“As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.” Luke 7:38
Forgiveness and redemption touch the soul in ways that no other form of love can. When I look beyond the ways in which someone might cause me pain, moving towards them with fierce love instead of pushing them away, my heart opens so wide and throbbing, the whole of me falls in, and I am lost in it.
The most deeply moving story I know is a scene in Les Miserables. I have probably watched it more than a hundred times, and yet I cry each time. It is the very pinnacle of what hands over my human heart to God. The escaped convict, Jean Val Jean, finds his way to the house of a bishop. The bishop takes him in, feeds him, and allows him to stay the night. In the middle of the night, Jean Val Jean steals the precious silverware in the house. Yet by morning the police capture him and bring him to the bishop with the intention of returning him to prison. The bishop opens his heart and tells the police that the silver was a gift. He goes even further and offers him his silver candlesticks. Jean Val Jean’s life is forever changed:
In the movie, Peaceful Warrior, three thieves rob Dan, the main character, and his Zen mentor, Socrates, at gunpoint. As they turn to leave, Socrates calls out, “You forgot our watches!” By the end of the scene, Dan and Socrates are walking out of the alley in their underwear.
These stories capture an ineffably beautiful and divine movement of the heart that only we imperfect humans can experience.
Guilt, in contrast, is crushing. When the suffering of remorse is unallayed by faith in the possibility of forgiveness or the possibility of being whole again, the heart implodes into an image of fundamental brokenness, and the will to live disappears.
In the movie, Seven Pounds, Ben Thomas suffers terrible guilt. “In seven days, God created the world,” he says. “And in seven seconds, I shattered mine.” He devotes himself to rectifying his grave mistake, but as in all journeys of redemption, he discovers love. The movie is both gut wrenching and inspiring.
There is something very remarkable about this movie. I will not spoil it for you, but if you watch it, notice the judgments you pass on Ben Thomas during the first portion of the movie (especially this scene). Then, when you reach the end, you will discover something about his journey. Really, watch it through to the end! Notice how all of your judgments must radically change, how even actions that seemed clearly reprehensible are cast in an entirely new light. You will want to watch it through again. It will change the way you judge people. There is endless love and wisdom in withholding judgment.
In Les Miserables, the bishop allowed Jean Val Jean to perceive his own fundamental innocence. This liberated him from fear and guilt and enabled him to devote his life to love. In constrast, when someone has difficulty offering forgiveness, or when they have difficulty recognizing another’s intrinsic wholeness, guilt and shame are more difficult to heal.
Learn to deflect the stones. Have faith in your own fundamental innocence. Even in the midst of deep remorse and a desire to make things right, you can recognize, through your grief, the divine purity of the love in your heart. When Jesus forgave the woman who washed his feet with her tears, he said, “Your faith has saved you.”
In relationships, especially meaningful ones, it is hard to know what actions are most loving. When I do things that cause pain, guilt wells up inside me, but not everything that breaks can be repaired.
This is the beauty of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a deep opening to the endless suffering someone feels over their mistake, knowing it can never be undone, and a longing to erase the mistake in your heart, to let it be repaired within. And forgiveness is a deep opening to the knowledge that people can be unkind for any reason, and maybe they will never think twice about it, but they are still precious and divine in their essence, and all those the unkindness will pass away in time. In fact, every unkindness will be sown into the cultivation of love and wisdom that we are all experiencing. Like the scene in Seven Pounds, at the end of the story, everything is cast in a new light. And the end of the story is now.
On Thursday, realizing the power of my own writing to shape my reality, I pulled out a pen with the intention of writing “I AM A SUCCESSFUL BOOK AUTHOR” on a slip of paper, but I couldn’t find any paper in my car, so I pulled up my skirt and wrote it on my thigh. So later, when I was experiencing guilt, I ran to my bedroom and, with great intention and prayer, wrote another phrase on my other thigh: “COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FORGIVEN.” Moments later, I realized that my jaunt out into the street earlier that afternoon had left my feet sooty, so I ran to the bathroom, and there I found myself, washing my own feet.
You can do no wrong. This is not something you learn intellectually. Rather, you feel it in your bones. You learn it with your body.
What does it mean to be completely forgiven? It involves an element of what Tibetan Buddhists call “crazy wisdom.” It means that even your wrongs are woven into the fabric of our fundamental innocence. Even your mistakes and flaws are woven into the fabric of our fundamental wholeness. This applies not only to those who cause harm, but to those who pass judgment and cannot forgive.
In the past, whenever someone passed judgment on me during a time of suffering, I would take their perspective of me and immediately make it my own. I would look at myself through their eyes and see a broken self. The situation, as I understood it, was that some objective observer was recognizing faultiness in me. I would feel shame, self-disgust, sadness, and helplessness. I would want to leave their company. I would want to either fix myself or, if that was impossible, rid the earth of me. I would never question their opinion, and even if I thought they were incorrect, that seemed irrelevant. If someone sees brokenness, they see brokenness, which means that I am effectively broken, for all intents and purposes (especially interpersonal ones), and the only task is to ensure that I do not appear broken. For that reason, there were many occassions in which my self-esteem was quite high and yet I still felt crushed by someone’s perception of faultiness in me. The onus, I felt, was all on me.
Speaking of which, am I the only person who thinks it is ironic that a “feeling of defectiveness” is something psychotherapists find wrong with people? If the feeling of defectiveness stems from your encounters with psychotherapy, there is only one healthy response. Phththt!
Now, I find it much easier to see that the judgments of others are often just reflections of their own inner journey.
Discovering your intrinsic, unconditional innocence is a major shift, one that is very necessary for the awakening of consciousness to what is. This shift has been happening for me in explosive spurts, powerful, overwhelming inner energy convulsions, one after another for months, each one clearing out lifetimes of suffering and debris. Each convulsion has been so earthshaking and physically permeating, I fall on the floor laughing until I’m covered in tears, all my muscles hurt, and I have to hold my mouth closed. It is a very physical experience. It is my energy body literally shape shifting. Afterwards, I am different. This can actually happen. You can become someone new, someone unencumbered by suffering, and when it happens, you will see that it was never you to begin with.
When someone perceives you as irrevocably wrong or broken, rather than struggling to alter their perception, simply step back and accept their path. Even their perception of your wrongness is not wrong. Nothing is wrong! When you sense your own flawlessness, you stop seeing flaws in everyone else. Divine innocence is your very nature. Forgiveness is eternal.
Highly Recommended Reading
In Defiance of Gravity, by Tom Robbins
Read this, and you will understand why I chose the black marble. Meow.
Wisdom of the Rebels: An Interview with Tom Robbins, Shambhala Sun Magazine
Excerpt:
“Crazy wisdom is a philosophical worldview that recommends swimming against the tide, cheerfully seizing the short end of the stick, embracing insecurity, honoring paradox, courting the unexpected, celebrating the unfamiliar, shunning each and every orthodoxy, volunteering for those tasks nobody else wants or dares to do, and perhaps above all else, breaking taboos in order to destroy their power. It’s the wisdom of those who turn the tables on despair by lampooning it, and who neither seek authority nor submit to it. What’s the point of all this? To enlarge the soul, light up the brain, and liberate the spirit. Crazy wisdom is both transformative and transcendent.”
Luke 7:36-50
[36] Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. [37] When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, [38] and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
[39] When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is — that she is a sinner.”
[40] Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me, teacher,” he said.
[41] “Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. [42] Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
[43] Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
[44] Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. [45] You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. [46] You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. [47] Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven — for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”
[48] Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
[49] The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
[50] Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
