Forgiveness/End game/4

 It goes without saying then, that what passes for forgiveness has a great multiplicity of motivations behind it, and that what people mean when they say that they forgive you has various meanings. True forgiveness, however, is wordless. It is a standing before your god, face to face and alone. There is nothing to say then, for all words would necessarily cheapen the truth of your own life within the greater totality of a direct encounter with existence.

This particular conjunctio oppositorum (liberation through the constraint of necessity) which we have been talking about here is also called humility. Analogically, one finds oneself at the receiving end of God’s mercy (the agency of said grace). It is a decidedly paradoxical state. Your dependence is absolute and unconditional and you are fundamentally unworthy of asking for anything. Knowing this, you ask anyway. What else can you do? Nothing, and that is just the point.

See, to look at it another way…supposing that there were no possibility of forgiveness—of making right? Suppose it mattered not a jot in the greater scheme of things. Suppose that, in point of fact, there was no such thing as justice or equity, let alone rectification. Suppose all of these things were mere sops—pacifiers to our selves in the face of inexplicable cruelty and vicarious affliction. What then would your own suffering matter? What then but the human condition itself your perpetual state of helpless unknowing concerning even the most seemingly fundamental experiences of being human? Your mind bulks at entertaining such notions? Let me remind you of another who did likewise and was answered—I mean Job.

You know not what you do. If you ramble on about forgiving this, that and the other thing, iaffords you less than nothing. And if you would pray with the hypocrites, then convince yourself of how forgiving you are. But instead, you might take courage in pleading guilty as charged—unrepentant “ sinner” that you are, and in this is the beginnings of understanding and love. Self-help forgiveness is like cheap grace. Let us recognize it for the vanity which it is.

Why call it vanity? Because you do not see. You are neither so important as to require forgiveness, nor yet are you so insignificant as to be accorded that which you in your limitless capacity for limitation understand as forgiveness. For a creature that makes of self-frustration a virtue—what does it make of forgiveness or the need for it? In any case, my concern here is with god, and with god, in truth, there is no forgiveness nor the need for forgiveness. It is but a human notion for children learning to shit without diapers. It is a teaching that would be called skillful means. And there I let the matter stand.