In talking to an old friend of mine, who just lost his mother, he told me that the biggest thing he had learned from her was forgiveness. That set my mind off to thinking about forgiveness for this past week.
Forgiveness. That was, and sometimes continues to be, a big hurdle for me. For a long time, after I came into this program, I couldn’t even think about forgiveness. It just wasn’t in me. Then I remember hearing one old timer saying that we can’t get to forgiving others until we first forgive ourselves. That had never occurred to me before. Forgiving myself. That was a bigger hurdle than forgiving others.
But I knew that, if I wanted to stay sober, I was somehow going to have to learn how to forgive all those others with whom I had resentments. But forgiving myself? I thought about all the harms I had done others. Especially my sins of omission. That was going to be a pretty high mountain to climb. Never, ever would I be able to do that.
The first hurdle, forgiving others, came in my working the 9th Step. It just happened. I suddenly found that almost all my resentments passed in my making amends. I was still angry at one of the men I was making amends with, when having completed that they just seemed to disappear.
That led me to thinking. What had happened? Eventually I came to the conclusion that in order to forgive I first had to understand. In some fashion I believe I had reached a level of understanding of others. I never had tried to understand others. But in trying to practice these principles in all of my affairs, I came to realize that in order to do that I needed to try to understand where others were coming from. So I set out to get a more open mind on why people spoke and acted like they did. Something akin to what Bill W. was talking about in the 4th Step in How It Works in the BB.
Then came the acid test. Forgiveness of myself. How was I to do that. And there was that word “understanding”. Did I really understand myself. I’m not talking about letting myself off the hook on the cheap. It meant going back, not once, or even twice, to examining my 4th and 8th Steps. In fact, I’m still in process in this operation. But I know I have grown closer as I proceed.
This week I was dealing with two new resentments. I examined the causes and after that inventory, I went to another person in this program and talked. Then I appealed to my higher power and determined to let go of these two. I also went to forgiveness. When I went to the meeting today, these two men were there. I had no difficulty in facing them and then, lo and behold, one of the men spoke and directly picked up on something I had said. He looked right at me and said he agreed. When he left he looked at me and smiled and shook my hand, as did the other man. I don’t know what that was, but I think it had something to do with the whole process I have been going through this week.
It’s about trying to live a spiritual life. To stop fighting anyone and anything, including alcohol. That begins with the willingness to forgive others and myself. It’s all about sobriety and living a sober life. Depending on my higher power and the other sober people in this program.