Monday, February 25, 2013

A Week Looking At Forgiveness

This is week, #5 in looking at the daily themes from my Attention and Interpretation Therapy course with Dr. Amit Sood of the Mayo Clinic. We have worked through gratitude, compassion, acceptance, and deeper meaning. This week we come to what may be in many ways the most difficult.

Forgiveness.

I cannot promise much insight this week. I wrestle with this one a great deal. I have already done so around the Newtown, CT, shootings. I am open to listening this week to what others have said via the quotes. That may be as far as I get- or, it may open a whole new set of directions and hopes for my life.

No more rambling. The starting point of the week. The first quote from the challenging Henry Ward Beecher, prominent Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, abolitionist, and speaker in the mid to late 19th century.

Simply let it sink in.

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.
--Henry Ward Beecher

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