Forgiveness

Remembering our parents. When we were young, we were unable to appreciate how devoted our parents were to our well-being and the many ways in which they devoted their time, energy, and resources to nurturing us. We now know how much they cared for us and helped prepare us for productive lives. However, appreciating their qualities does not require us to romanticize them. We all had to find our own paths in life and develop our own understandings of the world and our place in it, and that often led to conflicts with our parents. Moreover, we learned that our parents are human beings, with imperfections. As we remember our parents today and focus on their positive qualities, we may be able to forgive them their flaws. Some of us may feel that our parents harmed us, intentionally or unintentionally, and that we are not yet able to forgive them; we pray that our mentioning them here today will help bring us a measure of healing.

-Author Unknown

• People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
• If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
• If you are successful you will win some false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
• If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you. Be honest and frank anyway.
• What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight. Build anyway.
• If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
• The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow. Do good anyway.
• Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give the world the best you got anyway.
• You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

-Kent M. Keith, adapted by Mother Teresa

I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes. It is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, “Well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,” that’s all. So you say to yourself, “I’m sorry.”

If we all hold onto the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror. We can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell, we should never teach.

-Maya Angelou

You are not broken. Childhood suffering is not a mortal wound, and it did not irrevocably shape your destiny. You need not remove, destroy, or tear anything out of yourself in order to build something new. Your challenge is not to keep trying to repair what was damaged. Your practice instead is to reawaken what is already wise, strong, and whole within you. To cultivate those qualities of heart and spirit that are available to you in this very moment.

-Wayne Muller