Can We Forgive Ourselves?

I once left someone I had loved and promised to love forever.  The pain I had caused him was almost unbearable--for me as well as him.  I asked him to forgive me.   He refused.  He was deeply, deeply wounded.  And it was I who had harmed him.  The responsibility for his suffering weighed on me.  Without forgiveness, it would crush me.    When it became clear he would not forgive me,  I wrote to him, “If you will not forgive me will have to find a way to forgive myself.” His reply, “No one can forgive themselves.  Only God can forgive.”

This experience has stirred questions in me for over a quarter of a century.   I realize now that I should not have asked him so soon for forgiveness. As Hazrat Inayat Kahn teaches, “Don’t ask anyone for something they cannot give.”   He was not ready.  And at that moment I wanted his forgiveness inauthentically,  more as a balm for my suffering than as a genuine reconciliation or at-one-ment.

I believe he thought I leaped to forgiving myself as an easy way out of responsibility and guilt, a cheap “grace” I doled out to myself like a cheap little god. As if to say--with a narcissistic ego that does not see the harm it does to others,  with a cold heart that does not vibrate to the suffering others’ hearts--“Well, I did it and it’s over and I just have to let it go and move on.”  Just like that. 

That’s not what I meant or experienced. I trusted that in time, God’s time, The Father of Mercies would forgive me, the Womb of Compassion would enfold me.  But meanwhile, my experience of God was bound up with all my other relationships.   If one is torn or crooked, all suffer.  In a spider web, with God at the center weaving and adhering the edges into a perfect pattern perfectly fitting the surrounding space, even one broken filament mars the whole, one small cut makes the whole web tremble.  I felt that my being would remain torn by this relationship in which someone I had loved and hurt went through life angry at me and refusing me his forgiveness.   Without the person’s forgiveness, I felt I would never be whole.

What good was it to me that my tradition made it clear, as many do, that if a person who is asked for forgiveness refuses, he or she is in the wrong?  It was not a matter of right or wrong, who bare the greater responsibility, when I had discharged my debt and fulfilled my obligation—though that, too, was important.  It was a matter of feeling at one in the world.

To feel at one, I had to forgive myself.  Meaning, I had to stop judging myself in a way that crushed my spirit, killed its hope for transformation, of my self and  of this relationship gone awry.  I had to stop playing the part of the all-knowing god who saw what I had “really” done and what the irreparable consequences “really” were. And I had to stop depending absolutely on the forgiveness of another person for my sense of wholeness, attunement with the One.  The quality of every relationship we have affects our relationship to the One, but no one relationship has the power to blot out or block our relationship to the Whole.  That is what I needed to see.  This very large rupture in my life, as real and painful as it was, was not able to destroy my relationship with the One or prevent me from moving toward wholeness—unless I let it.  If I let it, I would be causing more harm.  I had to accept that I had caused this harm, that the other person adamantly refused my repentance, and that I was still on the way toward wholeness

Paul Tillich, in his famous sermon, asks, “What is grace?”  His answer:  “Accept the fact that you are accepted.”   The One is already, always, moving toward us in wholeness, inviting us to move toward it. To be on the way toward wholeness does not relieve us of our need to make teshuvah, repentance.  It does free us from relying absolutely on the outcomes of our repentance and the forgiveness of other human beings.  We can still move toward wholeness, even as we hope and wait in patience for certain ruptures to be healed.  And on the way, we can rest in that Wholeness, the One, given to us.

This is what spiritual leaders, psychological counselors, and well-meaning friends are reminding us of when they say, “You have to forgive yourself.”  Not, “Take your acts of harm and neglect of others lightly. All that really matters is you.”  But, “Let nothing obstruct you on the path toward wholeness.  Receive the gift and promise of wholeness present now, a wholeness that is not of your making.”

In these ten days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, between the world created anew and the world made whole, we prepare to ask the One to forgive us.  We intensify the examination of our spirits.  We go to those we have harmed and ask for forgiveness.  We forgive those who ask to be forgiven by us.  These are both acts beautiful beyond compare.   And if, in spite of all your have done to repair a relationship, it remains torn, keep your heart open to the day it might be made whole, and in the meantime, rest in the wholeness of the One toward which we are all traveling.