Forgiveness – Bad Things / Good People

We have been discussing Forgiveness for a while and the mind is now “primed” to see forgiveness in our day-to-day experience. Before you chose to enter into these practices, the connection with forgiveness would be weaker and we may pass by or ignore the opportunities to see and express forgiveness.

My latest connection comes from another reading of the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold Kushner. He concludes the book with these passages. [My additions in brackets.]

Are you capable of forgiving, and accepting in love, a world which has disappointed you by not being perfect, a world in which there is so much unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime, earthquake and accident? Can you forgive its imperfections and love it because it is capable of containing great beauty and goodness, and because it is the only world we have?

Are you capable of forgiving and loving the people around you, even if they have hurt you and let you down by not being perfect? Can you forgive them and love them, because there aren’t any perfect people around, and because the penalty for not being able to love imperfect people is condemning oneself to loneliness?

…Can you learn to love Him [God] despite His limitations, as Job [in the bible] does, and as you once learned [hopefully] to forgive your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?

And if you can do all these things, will you be able to recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons that God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in this less than perfect world?

Questions it might be good to contemplate…