Into Every Troubled Breast

 it seems to me that there are two qualities that ease our suffering more than anything else:  the ability to forgive and a sense of gratitude.  as i observe several people i love deeply, i long for them to forgive past wrongs.  i understand how their feelings of anger toward another have come to be.  i agree that they were wronged in the most hurtful ways.  yet their refusal to deal with their injury by talking with the person who caused it, their insistence on reliving the incident that caused their initial pain, and their failure to forgive that person cause their suffering to be prolonged.  it is as if they derive some perverse pleasure from their victimhood.  in cutting themselves off from someone i know that they love, they say to themselves and to those who listen to them describe their pain over and over that their isolating themselves from the offender will prevent another such hurt, but still the pain that is at the root of their suffering continues to fester like an infected wound that goes untreated.  the offending party can never make amends because the one who was injured will not have anything further to do with them.  often both parties continue to feel aggrieved, each blaming the other for their parting of ways.

in such situations, if we can try to place ourselves in the shoes of the other person, we may see why they behaved as they did.  understanding goes a long way toward finding forgiveness in our hearts but it doesn't excuse wronging another.  still, the person who was wronged must accept that the one who hurt them did so because of their own hurt.  they lashed out because of some hurt in their own lives, perhaps an injury that happened long ago that was never dealt with.  when we are able to see another's pain in the midst of our own pain, we can see that we are all the same and admit that suffering is universal.  we ease our own suffering by recognizing the suffering of others and forgiving them for allowing their suffering to cause more suffering for us.  

like forgiveness, gratitude enables us to see that we are not alone in the world.  we enjoy so many blessings because others have enabled them.  we can't lie down in our beds at night without countless people having made our rest possible.  those who felled the trees to provide the wood for our bed frames, those who grew the crops that made it possible to weave the fabrics of our bed linens, those who devised and manufactured the machines that enabled the trees to be felled and the crops to be harvested, the person who placed the linens on the bed in which we rest, the person who purchased our beds and our bed linens--the list could go on--to all of those we owe a debt of gratitude.  in every aspect of our lives, there are such lists of countless others who have made everything we enjoy possible.  we must be grateful to our ancestors who went before us, who made it possible for us to be where we are and as we are.  none of us is self-made.  in a real sense, each person in the world is our own mother, our father, our sister, our brother.  without them we could not exist, and to each of them we ought to be grateful.

may we be filled with boundless gratitude.  may we recognize that all is interconnected and that we are members of a vast network of relationships to every person and to the environment of which we are a part.  may we open our hearts so that our ability to forgive is infinite.  shalom.