Life is Not What Happens to You but How You React to It
Everyone fails. Everyone sins. Do you deserve forgiveness? It depends.
In his classic leadership book On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis writes,
“There is nothing you can do about your early life except to understand it. You can, however, do everything about the rest of your life.”
There is an important distinction between understanding our past and learning to live with the troubles of our past.
Learning to live with our troubles is analogous to putting up with a noisy neighbor, a boil on our neck, or a lump in our breast.
At one point, all three will come to roost.
When we ignore the neighbor, he might beat up his wife again. Allowing the boil to fester could lead to an infection, or the lump in our breast becomes two.
Understanding our past is not the same as putting up with it. It is not coming to terms with the abuse heaped on our backs and sheared across our souls when we were children.
Understanding our past starts with knowing who we are and who we are not.
It is coming to terms with our worthiness, who we are in our communities, and the role of forgiveness in our lives — both for ourselves and those who hurt us.
Everyone is a combination of talent fulfilled and left on the table, hopes realized, and ones cremated.
Sometimes, living is fearing who we are and the sins we carry.
We wonder if our past and hoped-for forgiveness define who we will be and if that same forgiveness is the sole arbiter of our worthiness.
Simon Wiesenthal, in his book Sunflower, wrote that during the war, he was a prisoner at Auschwitz. At one point, he was taken to the ghetto of his hometown when he came to his old school, which had been turned into a hospital.
A nurse saw him and asked if he was a Jew. Wiesenthal says yes. The nurse takes Simon to a dying SS soldier who wants to confess his sins and crimes to a Jew in hopes he will be forgiven. The German soldier confesses his sins, and Simon gets up and leaves. The nurse asks him to come back, but Simon does not. He could not offer the man the forgiveness he desperately wanted.
Simon Wiesenthal believed that no matter how much we repent, make amends, and change our lives, some sins are unforgivable.
And that is what you must decide. Are all sins forgivable or only certain ones?
That is the conflict in many of us. Our lives vacillate between being the soldier asking for forgiveness and Father Confessor being asked to forgive the hurts and wrongs done to another.
Even the holiest of men need forgiveness.
Pope Francis greeted a large group of followers during a New Year’s Eve gathering in Rome when an enthusiastic woman grabbed him. Without thinking, he slapped the woman’s hand. Imagine beginning the New Year and being slapped by the Pope.
The next day, he apologized:
I apologize for the bad example yesterday … sometimes even I lose patience.
Even the Pope has flaws.
It is unclear who the woman forgave Pope Francis. We do one thing: the Pope asked for forgiveness, and like Simon Wiesenthal, we have to decide, individually and collectively, if we have the right.
We cannot do anything about our past except understand it. When attempting to grasp the magnitude of our lives, we find a certain amount of self-forgiveness is necessary.
Understand who you are and who you are not.
Recognize you are flawed and imperfect. You will screw up.
And because you are flawed and imperfect, you will need forgiveness.
This sort of understanding does not come easily, and it is not procured cheaply. It is both a surrender and a renewal of who you are and could be.
Bennis said we cannot do anything about our past, but we can do everything about the rest of our lives. That starts with recognizing we are human.
We will fail, and when we do, we need to forgive ourselves for our mistakes. It also means accepting the ‘humanness’ in everyone else.
When tragedy strikes, when someone hurts us, remember what Epictetus said,
It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.
Forgiveness is like setting a prisoner free and then recognizing that you are the prisoner.
Thanks for reading. Simon Wiesenthal was a great man, but even he needed and sought forgiveness.
Love to you and yours,
Michael