Some ways of knowing do not require understanding. … You may understand less and less about the world and yet you might feel more a part of it than ever. Unconditional love means that we don’t love on the condition that we understand.

p. 73, Thomas Moore, Original self

Maybe it isn’t celebrity we long for, but the sense that life has meaning, that we belong on this earth, that we are contributing, and that we are appreciated.

p. 70, Thomas Moore, Original self

To Hell and Back (Utne reader no 92, p. 56)

Martha Minow: Between vengence and forgiveness

“When you’re dealing with the subtleties and complexities of human relationships, law is an extremely blunt instrument,” she explains. “Law can tell people to stop doing something. It can’t make people love each other, it can’t make people behave differently in a day-to-day way.”

”I worry that there is a false hope that law can solve the problem, when, at best, in many circumstances law can create a clearing, a space, where other kinds of difficult work at building human relationships can go forward.”

”There’s good reason to explore more ways in which our justice system can promote the possibility of apology and forgiveness or make more room for people to do that outside the justice system,” Minow says.

Ubuntu is an African concept Minow defines as “humaneness, or an inclusive sense of community valuing everyone.” In this sense of justice, no one can be human until all are human and the fragile bonds destroyed … are reconnected.

”Really terrible violence happens because people dehumanize other people,” she says. “And so how do you prevent that from happening? It has to work at a cognitive level, some sense that you just can’t do that to other people, that it could be you who gets dehumanized.”

The Art of Letting Go (Utne Reader no. 92)

Forgiveness deeply offends the rational mind. No reason why from our own pain and darkness, we should summon feelings of compassion and insight for that person, as well as for ourselves. …
And there is certainly no easy way to put forgiveness into practice. p. 47

Simply contemplating the act of forgiveness may bring us closer to a person, to events, or to our own most painful and vulnerable feelings than we want to be.
It may be by giving up while not surrendering that you catch your first glimpse of freedom.
You do it by abandoning that person to fate, and abandoning the desire to affect that fate.
And it assumes that the acts for which we are trying to find forgiveness belong securely in the past. p. 48

To forgive may be an act of supreme love and gentleness, but it is also tough.. It demands that at least one party face the truth – and learn something of value from it.
It does not involve condoning, trivializing, minimizing, excusing, ignoring, or pretending to forget what has been done (to betray or breach trust).
it does not withdraw blame. Yet it may ask you to be careful how you apportion blame, whether you absent yourself from events or remain present.
Offering our forgiveness or allowing forgiveness to arise restores us to something that is always within us but from which we have become unbound: a sense of unity expressed through the qualities of trust, faith, hope, and love. p. 49

Apology not Accepted (Utne Reader no 92)

A fundamental experience of basic worth helps us tolerate the complexity of being truly human – which, alas, includes such realities as coming in last in a race or losing someone’s love. p. 47

Indeed, it is the essence of obsession to try to handle something in your mind when you believe it cannot be resolved in the outer world. p. 48

Humans will, no doubt, debate this issue until the end of time, when to hold other people accountable, even punishable, for their offense, and when to move toward acceptance and tolerance (transcendence) p. 49

To forgive means, literally, to give up – to give up hatred, revenge, punishment, hard payment of a hard debt.
In struggling to forgive someone, our motive is to move our lives past bitter obsession.
Regrettably, forgiveness is not necessarily about justice. Nor is forgiveness other worldly acceptance of what must be.
In contrast to justice and acceptance, forgiveness is not only the recovery of our spirit, but also the enlargement of that spirit – somehow, some way to imagine the humanity of the injuring spirit. p. 50

Utne Reader 15th Anniversary Special edition, March – April 1999, No. 92

We also decided that while apologies are about the past, forgiveness is about the future, a tool of the optimist who pines for a better world. The editors p. 7

If we all recognize that forgiveness has the power to liberate us from the past, then why are we so reluctant to grant it? p. 45, editors

… a book about healing relationships, all kinds of relationships.
Beyond this we are involved in a relationship with our whole environment, including plants, water, air, and all that nurtures and supports life on this planet.
… based on the belief that we all have the capacity to retrain our minds to recognize that love is the most powerful healing force there is.
In this book (about hope, faith, trust, love, and forgiveness), we open doors for exploring the inner spaces of our mind, in order to bring light into the darkness of past hurts.
We find the value of letting go… and the boundless benefits that come when we recognize that forgiveness is the key … and love is only experienced when we give it.

Introduction, love is the answer, Jampolskey, G. G., and Cirincione, D. V. (Also author teach only love)

Practice until loving becomes easier and the way you love looks like the way God loves.

The word among us, Lent 2024

You hear the wind blow. But you don’t know where the wind comes from or where it is going. It is the same with every person who is born of the spirit. John 3:8

Really, wind is no mystery. As the sun heats the earth’s atmosphere, warm are rises. At the same time, cold air is falling downward. As the new air is heated the process continues, leaving our planet with the wonderful phenomenon of wind.

Isn’t it interesting that everybody believes wind exists, even though they don’t understand everything about it and they can’t see it with their eyes?

p. 75, Brave Girls, Jennifer Gerelds

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, where ever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you wind up doing. Whatever you are thinking now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is how are you going to handle it? In other words, “Now what?”

Introduction, Where ever you go, there you are, Jon Kabat-Zinn