Going With the Flow

I have never been a person to hold grudges.  Even when some kind of wrong is inflicted against me – be it verbal or physical – it may sting deeply initially, and may even thrust me into a brief downward spiral of sadness or confusion, but once my internal turmoil and searching for answers has dissipated, I always let it go and move on.  Or do I?

Sunday morning at church, our pastor spoke on “The Rhythm of Forgiveness.”  A small portion of his message was juxtaposed with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and how the need to forgive even the worst imaginable offenses is critical to our emotional and spiritual well-being.  Holding on to the hurts, scratching at the wounds,  constantly reliving and dwelling on hatred for another person or persons … none of those things can ever do anything but eat us away inside like aggressive cancer.  Only by offering forgiveness, however, can we keep the demons at bay.

But what do we do when everything we feel wages a raging war against everything we know intellectually and morally to be the better choice?  I have found myself in this quandary a number of times through the years as I’ve dealt with a toxic relationship with an immediate family member.  I won’t divulge any specific details that would identify – or even nearly identify – the relative, but I will say simply that this individual has spent years in a seeming campaign of emotional and mental manipulation and abuse.  The “attacks” (for lack of a less civilized term) have run the gamut from belittling me for my bleeding-heart-liberal political views to taking thinly veiled aim at my being gay to using family ties to bind me in a knot of guilty feelings.

Don’t misunderstand me; I will stand up for myself and bite back if I’m cornered too vehemently.  Beyond being pushed in that fashion, though, I’m just too much of a pacifist and softy to stay on a retaliatory streak.  And yet, I still manage to get tormented time and time again by the tug of war within my soul between the peace-mongering side of me that has an almost pathological aversion to conflict and the carnal side of me – with all its human frailties – that tries to convince me that I should want to knock some blocks off.  Where in that moral duality does the spiritual concept of forgiveness come into play?

I have long been accused by friends and relatives of over-analyzing and over-thinking most situations in my life.  I haven’t agreed with that assessment 100 percent of the time but, in the case of old wounds, could they be right?  I spite of myself, do I expend so much energy and waste so much precious time dwelling on the hurts inflicted that the seemingly innocuous dwelling-upon actually becomes a grudge?  In all of my trudging through the quicksand sludge of my complex feelings, maybe it does.  I do know that I don’t like the added turmoil it produces in me.  Whenever possible, I prefer to “pack light” when it comes to carrying my most intimate emotional burdens. 

So maybe I need to envision forgiveness as a constantly flowing river that is too great a force of nature to be dammed up … a cleansing, organic energy that washes away anything that ever again threatens to block me from the blessings – spiritual or otherwise – that come from going with the flow.

Sort of gives new meaning to the expression “healing waters”, if you ask me.