There are so many wrongs in this world. All of us have been wronged by someone at some point in our lives. We wrong others too, although we don’t like to admit it. Sometimes people ask for forgiveness, say they are sorry. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they won’t even accept that they have wronged us. Most times we cannot force someone to admit wrongdoing. Most times we can’t demand that the wrongdoer say ‘sorry’. But at all times we can forgive.
The other day I remembered a film I had seen about 15 years ago, ‘Smoke Signals’. A friend of mine, half Cuban and half Native American recommended it to me. ‘It’s just us, brother,’ he said. ‘Our ways, our brand of humor,’ he added.
There was enough to laugh in the movie. But there were moments that I remember again and again for they made me stop and think. Even today when I remember, I stop, the world stops and I see everything around me differently. It was that powerful. The story was about fathers and sons. Well, it was about other things too, but there was a son and there was a father, the son had a friend who knew how to tell a story. The friend, whose name is ‘Thomas Builds-the-Fire’ is the observer and the narrator in the film. At the end, he makes the following observation.
“How do we forgive our fathers, maybe in a dream? Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous or because there never seemed to be any rage there at all. And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning, for shutting doors, for speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them, or not saying it?”
Do we ever ask ourselves ‘should I forgive?’ or do we ask ‘why should I forgive?’ Do we ever ask ourselves whether in fact there is something to forgive, whether the person concerned was even aware that he or she had wronged us? What do we lose when we forgive? Maybe what we lose is giving back hurt for hurt we received. Maybe what we lose is the chance of being compensated for whatever we lost. The thing with forgiving is that it is a ‘give’ and when we give we lose or we have less with us than we had before or so we are made to believe.
Forgiving, however, is by itself a gift we give ourselves. We gift ourselves peace of mind. We gift ourselves a mind and heart that is free of anger and hatred. It is a gift we give those who we forgive because then they are at peace and it is a gift we give the world because we’ve effectively laid to rest some element of anger, vengefulness and ill-feeling.
Most importantly, when we begin to consider forgiving someone we are at the same time making a conscious effort to understand that someone. We really cannot tell why someone is cold and we are sometimes uncomfortable when we receive too much warmth – for example a schoolboy or schoolgirl would often cringe if his or her father or mother were to hug and kiss them as they drop them in school. It is embarrassing, but maybe, just maybe there’s so much love that the particular parent can’t help but show it. Maybe also, it is an awkward way of saying ‘I may have not shown you enough love, I may have been too harsh last night, but please, please believe me, there’s nothing more precious to me in this world than you’.
It might sound odd but if you think about it, even though we love our fathers and mothers to the point that we cannot even imagine having a different father or mother, they are the people we find hardest to forgive. The beautiful thing is that if we can forgive our parents then we can forgive the entire world. And who knows, perhaps by way of thanks the world might forgive us too.
Other articles in this series