Forgiveness isn’t a skill you can master and employ whenever you wish, or a tool you can use the way you might use an umbrella or a fork. Rather:

–Forgiveness is a natural response to reality that arises from a deep understanding of the nature of life and how best to live it.

–Forgiveness isn’t a way to escape from your past or to forget it; it’s a way of not dragging your past into your present.

Rami Shapiro

–Forgiveness isn’t a way to avoid suffering; it’s a way to avoid clinging to suffering.

Life is a blend of joy and sorrow, happiness and horror. Forgiveness won’t change that. But it can free you from dragging sorrow into your moments of joy, and prevent you from allowing moments of horror to corrode your moments of happiness.

There are two keys to living life with forgiveness at its core. The first is found in Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is its season, a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to plant, and a time to uproot… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance… a time to embrace, and a time to let go… a time for love, and a time for hate… a time to be born, and a time to die.”

Everything has its time, its moment for arising and its moment for passing on. You cannot have one without the other. Just as front goes with back, so weeping goes with laughing, and loving goes with hating. What you can have – all you can have – is one thing after another, so the key to navigating life well is to know what time it is: to know when to laugh and when to mourn, when to love and when to hate. When you know what the moment requires, you know how to act in it. And when the moment passes so does the action that it required. Forgiveness is what happens when you know and live with the arising and passing of time.

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