You Must Die to Live: Good Friday & Forgiveness

The cranes are gone, the field where they gather now disked and fallow. Its hay is baled, stacked in the distance. Tomato plant stalks, desiccated ivy vines, dead leaves, raked from my garden, now fill white, plastic bags leaning against the brown adobe wall. Dried zinnia stalks and a dead rose bush will follow. Death is evident today, Good Friday, as I remember a dear friend who also died on Good Friday five years ago. I contemplate the ways I am dying.  

“You must die to live,” a spiritual mentor told me. Such a beautiful paradox. Allowing my old thoughts, beliefs, habits, experiences, ways of being in the world to die creates the space for new thoughts, beliefs, habits, experiences, ways of being to bring new life. I am always dying. New life is always beginning. Dr. Deepak Chopra says we have a new body every seven years since old cells that die are replaced by new ones. Iris and tulip bulbs have pushed green shoots through the garden’s soil. Bright yellow daffodils are open, new life accompanies death.

Each moment we expand our consciousness, its old form ceases to exist. Since consciousness creates, the person we were also ceases to exist, replaced by a new expression. Talking with a friend about forgiveness this week reminded the Spiritual Adventuress she is not the same person she was thirty years ago when she began forgiveness work on her father. In her dysfunctional family where alcoholism was present, anger and domestic violence were also present. Her father beat his three children. She viscerally hated him. Not his behavior, as a well-meaning listener recently suggested, attempting to spin the truth. She hated him. The spinner didn’t have to live with the father who handcrafted a butcher knife then chased their mother with it, kicked a hole in the front door in the middle of the night, forced his children to watch the bloody butchering of chickens while he smiled sadistically and kicked their pet dog and a cat.

Reading a letter at my father’s graveside after attending a profound personal growth workshop was the first step on a long journey of forgiveness. Over time, as my consciousness expanded, the depth of my understanding and my ability to forgive would ripple outward in concentric circles like pebble-disturbed pond water. Years passed. Layer after layer of understanding and forgiveness arose to be cleared in turn.

Hearing a mentor describe her own transformation, lessons of forgiveness, victimization and abuse, I realized that like her, I chose to take an initiation in the abuse of power. By experiencing how terrible the abuse of power is, how awful it feels, both of us learned how to be women of power and passion who could make a difference in the world without ever abusing that power. At a subsequent workshop, she opened my mind to the possibility that I not only chose the initiation, but also my parents and family. I accept two premises as true. First, each of us has free will, or choice. Second, life is eternal since quantum physics shows energy is indestructible, it simply changes form. Therefore, I could only conclude I am at choice - before I came here, while I am here and when I leave here. I then realized I chose my parents, my family and experiences as part of my soul’s journey. I took responsibility for my soul choices – the initiation and the father I had. Living in a consciousness of increased responsibility and decreased blame lifted me to the next level of forgiveness.

Meditatively walking on the beach in Santa Barbara, contemplating my family, I felt again my deepest wound. While mentally pointing my right index finger at my father, and saying in condemnation, “You didn’t see me for who I really am,” I realized the third, fourth and fifth fingers of the same hand were pointing back at me. I didn’t see my father for who he really was. He too was an expression of God. I acknowledged it’s pretty hard to see someone as an expression of God when they are beating the heck out of you. Waves of peace bathed me in these realizations. Surely I had finally finished forgiving my father. Once you know someone is an expression of God, where do you go after that? When I told this story to a woman at church, she said, “Well, you could love your father.” Oh.

The next ripple occurred during the ayahuasca ceremony when sentient beings asked me if I would like to acknowledge my father. “Yes,” I answered, realizing my father had never been acknowledged for playing his part. “Thank you, Dad,” I said. Surely now the forgiveness process was complete. But, no, there was still more.

When I returned to Peru the following year, I stayed at Willka T’ika (Sacred Flower) Garden Guest House in the Sacred Valley. The magnificent gardens, overflowing with beautiful, fragrant, flowers of every hue and variety, correspond to the chakras, or energy centers, of the body. Meditating in the Heart Garden, I had a clairaudient experience. The garden asked me, “Is your heart big enough to love your father?” “Yes,” I answered, feeling completely at peace in expanded awareness.

Gifted writer Anne Lamott says unforgiveness is ". . .like swallowing rat poison and waiting for the rat to die."  Perhaps resistance to forgiving someone else is actually resistance to forgiving ourselves. “Forgiveness can take place in the twinkling of an eye, unless you're addicted to suffering," says Edwene Gaines. What I know for myself is forgiveness takes place after anger has had its say and whenever it is ready.

My consciousness of forgiveness continues to ripple outward, deeper and deeper into the divine matrix. The people in our lives are reflections of us. We are looking in a mirror. When I asked myself, “How is what I say about my father true about me?” I realized I was not only the abused, but also the abuser, not only the victim, but also the perpetrator – I abused my body with food. When I saw what was in him was in me, all separation melted away. In meditation, the realization came, “I and my father are one.” This seventh expansion in my forgiveness process reminded me of a well-known teaching. Forgiveness is to be done seventy times seven, or until it is complete.

Last week, completing the fourth step of a 12-step program, I forgave myself for being unforgiving of myself. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” is but one of the gifts of Good Friday.