Source: Finding Forgiveness by Eileen R. Borris Dunchunstang, Ed.D. (Foreword by H.H. Dalai Lama)
Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.
- Cherie Carter-Scott
Our lives are faced with many challenges concerning forgiveness. Incidents happen on a daily basis where we get angry about some that someone else said or did and then carry that anger way past its due. Before we realize it, we have become angry people.
Perhaps one day you come home to find your spouse has left you and that you have been betrayed. how can you forgive someone who has caused you so much pain? Consider the Jenny Sanfords and Elizabeth Edwards of this world, grappling with how to forgive their husbands of deception and infidelity. And as if forgiving your spouse isn’t difficult enough, how are you supposed to forgive yourself for the messes you’re in that you feel responsible for and that bring you great hardship?
We are told to forgive to prevent becoming embittered people. Yet forgiveness can be difficult to understand and to achieve. It’s essential to remember, though, that the key is forgiveness is not a gift to the wrongdoer – it is a gift to ourselves, a gift that allows us to be freed of our emotional burden. Forgiveness is our ultimate freedom.
When it comes to deception, financier Bernie Madoff tops the list of those who have shattered the lives of many others. On December 11, 2008, Madoff was arrested for perpetrating one of the greatest investment frauds in history by allegedly losing at least $50 billion of investors’ money. The former chairman of the NASDAQ stock index was surprised that his Ponzi scheme was not uncovered sooner. The victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme felt deeply betrayed and angry. Some lost all their life savings and had to begin living of social security checks. Others felt as though they were discarded like road kill. Many people spoke of unpaid bills and lost homes, dreams destroyed, and sleepless nights.
Burt Ross, the former mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and one of Madoff’s victims, condemned the fraud as “the worst of sins, the ultimate evil.” Madoff sank so low as to steal from Elie Wiesel, the Nazi concentration camp survivor and Nobel Prize winner, as if Wiesel hand’t suffered enough in his lifetime. Wiesel conjured a vision of torment for Madoff: he wanted Madoff to be in solitary confinement for five years, forced to watch a movie played continuously in which the photos of his victims appeared, one after the other. The narrative would repeat, “Look what you have done to this old lady, look what you have done to that child, look what you have done” (Strom, 2009). Did Elie Wiesel forgive him? No. Could you if you were one of his victims? Could you forgive Madoff, who looked people squarely in the eye as they turned over their life savings, all the while knowing that he was going to ruin them?
Because of the magnitude of the crime, people questioned whether Bernie Madoff could or should be forgiven. Elie Wiesel felt that Madoff needed to get on his knees and ask for forgiveness for there to be forgiveness given. Some believe that forgiveness can only be accomplished with the participation of the one being forgive. Yet the true meaning of forgiveness may take us someplace else. Forgiveness doesn’t come because someone has asked for it or has earned it. Forgiveness is a gift of grace given to those who choose to forgive because they don’t want the cancer of hatred to spread within them and eat them up. Therefore, Madoff cannot earn forgiveness; forgiveness is not about someone else. It is about our own personal inner healing.
As unbelievable as it may seem, there are some of Madoff’s victims who have been able to forgive him. One example is Ian Thiermann, who lost his entire life savings of $750,000 to Madoff. Ninety-year-old Thiermann subsequently needed to go back to work. The grocery store where he was a customer for years created a greeter position just for him. According to Ron Clements, the store manager, Theirmann was an inspiration to many of his customers because of his ability to forgive. Although Theirmann still had house payments and his wife’s medical bills to pay, he chose not to be a victim twice over. He made the decision to let go of his hatred and need for revenge and to forgive so the poison of bitterness wouldn’t ruin his life.
What Ian Thiermann was able to accomplish you, too, will be able to do if you choose to. Don’t worry; don’t be afraid of what this book will tell you. It will not tell you what people have done wrong to you is OK. It will not tell you that you must excuse someone who has treated you vilely. It will not tell you that you have no right to vengeance or to the anger that fuels it. It will tell you something quite different.
What this book does is expose the complexities of forgiveness – a misunderstood process that frequently hides in robes of morality, self-righteousness, and woundedness. It will tell you that you have a right to anger, and that your desire for justice and retribution are perfectly normal and recognizable human emotions. It will also tell you that you have a right not to excuse someone who has wronged you.
But it will also tell you that the path to freedom requires you to shed the baggage caused by persons, circumstances, fortunes, fate and bad experience so that you are light and limber enough to travel that road. There is a process to shedding that baggage, and this book will tell you how to develop that technique. Shedding this burden is what I call the process of forgiveness, not in the sense of excusing or ignoring a wrong done to you, or of being passive in its wake, as you may have been taught be religion. It is forgiveness in the sense of forgiving debt, of recognizing that full repayment may not always be possible, even at the cost of someone’s life, and that justice may be better done more practically through the process of forgiveness.
Do not misunderstand. If people commit a crime, they should suffer the legal consequences. This book does not tell you to forgive crime in the legal sense. That would be foolish and injurious to you and to society. This book does not tell you that you must love your enemies. This might add to the pain of the wrong done to you and is completely unnecessary. And this book does not tell you that you must simply forgive the debt owed to you. For civilised society to run properly and sensibly, people must all pay their debts they incur, whether they are financial or behavioural. Pickpockets, cheaters, and murderers must all suffer the consequences of their actions.
