Connecting Point

My little brother woke me up at 4am Sunday morning, calling because it was Mother’s Day, and I’m the closest thing he has to a mother now. He was calling from Georgia and had forgotten that my time was three hours earlier. He was crying. He’s been going through a lot lately and our mother died of colon cancer just a little before Mother’s Day ten years ago. We lost our father when he was three and I was seventeen. I lost one of my best friends then and my little brother never even got to know him. He grew up with a different father. I’m in my 50’s now and he has a family of his own. I don’t know where I’m going with this blog, but I feel compelled to write. Like many, our family has been through a lot over the years, with a lot of painful experiences. He asked me what our father was like and all I could tell him was that he was a good, kind and generous man with a few flaws. I’ll have to work on that and give him a better description later.

I have been angry at God a lot over the years, and if not angry, really not understanding how someone so all powerful could let such things happen to me and to the ones I love. I have learned a lot in the last couple of years and the most helpful to me and this particular life I’m living is forgiveness. My mother use to talk to me about my need to forgive and I so didn’t get it at the time. I couldn’t even imagine how one did forgiveness and I couldn’t imagine how she had so much faith given all we’d been through. It did in fact take me many years and many more painful experiences, not the least of which was her death and the aftermath, to gain understanding. I was pretty deeply depressed for three years or more and I so didn’t get what kind of God would have made her suffer that way. I was still at that time holding the image of God that I was taught by her and the churches she took us to. The man, omniscient maybe, but a man made in our image, none the less.

Having realized I was a lesbian along the way and coming up in the 70’s, embracing feminism as I did, I didn’t embrace a man, who wouldn’t really fix things as far as I could see, as being my guiding force. I had no faith or trust in this person we couldn’t see or hear, who was described to me in the bible. I pretty much rejected the whole christian ideal as it was shown to me in my early years. I did however glide down a seeking path over the years, for something greater than myself to explain our world and my experience in it. I just couldn’t seem to find that philosophy or ideal that really held answers that made sense to me. Forgivenss was still a very long ways away. Until recently.

I have a new understanding of our creator.  I’ve discovered a concept of our creator that makes sense to me. Not that I can explain or understand why we in our family or anyone is this world has to experience so many painful things, but my new understanding says our creator doesn’t take credit for everything that happens. My new understanding is that we infact create much of our experience ourselves and we definately create how we feel about what we experience. I know there has always been free will and all that, but somehow I got the impression through my early church experience, and within a working class environment, that we did not have much power to affect the course of our lives. We had to take the life that was handed us by God and make the best of it, being thankful  for what little pleasures we got. It was a bleek outlook for my young starving consciousness, looking ahead an seeing a lifetime of nothing I wanted.

The literature and information coming out these days (which is has always been available),  paints an entirely different picture. I have links to some different writers and websites on my website that I have really liked. The books and podcasts of these teachers have been very helpful in my learning to think differently about our creator and to finding my way out of the anger, resentment and guilt, by way of understanding and working with forgiveness. It’s been a long haul for me to get here, but I do finally get it. I won’t repeat everything I’ve written on my website about forgiveness, but it has been a miracle in my life. I have systematically gone back through all my experiences that seemed unforgivable, or even just kind fo bad, but which I clung to as the reason for all my pain and anger, and I have forgiven everything. this education has taught me that I don’t have to live in fear, that I don’t have to feel guilt for every mistake I made, and that I don’t have to defend my anger and resentment as righteous and inevitable given my experiences.

Now I love God, who i consider to be love, the creative energy of all that is.  I’m not saying that going through and releasing myself from all that unforgiveness was easy, or that it happened over night. It has been totally worth it though. I feel so much more at peace than I ever thought possible.  I feel so much more hope for our future than I ever thought I would, given the state of our world these days. I no longer feel impotent to achieve what I want or to have a positive affect on our future. I could go on with nice little affirmations about forgivness and it’s miraculous affect on me, but now I want to bring this post back to my little brother and his phone call.

My little brother’s call gives me another opportunity to practice forgiveness, and I do find that opportunities appear all the time. He is a full time employee of the National Guard and he talked to me about his upcoming deployment to Iraq. I could find a lot of things to not forgive about this.  I do not support violence in any circumstance and my brother being in the service has been challenging. I have made an effort to be supportive to him and his choices. Before my recent spiritual education I would have met the news of him going to war with huge inner resistance, then anger at our government for making such a thing possible. I would have thought of all the terrible possibilities and worried myself sick over his safety.

With the gift of my new understanding and ability to bring forgivenss to this situation, I can stop all that and give him what he truly needs, which is my love and my support. Before I might have tried to talk him out of it, and I did for a brief moment in our conversation, blurting out, “Don’t Go!”. But then I backed off. I realized arguing with him will only create mistrust and division and possibly hurt feelings all around. Do I want that between us as he goes off to war? No.

So I have discovered that though forgiveness is not always easy, for me it has become the best tool I can use in any situation. Once I bring forgiveness, which is also to bring love into a situation, I can let go of my fear and frustration and truly give the best that I have. I can bring loving kindness, compassionion and my attention to the moment.  So my brother, I love you deeply and though I might even cry about this occasionally, I know now that I can always forgive what causes fear in me. I know we will always be connected by the love that created us.