I have spent nearly half of this year in mourning. There is a time for it. What I have begun to understand, though, is that there truly is a season for everything. Betrayal, particularly the all-encompassing soul betrayal, is no easy thing to come to terms with. In fact, it is so personal and such an intangible pain that most human beings have no adequate words to offer for comfort. "I'm sorry" or "It will get better" just feel like salt poured into a wound that one realizes over time no one can possibly heal with words. It is one thing to be betrayed, but what happens to one's physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being as a result of the betrayal is a whole process in and of itself. You cannot know this pain unless you have felt it. But, what I have started to understand deep within my spirit, is that there comes a time when holding onto the pain someone else has caused you injures yourself and the world more than the betrayer. More than that, the one who has betrayed, unless one of the rare human beings who carries absolutely no remorse, suffers immensely while you refuse to extend forgiveness. Forgiveness is almost as difficult to describe as love. Neither can be touched, contained, controlled, or forced. Both are gifts that can only be given when truly first embodied within one's self. I believe many of us, including myself, prematurely offer what we believe to be forgiveness because we have been taught that we will not be forgiven ourselves or that there is some shame or guilt to be carried for an inability to forgive quickly. Forgiveness is an experience one must come to on their own terms, and I have found that the times I have not received forgiveness are the times I learn the most about the value of it.
In all of my pain and inability to forgive, I have hurt people whom I love so deeply. And, when we really truly stop to understand our lives, we all recognize that there is pain in us caused by others that inevitably has affected us in ways that perpetuate pain through our actions with others. It's circular and cyclical. It's all connected. Therapists build their careers on us behaving this way. We can spend a lifetime rehashing and pulling apart all the ways in which others have damaged us. But, when do we stop? When do we stop and recognize that every human being has been wounded, and if when we are wounded, we have made mistakes and desire forgiveness, why then, is it so difficult to offer this to those who make mistakes that affect us? Too often, we walk away from friendships, family members, and marriages because the growing pains of learning greater forgiveness and compassion become too great. Is there truly a limit on love, compassion, and forgiveness? No. The only limit is within ourselves...when we close off our capacity to expand as creatures of eternal healing for ourselves and those around us...when it becomes easier to restrict our innate purpose to be whole, because in order to be so we must rearrange expectations or needs we believed were critical for our survival. Change is hard. But, while the season may come for solitude, anger, and unforgiveness, so does the time come for compassion. Within each of us is the small child still hoping to find a safe place to lay our head. When we accept our own vulnerability, our own shame, and our own frailty, it becomes innate that we honor it in others.
So I ask you, who have you not extended compassion to? And who are any of us to determine that someone is undeserving of such a gift?
