The Rainbow and the Covenant

Whilst stirring my oatmeal in the morning I usually read my current Patrick O’Brian novel. Having just completed the series again, I was reading instead 1001 Pearls of Bible Wisdom by Malcolm Day. Regular readers know I have no qualms about posting religious insight along with the philosophical, be it from the Bible or the Talmud or the Koran. I was reading the section about forgiveness and reconciliation. 
All my life, I have always had a hard time understanding how Jesus could ‘die for our sins’. Why should God forgive us because Jesus died on the cross? I understood that Jesus asked God to ‘forgive them for they know not what they do’ but why should He? And it was always strange to me that, for such a central concept, I had not come across any explanations, no elaboration about why this should be.

Well, at 53, stirring my porridge one morning, I finally understood why.

The Rainbow and the Covenant

After the flood that destroyed all living things, except those taken into Noah’ ark, God made a covenant, or pledge, with humanity never to devastate the Earth again. As a reminder of his promise he placed a rainbow in the sky: ‘I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant…” (Genesis 9:13).  The covenant was fulfilled in the Passion of Christ. Jesus straddles the divide between human wrongdoing and God’s judgment and, through the Crucifixion, enables God to be reconciled with sinful humanity. People no longer need to endure God’s wrath – their sins are forgiven.

And following this introduction we read …

… in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them … 2 Corinthians 5:19

In Jesus God took on the form and condition of a man, open to fear, weakness and pain. Yet Jesus could ask God to forgive his persecutors while on the cross. Thus God could see that there was some good in man, despite his sins. Thus he was reconciled and the covenant fulfilled.

I am reminded of that quote we saw in Into Great Silence:

Behold I am become human. If you should not want to join me in becoming God, you would do me wrong.

Image by Brian Parton

Integrity

All my life I have been very sensitive of the concept of fairness. I think I have stated before in my posts on anger that I have a very revengeful nature. Certainly if I am wronged or treated unjustly I have a hard time dealing with my anger for that person. I will remember a wrong for years. I will cut out any person who has wronged me; I will ignore them from that time onwards. (I have a long way to go on the spiritual path of forgiveness).

However, if I have deserved a criticism, if I have acted badly, if I have wronged first, that is an entirely different matter. I may grumble, mostly in anger at myself, but I am not infused with the same anger or revenge for that person. Fair is fair.

People who lie, who bear false witness, are the lowest of the low in my eyes. I can’t abide dishonesty and falsehood. Some of you reading this who know me may know what (and who) I am talking about. Anyway, this weekend I had occasion to think about integrity and the malice of those who don’t have any. I looked up some quotes. The following ones are most in tune with my own thoughts at this moment. I will no doubt write more about integrity or the lack thereof in the future. I think it is an important subject.

O, what a tangled web we weave; When first we practice to deceive!  Sir Walter Scott

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. Thomas Jefferson

There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious. Francis Bacon

If you have integrity, nothing else matters.  If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.  Alan Simpson

He who indulges in falsehood will find the paths of paradise shut to him. Abu Bakir

It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance. Thomas Paine

If a man does not resent slight injustices, he will soon be called upon to face giant wrongs. Taoist tradition

'Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.  Thomas Fuller

Take care that no one hates you justly.  Publilius Syrus

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.  Jean-Baptiste Molière

Update: if we believe the author of this quote, then it would seem God agrees with me:

All malice has injustice at it`s end, an end achieved by violence or by fraud; while both are sins that earn the hate of heaven, since fraud belongs exclusively to man, God hates it more and, therefore, far below, the fraudulent are placed and suffer most. Dante Alighieri

To understand all is to forgive all

When you lose in love, things are very confusing. The joke about being the last to know is based on truth. We see what we want to see, we ignore the rest. We project our feelings of love onto our beloved and we believe that they are experiencing the same thing. Of course they are not. We don’t see the end coming. And when it hits us we are not ready. When it hit me I had to understand.
I pulled out my agenda and reconstructed the play: Act 1, Act 2 and the devastating Act 3. I had to understand what happened and how it happened. In hindsight I revisited the conversations, the scenes and the places and I had to admit to myself that the signs were there, I just refused to see them. Eventually, I understood pretty much what happened and this allowed me to gain a modicum of peace of mind.
Anger remained and remains still a little, if I give it any thought, in my heart if not in my head. Strange how love can turn to anger. Over time, with the help of the philosophy of Anthony de Mello and others, I understood more. Until one day I read this quote from Spinoza.

