Forgiveness

The most important thin I must five, but the most difficult, if forgiveness. I must forgive, always, again and again. As soon as I stop forgiving, I build a wall, and a wall is the beginning of prison. Above all, in life I've got to do two things: (a) understand and (b) forgive and forget. In the normal course of events, disagreements, frictions and tensions will develop. Only when a person understands that other people are different, and only when he is ready to forgive, is it possible to live together. Otherwise, there is a state of mutual siege and you live in a day-in, day-out, cold or hot water.

There are many exceptionally good opportunities for us to make peace, or to make up our quarrels. Once the first step, the most difficult, is taken, the rest is easy. Part of our unwillingness to forgive is due to our unreadiness to accept that we too have faults and failings like everyone else.

For various reasons - an inability to take failure, a need to be above criticism - we expect too much of ourselves and therefore too much of other people, too much of life altogether so that it kicks back in one disappointment after another. Every relationship, pleasure, ambition, job done, must have its core of discontent, must at some point fail us, because we are made to want something always just beyond us. What it is, God alone knows. All we know is that if we did not have this infinite want, we could settle for the here and now. In that case we would either love it and necessarily hate death, or else disapprove of it all. Both these attitudes would make it more difficult to forgive, less easy to grow into the wholeness, the holiness to which we are called. The art of forgiving becomes easier to master when we remember that "man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?"