No matter what the song says, what the world needs now isn’t love. Not the garden-variety love people think of, anyway. It needs the special kind of unconditional love called forgiveness.
Christmas and New Year hold such power and it’s nothing to do with religion. After all, Christmas is not the most important feast of the Christian calendar. Easter is. Christmas is about birth, Easter about rebirth.
But the season of Christmas and New Year has become the cue to start anew. Some approach the season with the regret of a misspent year. Some look forward to it as the season of fresh possibility.
Beginning anew begins first in making peace with the past. Ancient Hawaiian Polynesians believed forgiveness literally unties people from each other by cutting (kala) the invisible astral cords that bind, allowing relationships to start anew.
I wish I knew who it was who wrote the following piece of compassion: “If we could read the secret history of those we would like to punish, we would find in each life enough grief and suffering to make us stop wishing anything more on them.”
It was the Buddha who said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the one who gets burned.”
The great Hawaiian lexicographer Mary Kawena Pukui was afraid that the forgiveness process called ho’oponopono would die out with modernization of Hawaiian life, and she left some descriptions of it.
“Are you willing to kala your brother?
Free him entirely of this entanglement of your anger?
Remember, as you loosen your brother from his trespasses, you loosen yourself too.
As you forgive, you are forgiven.”
Ho’oponopono brings up a fundamental truth, which is that all forgiveness is in the end self-forgiveness; you cannot see anything, any quality or trait in someone else that you don’t first see in yourself. If you hate or reject a quality in someone, it’s only because you know you are capable of that same quality. Forgiveness means you stop judging yourself.
If you can discover where you have yet to forgive yourself, then your world will gently begin anew.
Thank you deeply for your marvelous company this year, and may the next one fill you with unconditional love.
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