"Forgive your father"

Tuesday night I visited the UU Sangha, as usual. And I told the story about my father.

 

At the end, as we were all packing up, one of the women said, “Good luck with your dad!”

 

Then she added, “My uncle always used to say, You have to forgive your father; because if you don’t, who will?”

 

That almost sounds like saying, You have to forgive your father; because if you don’t, you can be damned sure nobody else will!  

 

Maybe that’s what she meant and maybe not. But either way I got a hollow chuckle out of it.

 

Jack Kornfield (or maybe it was Lily Tomlin) once defined forgiveness as “giving up any hope of having a better past”. In that sense, I suppose I have already forgiven him. I know that’s just how he is … I don’t expect any better of him … and I even realize that my father’s selfish and short-sighted behaviors injure himself more than they injure anybody else. I realize that he makes himself suffer terribly this way, and I try – when I can spare the attention – to have compassion for him over this.

 

But that doesn’t stop me from recognizing what he is. And it hasn’t yet stopped me from feeling irritated at him. Clearly I have a lot more spiritual progress to make ….