61
" The movie, (X-Men: Days of Future Past), illustrates a spiritual journey that involves going back in time. The Purpose of the journey is to find the core grievance and let it be healed. When the grievance is healed in Forgiveness, all future scenarios of conflict and destruction are also healed. It is not that they have been prevented in time; it is that we have come to the realization that there was no time in which they could have existed. In the Happy Dream, everything is resolved. It becomes harmonious and then disappears.
Wolverine is the agent strong enough to go back through time and ignite the mission of forgiveness. We can think of ourselves this way as well. We can imagine that our future self, or our higher Self, is orchestrating this whole thing for our awakening. We are just perceiving it in time, where we perceive ourselves to be. There is great love and compassion coming from the higher Self, the future self. "
― David Hoffmeister , Quantum Forgiveness: Physics, Meet Jesus
62
" Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole. "
― Salman Rushdie
64
" For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:
For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,
Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted
That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.
You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something
That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.
Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.
Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open.
May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.
As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound
So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face. "
― John O'Donohue , To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
71
" I want to move my hands, but they’re fused to his rib cage. I feel his lung span, his heartbeat, his very life force wrapped in these flimsy bars of bone. So fragile yet so solid. Like a brick wall with wet mortar. A juxtaposition of hard and soft.
He inhales again. “Jayme,” he says my name with a mix of sigh and inquiry.
I open my eyes and peer into his flushed face. Roses have bloomed on his ruddy cheeks and he looks as though he’s raced the wind.
“Mm?” I reply. My mind is full of babble, I’m so high.
“Jayme,” he’s insistent, almost pleading. “What are you?”
Instantaneous is the cold alarm that douses the flames still dancing in my heart. I feel the nervousness that whispers through me like a cool breeze in the leaves.
“What do you mean?” I ask, the disquiet wringing the strength from my voice.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he explains, inhaling deeply.
I feel the line of a frown between my brows. Gingerly, I lift the hem of his shirt. And as sure as I am that the world is round and that the sky is, indeed, blue the bruises and welts on his torso have faded to nothingness, the golden tan of his skin is sun-kissed perfection. Panic has me frozen as I stare.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper.
He looks down at his exposed abdomen. “I think you healed me.”
He says it so simply, but my mind takes his words and scatters them like ashes. I feel like I’m waking from a coma and I have amnesia and everyone speaks Chinese.
I can’t speak. If I had the strength to, I wouldn’t have the words. I feel the panic flood into me and fear spiked adrenaline courses through me, I shove him. Hard.
Eyes wide with shock, he stumbles back a few steps. A few steps is all I need. Fight or flight instinct taking root, I fight to flee. The space between us gives me enough room to slide out from between him and the car.
He shouts my name. It’s too late.
I’m running a fast as my lithe legs will carry me. My Converse pound the sidewalk and I hear the roar of his engine. It’s still too late. I grew up here and I’m ten blocks from home. No newbie could track me in my own neighborhood. In my town. Not with my determination to put as much distance as I can between me and the boy who scares the shit out of me. Not when I’ve scared the shit out of myself.
I run.
I run and I don’t stop. "
― Elden Dare , Born Wicked (The Wicked Sorcer Series #1)
73
" Jesus confronted many of the important issues of His time. He went into the temple, taught the New Testament message, and took action against those who were buying and selling on holy ground. He healed the widow, forgave the adulterer, and by His example, the righteous walked away in shame. He had said, whoever is without sin, cast the first stone (John 8:7 - paraphrase)! Not one pebble, nor one rock was thrown. He who had that right to judge, Jesus Christ, did not cast judgement either. He looked upon the sinner lovingly, and embraced them. He guided them to change and opened blind eyes to see. By Christ alone, was and is salvation attained. Truth is in the New Testament, and a Holy Spirit-guided understanding of it. It must be read without regard for self. For when self enters in, that is when misinterpretations and heresies arise. "
― Zechariah Barrett
77
" To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. When others heal, I could have healed too. And when others give life, I could have done the same. Then we experience that we can be present to the soldier who kills, to the guard who pesters, to the young man who plays as if life has no end, and to the old man who stopped playing out of fear for death.
By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness, we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community. "
― Henri J.M. Nouwen , Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life
