Forgive those who hurt thy pride, offend thine honor,
or otherwise frost thy buttocks.
On the other hand, I thought, almost every other religion
I knew of addressed forgiveness in some direct way or another, and since
we, as Wiccans, like to think we are working at following the religion
or spirituality behind all religions, I wondered why we didn't. Perhaps
in striving to separate ourselves from the Christianity that surrounds
us, and from which most of us have come, and many of us have been wounded
in the name of, we have mistakenly jettisoned a vital universal spiritual
and religious principle. I also noted that many of the Wiccans I know
tend to get offended and hold grudges of a spectacular magnitude, and
feel very righteous in doing so. In realizing somebody should say something,
I realized also that I was about to piss off a great number of the Wiccan
community who enjoy their grudges. Oh well.
The obvious, which is that holding a grudge breaks the
Rede ("An' it harm none do what ye will") I shall belabor presently.
First, I want to explain how it goes counter to the entire philosophical
ground upon which our religion is founded.
Wicca is based upon the idea that we are all growing and
learning, all learning different lessons, are all at different points
in our development, and all working at our own pace. The ideas of karma
and reincarnation are central in this -- we experience karma to learn
our lessons, and reincarnate life after life to learn the lessons we
failed, misunderstood, didn't get quite right, or didn't even get close
to learning in our previous lives.
Perfect Love and Perfect Trust also take this into account
-- loving a person for whom they are, warts and all, and trusting them
to be who they are and to behave appropriately to their actual development.
If you trust someone in the wrong way, and they disappoint you, you
were the one who was mistaken. You revise your expectations of the person,
and your estimation of the lessons they have learned. You forgive, but
not necessarily forget, because they are working on whatever lesson
they failed, and may fail it again; some people may fail it many times
before learning it. You trust that they are working on it (they cannot
really do otherwise - they'll get it right eventually, though it may
be in another life), and love them in spite of it, or perhaps even because
of it, for who they are. You hope that they will do the same, for we
are all learning our own lessons.
Grudges are directly counter to this: they are attempts
to freeze situations as they are, and stop or preclude growth. They
do this by fostering the assumption, either openly or tacitly, that
the person who hurt you will always be at that level of development
(that that is the way they are and will remain, an "evil person" who
basely betrayed you and will always do so, and who should suffer greatly
for their offense against you, the Light and the side of the angels
or whatever) and/or stops you from growing by holding onto that pain,
by assuming that you were completely, or mostly, in the right and did
little or nothing to contribute to the outcome of the situation, and
disregards the whole of the situation, the context of which you and
others were a part. You disclaim self-responsibility and stop yourself
from learning the lessons you need to because you blind yourself to
them. This self-as-victim and other-as-"batwings-from-hell" is false
-- you were two (or more) growing and developing humans who, together,
created a situation; what can you learn from this? No, I mean other
than that the other person's father is actually Ming the Merciless,
'cause odds are, he wasn't.
Now we come to the "An' it harm none" part. In addition
to the harms listed above, by seeing the other person as a frog, or
minor demon, or slimeball, you are working counter to the other person's
development if you push this thought with any magical force (which is
so easy to do when you're angry enough to hold a grudge), by adding
your own force to the resistance they must overcome to learn their lesson
and be a better person -- "Hi there, I'm Saint Urvile the Slimeball.
