I’m thinking about forgiveness today. One of my favorite lessons from A Course in Miracles is that forgiveness is the key to happiness. What is forgiveness, anyway? Is it better to forgive and forget? Can most people actually do the “forget” part?

My friend Peter Sandhill likes to say the a good definition of forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better yesterday. Forgiveness involves letting go of past hurts, resentments, and upsets instead of dragging the past into the present.

A lot of people try to forgive conditionally - I’ll forgive you if you promise never to do THAT again. In my experience conditional forgiveness is usually not forgiveness at all. Actually it’s a test. If the one being forgiven stays transgression-free for some unspecified period of time then they will be forgiven. What I see happening is that if the “transgressor” ever does anything even remotely resembling the action that got them in trouble in the first place, the past will be trotted out and used as evidence that they never really deserved forgiveness in the first place.And who is hurt by our refusal to forgive? Does the unforgiven person suffer from our unwillingness to let go? Perhaps, but not I think nearly as much as we suffer holding onto past hurts. Does our refusal to forgive protect us from being hurt again? Or does it in fact inspire our own feelings of hopelessness and impotent anger?

So who deserves forgiveness? Maybe everyone and no one. I think my decision to forgive is my decision to move on, to let go, to stop hurting myself over past behaviors, my own or the behavior of others. I forgive for me, not for the other person.Sometimes we think that someones behavior is “unforgivable”. We vow to never forgive them, usually with high moral indignation. And yet how many of us are Saints or Bodhisattva’s? How many adults are truly without sin? I found a great site on the net that asks if even Jesus was without sin