Be Kind to One Another, Tenderhearted

And You Will Be Forgiven

I originally wrote this post¹ on my spiritual and supernatural experiences.

Yet it converged upon something far more important and what will now be the focus of this piece, my most important lesson of truth. Anyone who knows me or who takes a cursory glance over my posts on here will know the extent to which I express the utmost importance of recognizing and professing the truth. I genuinely believe it to be the most profound lesson that life can offer—the hardest and most painful and the noblest too. Yet the more life teaches me—and life teaches best through suffering—the more I discern the breadth of truth.

We first and might best learn how to tell the truth simply by not lying to ourselves. This already proves immensely difficult. It sometimes might be challenging if not beyond us to separate what we know from what we genuinely do not know, let alone what we believe from what we disbelieve, chosen or otherwise. We then might find ourselves able to tell the truth to ourselves after removing our willingness and want to lie to ourselves. We then can learn how to tell the truth to others but likely can only do this after helping them not lie to themselves too. We then might find ourselves able to explore and understand the world around us in the company of others who can see beyond the shrouds of the lies we tell ourselves and find ourselves told. What a precious gift, to be able to exist in the world and see our manacles melt from ourselves and the veils lifted. It would be like being borne into the world anew.

One element of truth remains that I believe to be the most important and perhaps the most difficult truth to arrive at with complete sincerity and commitment: forgiveness.

Anyone who has suffered the grief of betrayal knows this wound and to be asked to forgive it requires something which genuinely feels beyond the capacity of the logical, rational mind and beyond the warmth and compassion of the corners of the human heart. Dante placed the final and lowest circle of Hell as the place for the treacherous for a reason, Satan encased in ice, so far removed from the light and warmth of love and compassion, little bat wings fluttering in attempt to free itself only further fanning the cold and further sheathing itself within the frozen prison. We do this often to ourselves: the sin of pride.

I realized that we all must learn forgiveness too because to clasp our grief and to internalize it as part of our identity becomes the act of licking the wound and never allowing it to heal. The way toward healing means learning to tell the truth about it, teetering a narrow tight rope between an inclination to fall victim to a grief on one side or to romanticize and embellish it on the other: the rope of our lives being the only way forward with, as far as I can tell, the truth serving as our balancing pole and compassion and understanding and love awaiting us in our fullest and most actualized selves at the other end of the rope. That is life.

We therefore must be willing to confront our grief in such a way that it does not become a focal point of the narratives we tell ourselves for that seems to be to feed upon it, repeatedly returning to the poison which harmed us. It must be done in such a way that we do not wave it like a banner to gain the sympathy of others either, for then we revel in our misery and wrap it around ourselves like a pestilence-laden blanket that seems to shelter but actually only sickens us. It must be done in such a way that we do not find ourselves repeatedly chasing the spider that bit us in demand of a justification, for it likely does not even possess one and simply did what it happened to do in the moment: sometimes to feed, sometimes from fear. It does not matter: Let it go—or you may find yourself not only bitten but ensnared within a web of your own choosing.

Instead of clinging to the wound and the grief, cling to the opportunity toward compassion and understanding and love. To let free the wound creates a space for love to return inside the heart: The wound heals—scars and all—and allows the heart to fill again so that it may be offered once more to the world. Until we learn this, we carry our griefs like rotten treasures and render that instead to the world, gift wrapped in lies and ribboned with malintent.

We must choose: What gift do we want to create in our hearts and offer others?