I'm working on generosity when I'm not engaged in two-faced gossip-mongering..."
can be a tough image to overcome. You are also harming yourself by binding
yourself to this image! Before sending this out, you must create it
within yourself, and before too long, you may find yourself engaged
in two-faced gossip-mongering about "ol' St. Urvile" and feeling oh
so righteous about it. Meanwhile, you've just signed up for refresher
courses on the lessons about Gossip-Mongering, Working Bad Woojie-Woojie
(consciously or not, as the case may be), Winning and Losing Friends
and Influencing People (with the principle of like attracting like,
you're likely to wind up surrounding yourself with like-minded folks
who will support your self-justification and form a clique or club with
you, and making the lessons that much harder to learn), as well as signing
up for a masters degree in Why Grudges Are a Bad Idea. People who carry
a grudge seldom carry only one. Better make that a doctorate, and count
the lifetimes till graduation if you are stubborn. Not to mention that
since you're doing this, others are likely seeing you as "the two-faced
gossip-mongering slimeball," which, of course, you've become. You sure
have made some serious work for yourself just to shift your portion
of blame and make yourself feel better, haven't you? Can you make the
situation any worse? Sure! With arrogant stupidity, self-righteous pride,
and persistence, any degree of self-wounding and situation-worsening
is possible!
There are only three ways to deal with anger: express
it, repress it, or forgiveness. Almost all of us do some degree of all
three.
Repression, or denial, does not work, except for
analysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, police, district attorneys and
politicians who make their living off of other people's repressed anger.
The anger does not go away, though it may seem like it, but is always
expressed somehow, and almost always negatively, and almost always destructively
and/or self-destructively. Repressed anger accumulates, becomes a mental
toxic waste dump which seeps out and poisons one's world, attitudes,
relationships, or becomes a munitions pile which can be exploded by
a random spark, and these uncontrolled eruptions can ruin relationships,
psychically wounding friends, lovers, and children, frightening wildlife
miles away, and startling passing motorists.
Expression can be positive, as a force to communicate
grievance and a problem with a situation to change it, or negative,
as a force to hurt others (whether it is rationalized as a way to communicate
the degree of pain to the other by making them feel a similar pain themselves,
of just to make them hurt to get even). Positive expressions of anger
are almost always of short duration - they are assertions that communicate
or fail to, work their change or fail to, and are done. Negative expressions
are often longer in duration; there is often a pleasure taken in their
expression, and a feeling of satisfaction with the other's pain. This
type of anger and its expressions tend to be held onto, they are ineffective
as true agents for positive change, and the pleasure taken in the expressions
make them self-reinforcing, and they become a vicious circle, the anger
is never released, and must be expressed again and again. Like repressed
anger, anger that is held onto -- grudges -- is linked with physical
health problems, including but not limited to depression, heart disease,
cancer, high blood pressure, and strokes. Holding onto anger can cause
poor health, and if that isn't harming yourself, I don't know what is.
The last option is forgiveness. Many people seem
to have the idea that to practice forgiveness is to somehow make yourself
into a sap, sort of a treacly, Polyanna-esque Glenda-the-Good figure
(complete with goofy voice and pink tulle, and traveling around in a
pink saccharine bubble), someone too weak to "stand up for themselves"
or a masochist. That is a defense, like the other self-righteous blinders
previously discussed. Forgiveness is difficult. It takes time and effort;
it requires a measure of self-responsibility, directly addressing the
problem and pain, and forgoing the pleasure of vindictiveness. It requires
that you deal with them not just all-at-once, but on a continuing basis
while the pain heals and you either attempt to change the situation
in some constructive manner or admit that the situation cannot be changed
by you and accepting that. It does, however, stop the cycle, reduces
your anger, reduces your feeling of need to force someone to change,
allows less accumulation of "bad karma," and gets you back on track
in lesson-learning for Life 101. It changes your world by allowing you
to love more, feel more hopeful, optimistic, sleep better, be less anxious
or depressed, and enjoy life, which is something that you had
forgotten you weren't doing so much of anymore while being Baron von
Grudgebearer (demanding swords, or at least nasty epithets and cutting
remarks, at dawn). It does not reduce your ability to be assertive (in
fact, it enhances it because you improve your self-esteem), and the
more you do it, the more your attitude and world improve (good karma)
and the less you find you have to do it because you are being hurt less
often because you are less sensitive and looking for a reason to be
hurt.
© 2002 SerpentStone, All rites reserved.
Used with permission