To understand all is to forgive all.

This was a powerful insight for me. I saw that the only reason I still harboured anger and hatred was because of my incomplete understanding. I saw that even if I did not have the power to understand all yet, still forgiveness would be correct. I should not deprive myself of peace of mind and the liberation of forgiveness because of my incomplete understanding.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Because when you understand you can accept, and you can forgive. Marcus Aurelius helped me further along this path of understanding:

Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself:
What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.

That I would lose my love was plain for others to see. I blinded myself to the possibilities. If I had been able to keep my wits about me as Marcus Aurelius suggests, I would have understood the situation as it was happening. As it was, I had to understand in hindsight, whilst sorting through my negative emotions.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. Anthony de Mello

My love was compelled to act in the way she did. I was compelled to act in the way I did. That’s life.

To understand is to transform what is. Krishnamurti

How to forgive

To err is human, to forgive divine. So goes the saying. Why divine? It is divine because it is hard to do, almost impossible where our emotions run high. When we are angry with someone, when we hate someone who has done us harm, we would have to be angels to forgive him (or her).
In my experience, I think this has to do with a sense of injustice. We judge the person, we condemn him, and we want him to pay for what he has done. The only trouble with this approach is that the only person suffering here is ourselves.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Mathew 7:1-2

To hate, judge and condemn the other person we must first fill ourselves with hate, anger and negative energy. Our thoughts are creative and by harbouring them we bring about, we manifest the negative situations we condemn in the other. From 'The Power of your Subconscious Mind' by Dr Joseph Murphy:

This means that in applying standards and criteria to others, you create those standards and criteria in your subconscious, which then applies them to you. Once you know this law and understand the way your subconscious mind works, you will always be careful to think, feel, and act right toward others, for in doing so you are creating a situation of right action, feeling, and thought toward yourself.

In other words it is in your own best interest to forgive. You forgive for yourself. You forgive in order to let go of the negative energy that is poisoning your subconscious and your life. Anyone who has genuinely forgiven knows the liberating feeling that comes with it.
When you forgive, you are not saying that what that person did to you was right. You are not agreeing with that person’s actions. You are simply letting go of the negative emotions you feel for that person, for your own good.
To let go of those negative emotions we must replace them with other positive emotions. Whenever we think of that person, we must replace any hateful emotion by a positive thought. Dr. Murphy suggests this affirmation:

I fully and freely forgive (the name of the offender). I release him (her) mentally and spiritually. I completely forgive everything connected with the matter in question. I am free and he (she) is free. It is a marvellous feeling.

Another major obstacle to our ability to forgive, I have found, is our inability to understand the other person and what has happened. How could that person do such a thing? Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher, offers us this advice (from 'The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius' translated by George Long):

Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself:
What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.

When we understand ‘where a person is coming from’ we will have more appropriate ‘expectations’ and we will be better disposed to be tolerant. This is another way of saying, to understand all is to forgive all. And if we are able to understand all, it will be easier for us to forgive.
But we should not wait to understand all before forgiving. This reminds me of the Buddha's parable:

It is as if a man is hit by a poison arrow. His friends hasten to the doctor. The latter is about to draw the arrow out of the wound. The wounded man however cries: `Stop, I will not have the arrow drawn out until I know who shot it. Whether a warrior or a Brahmin, or belonging to the agricultural or menial castes... his name and to which family he belonged...'

Such a man would be a fool not to have the arrow pulled out immediately in order to save his life.
Similarly, it is more important for us to forgive now to get the poison out of our system, than to wait until we understand the situation more completely.
Even if we cannot always ‘understand all’, we can understand that if we could understand all, we would forgive all. Therefore, we will not go far wrong by forgiving now, ‘on faith’.
God always understands all and he always forgives all. If we do the same, wouldn't that be divine?

Forgiveness quotations

Do not think about whatever service you may have done for others; think about what you may have done to offend them. Don’t forget what others have done for you, forget what others have done to offend you. Huanchu Daoren

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Ghandi

The stupid neither forgive nor forget, the naïve forgive and forget, the wise forgive but do not forget. Thomas Szazs

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. Oscar Wilde

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness. Josh Billings

When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive. Alan Paton

To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness. Robert Muller