trips...and other kinds of trips...were a pretty miserable time, while my boring studious 30’s weren’t bad...not so many good stories, but some good friends, mellow good times, and a lot fewer mornings mumbling fuck upon opening my eyes...which says something about spectacular experiences...they’re cool, but, ultimately, it’s the day to day life that counts...

...and that goes for hatred, as well....it’s way too easy to declare yourself an irredeemable asshole because, after so much yoga and meditation, you’ve failed to turn into a glowing floating being of pure love...on numerous occasions in the recent past yelling at friends and family, giving the finger to people on the street, fantasizing about doing horrible things to inexplicably popular talk radio personalities...not that I’ve done any of that stuff myself....

...the important question is: what’re ya gonna do now?

Flakes of Wrath

Contrary to what your more irritatingly blissed out yoga practitioners in their designer label “Live Simply and Let Others Simply Live” t-shirts say in between expensive spa treatments, there’s a lot to be pissed off about.

Sure, forgiveness is a good thing, one might even say divine. And, apparently, it’s good for one’s mental health:
Forgiveness is an act of letting go. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves....We do not release them from accountability by forgiving; we free ourselves from the burden of bitterness. Gordon Livingston, M.D.
Things get more complicated when you away from the personal, though. A long time ago, when I was an angry self-righteous young political activist, my Dad gave me a book by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. Hoffer said that people who want to change the world are simply trying to avoid changing themselves. I thought: if King, Gandhi, and Mandela did what they did to avoid working on themselves, we should all be grateful for that.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark to make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark; it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.
Bob Dylan

Here’s what’s pissing me off at the moment (as opposed to ten minutes from now, or ten minutes ago): Republicans. Cindy McCain said “In Arizona the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.” Phil Gramm says people should stop whining about the economy, since, presumably, nobody he knows is so strapped that the private plane is on the block. Karl Rove says Obama is just like that snooty guy “everybody” knows from the country club that, presumably, “everybody” is a member of. And yet, find a picture of a Democratic candidate wind surfing or admitting that he reads a book now and then, and an Andover graduate son of a president who used family connections to keep out of Vietnam only needs to clear some brush in front of a Fox News camera and mispronounce big words to be a man of the people. Of course, these are also the people who’ve taken on the mantle of “morality” to the point that when the word “values” appears in the mainstream media, we can assume it means “right wing fundamentalist Republican values” even as they’ve fucked the world with their ideology of avarice, bigotry, paranoia, and unbelievable greed (though, admittedly, what pisses me off almost as much is that democrats/progressives/liberals let them do it...since, y’know, we’re too postmodern to use that kind of terminology).

Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV, and you think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

On the other hand, King et al didn’t, as far as I know, spend a lot of time sitting around stewing in their own rage. I have friends who can barely sit still over a beer thanks to their visceral hatred of George W. Bush. I’ve also met incredibly privileged people who spend hours every day gritting their teeth with rage as Rush Limbaugh rants about the possibility that a few of their tax dollars might go to healthcare for people with nothing. I spend a ludicrous amount of time and energy coming up with angry political rants (see above), ending up emotionally drained and, thus, actually less likely to take any significant action about anything.

There’s a scene in the movie Gandhi, where Gandhi’s on a hunger strike to get the Hindus and Muslims to stop killing each other. A distraught man enters the room, throwing a hunk of food onto his blanket. “I’m already going to Hell,” he says (all dialogue is from memory), “I won’t have your death on my conscience, too.” When Gandhi asks why he’s going to Hell, the man recounts that, after the Muslims killed his family, he bashed a Muslim child’s head in. Gandhi says “there is a way that you can escape from hell. Find a child who’s lost his parents in the fighting. Take him with you and raise him as your own.” Then, after a pause: “One more thing: he must be a Muslim, and you must raise him as one.” The point of this is not that the guy needs to make some bizarre and, most likely, impossible penance to keep from going to Hell after death; it’s that he’s already in Hell because of his hatred for the Muslims for what they did and for himself for what he did because of that hatred. The only way out is to break the cycle.