Forgiving Our Enemies and Our Exes

Forgiveness can enter our lives in strange ways. For Mary Noble she was consumed with anger and pain when one day her husband announced that he was leaving her for another woman. Mary, founder and CEO of Feminenza, a nonprofit organization where Mary gives training programs in forgiveness, did not always support the belief in forgiveness. She was in shock over the end of her marriage — didn’t even see it coming. And for six months she was filled with anguish.

In the upcoming “Political Forgiveness: Voices of Peace” episode I interviewed Mary, who shared a dream that her husband came back, and in the dream Mary knew they were going through all the difficulties they had put each other through yet again. When Mary woke up, she realized that she needed to move on.

Forgiving Our Exes

During the course of that day the word forgiveness “landed” in Mary. In her heart of hearts, she wanted her life back. She wanted to be free of her anger, to forgive her ex and his lover. At that moment of truly wanting to let go, she felt something inside of her — as though a miracle had happened, a moment of grace where the anger totally dissipated replaced by feelings of joy. Mary realized this was not about her ex, it was about her inner healing. She recognized that there was something greater going on and, in that moment, she experienced the power of grace. An interior renovation took place where she was able to totally let go of her pain. In her sincere desire to let go of her anger and resentment Mary was able to experience grace, and all of a sudden the anger was gone. That is the miracle of forgiveness and it can happen to anyone.

Forgiving Our Enemies

This experience was so powerful that it stayed with Mary and 20 years later, as she was developing programs for Feminenza, the issue of forgiveness kept coming up. This inspired Mary to engage in a two-year study of forgiveness, asking herself questions such as, “Why should we forgive?” and “What about the perpetrator.” She realized that as a society, as a human race, the lack of forgiveness is enshrined in what we consider the right way to go: you know, vendettas, tit for tat, sweet revenge — the things we believe are okay to do. All of this affects our ability as a human race to evolve, to become better human beings. Then a Congolese pastor who worked at the United Nations sat down with Mary and pulled out pictures of mutilated bodies. Mary asked what was she looking at and he replied, you are looking at the result of the civil war in the Congo and the lack of forgiveness. Generation after generation, leader after leader, each one comes into power and massacres everyone who was there before. Then the pastor said, “I think, Mary, forgiveness is the only way out of this.”

So how do we heal what has been passed down from generation to generation? Forgiveness is about the art of healing. This is what Mary was doing — creating a certain ecology in her workshops that is so warm and loving that it provided the space and the opportunity for people to release at least some of what they were holding on to.

Peeling the Layers

When we are willing to engage in a forgiveness process and are willing to do the work, it is like peeling the layers of an onion. We begin to deal with our anger, our fear, our guilt. We give ourselves permission to mourn. And then we can begin to release pain and sorrow and in that releasing we begin to remove blocks to the ability to love. That’s the profoundness of forgiveness. We don’t necessarily think about it in that way, but there are many levels of forgiveness from the pragmatic, letting go of pain and suffering, to the sublime, knowing grace and the face of God.

Through the work of forgiveness, we develop the ability to connect with our humanity. That interconnectedness can become very powerful — that what I see in you is what I also know is in me, because we are all part of the human condition. As we go deeper into the forgiveness process, we begin to understand what it really means to love: I can see you in your entirety. The deeper we begin to recognize what it means to be human and get in touch with our own humanity, the more we peel off those layers, the more we are also learning about what real love is. And if we can get to a place of being able to love someone — even though they may have harmed us deeply — that is the highest form of love we will ever really know.