Forgiveness
It's not about letting go; it's about expansion
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruiting an identity that can put its arm not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow, and through a kind of psychological virtuosity extend our understanding to one who first delivered it.”
- David Whyte, “Forgiveness”
I read David Whyte’s “Forgiveness” in his beautiful collection, Consolations, a few years ago. I appreciated the artistry of his words and how poetically he was able to weave together his ideas. But it wasn’t until very recently that I moved beyond simply intellectually understanding what he was conveying, and began to take it to heart, feel it, and live it.
A few weeks ago, I had the experience of forgiving someone whom I never thought I could forgive. It wasn’t some kind of dramatic moment that you’d see in film or television; there was no obvious or external resolution; no utterance of the words “I forgive you,” because, despite me forgiving them, they never did—nor do they now— admit or even understand that they did anything wrong. Some might take issue with forgiveness even being possible if the the transgressor cannot, or will not, ever be cognizant of the transgression. Some might say, what’s the point of forgiveness if the person doesn’t acknowledge they did anything wrong in the first place?
But there came a point when I finally accepted that this person would never understand or acknowledge the impact of their actions and the hurt that it caused. My moment of liberation came when I understood that forgiveness isn’t contingent on another. Beyond the initial wounding, the awareness, acknowledgment, or even presence of the other is not required for forgiveness to arise.
For years, even after unsuccessfully confronting this person, I desperately held onto the belief that forgiveness could only happen if the other person acknowledged what they had done, witnessed my pain, and sought out forgiveness. But I finally understood that forgiveness was my responsibility. It was up to me to grant or withhold it. Waiting for the other person to say “I’m sorry” was like asking a knife to apologize for being sharp, or asking a spider to apologize for trapping an insect in its web: both do what is in their nature to do.
Humans aren’t knives or spiders, I know. Some believe that humans have free will; but regardless of our stance on free will, we do have the ability to recognize ourselves and our actions in the world. How we recognize those actions (and their consequences), and how we attribute those actions, are not based on facts as much as they are on the stories we tell ourselves to justify those actions. Whether we act out of a perceived good, to balance a perceived slight, or to follow the directives of a real or imagined divine force, we create a narrative to contextualize our actions.
For years I was creating a story-within-a-story. There was the story that framed the originary wound, but then there was the story of how forgiveness was contingent upon a certain acknowledgement: a magic sequence of words that would somehow make up for what had been inflicted, and what had been taken. I believed that there needed to be a specific type of recognition on their part before there could be any kind or reckoning.
As that outer story unravelled, I faced the inner story that it was protecting.
That story — the narrative of myself that had been built around this wound — had become too small to hold what I have become since. It had become too restrictive of the spaces in which I wanted to reside, and of the things I wanted to achieve. I had forgotten what was the very first act of our embodied will that all of us learn. It is the very first time the mind and body come together to overcome the tyranny of our reflexes; the very first things we literally put our minds toward: to release the reflexive grip and let go. Infants reflexively grasp, but only learn to let go. Once we master that skill, we then can choose what we will grasp or hold next, and how long we wish to hold it.
The moment that I remembered that I could let go was the moment when expansion happened: it’s when I finally grew beyond the boundaries of the originary wound itself; just on the outer frontier of that scar — where the numbness of the scar tissue gives way to sensation. That’s where I chose to expand.
“To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity; we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.”
- David Whyte, “Forgiveness”
The expansiveness of forgiveness is something that encompasses both the healing and the ability to let go, the ability to live in the past, present, and future all at once1, and the capacity to understand that the person who wounded us in the first place is, in one way or another, perpetually living within the limitations that they’ve imposed upon themselves by their own actions — limitations that we often cannot or will not ever be able to see. With that in mind, we need to remember that forgiveness does not excuse the behavior itself.
Furthermore, forgiveness is not a “rising above” a given wound or hurt; it is instead an “expanding beyond” the hurt — making ourselves bigger than the wound and bigger than the person who wounded us. Like a tree exposed to fire, a charred ring will always remain buried under each new layer our expansiveness adds. Additionally, rising above is a misnomer because it makes us think that the pain is left behind, rather than thinking of it being incorporated within us.
When we physically heal, we’re not necessarily regrowing the affected limb or organ. Skin and bone mend but still with internal and external scars. And even in the extreme if that physical part of us is excised or amputated, we are still ourselves; or we relearn to be ourselves again, often gaining new skills to compensate. How many of us, after a stint in physical therapy, effectively relearn how to move our bodies in a way that not only mitigates the injury, but prevents further injury in the future. And if the injury is indeed debilitating, where a specific ability is lost, we expand in other ways to compensate. We may move or live differently in the world, but, barring any extreme catastrophe, we are still in it.
For the emotional wound that has been forgiven, expansion is liberating, and gives us more freedom than we had before. We exist differently, move differently, and come across paths we would not have otherwise traversed had we not been injured in the first place. To forgive, we must be cognizant and accepting of what we could and could not control, and subsequently create the boundaries we needed to allow ourselves to heal and expand. It is the greatest defense against being wounded in the same way again. Forgiveness is engaging in an informed vulnerability; understanding how were were once vulnerable, but need to once again embrace vulnerability so that we are able to process the pain and accept that we were vulnerable in the first place.
In order to expand, we need to let go. In order to let go, we need to expand. This is not an exclusionary paradox, it is instead a necessary duality. Letting go and expansion happen simultaneously and metamorphically; one cannot happen without the other. To grasp, we need to first open our hand; to open our hand is to release what we were holding.
To forgive is to allow ourselves the room and expansiveness to get beyond ourselves, and to become someone both new and the same, who is no longer defined by the wound, but has instead grown around it, and become better for it.
See David Whyte, “Maturity”