|
A friend of mine once told me in a fit of pique, "I'm a Wiccan,
not a Christian, and we're not into that forgiveness crap." I mentally
ran down the incredibly short list of the Wiccan Commandment, and
noticed that she was right -- there was no specific formal charge to
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.
W
icca 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.
|
