By Roland Ashby
We all carry woundedness within us.
This thought has come into sharper focus for me over these last few months, spending, as we all have, much time in solitude and isolation imposed by COVID-19. Spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle calls our woundedness, our accumulated hurts, the “pain body”, which can have a crippling effect on our lives, and adversely affect those with whom we live, unless we can learn to let go and forgive.
Nelson Mandela said that holding onto resentment was like “drinking poison and hoping it would kill your enemies”.
We cannot inoculate against the virus of unforgiveness, but with attention, work, meditation and prayer, it can be treated.
I am grateful for the opportunity the pandemic has provided to look deeply into my own unforgiving heart, and to begin to find a freedom from hurt and anger. However, for many, such issues are never faced, while for others they may only be faced at the end of life.
Archbishop Anthony Bloom, who became the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in the UK, and had been a medical doctor before he became a priest, describes ministering to a dying parishioner:
Some 30 years ago a man was taken into hospital with, as it seemed, a common illness. On examination, it was discovered that he was ill with an inoperable cancer. His sister was told and so was I, but he was not. He was vigorous, strong, and intensely alive.
He said to me, “I have so much to do, and here am I, bedridden and for how long?”
I said to him, “How often you have told me that you dream of being able to stop time so that you can be instead of doing. You have never done it. God has done it for you. Now is your time to be.”
Confronted with the necessity of being, in what one might call a totally contemplative situation, he was puzzled and said:
“What shall I do?”
I said to him that illness and death are conditioned not only by physiological changes – by germs and pathology – but also by all those things that destroy our inner energies. This is what one may call our negative thoughts and feelings, everything that saps the power of life within us, everything that prevents life from gushing like a torrent that is clear and free. I suggested that he should put right not only outwardly but within himself all that was wrong in his relationships with people, with himself, in the circumstances of his life, and to begin in the present moment. And when he had done it in the present, to go back and ever further back into the past, clearing it all, making his peace with everyone and everything, undoing every knot, facing every evil, coming to terms in repentance, in acceptance, in gratitude, with his whole life – and his life had been hard.
So day after day, month after month, we went through this process. He made his peace with the totality of life. And I remember him at the end of it lying in his bed too weak to use a spoon, and saying to me with shining eyes: “My body is almost dead, and yet I have never felt so intensely alive as I feel now.” He had discovered that life was not his body, although his body was him, and that he had a reality that the death of his body could not destroy.
This is a very important experience. It is something that we must do in the course of all our life, all the time, if we want to be aware of the power of eternal life within us and, therefore, not be afraid whatever happens to the temporary life that is also ours. (Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World, 95):
In addition to daily times of meditation and prayer, I have found the following to be a powerful way of loosening the grip of unforgiveness*:
First, I slowly read and take time to reflect on Luke 6:27-28: “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
Secondly, I slowly read and take time to reflect on Matthew 18:21-22: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’”
I also spend time trying to understand the person and what might have led them to give the offence. “When you understand, you cannot help but love,” says Buddhist Thich Nhat Hahn. Jesus, even while on the cross, was able to say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Finally, I bring to mind the person who has hurt me, and pray the following prayer:
In and through the love of Jesus, I love you… (name)… bless you, embrace you and forgive you, and see the Christ within you. I forgive you the hurt you have caused me, and ask you to forgive any hurt I may have caused you, and pray for an end to whatever is causing us to suffer.
I then visualise the light of the love of Christ flowing through me and into them, and visualise our faces transformed by Christ’s love.
*I acknowledge, however, particularly in cases of abuse or substantial trauma, where the level of hurt may be very great and damaging, the work of healing may require the assistance of a spiritual director or professional counsellor over a long period.