Journey Groups

READINGS FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH
october's THEME: FORGIVENESS

“The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hate has become a present love.” (The Course in Miracles)

“Forgiveness is no way justifies the actions that caused your wounding, nor does it mean you have to seek out those that harmed you. It is simply a movement to release and ease your heart of the pain and hatred that binds it. It is the harvested fruit of a season of darkness, followed by a season of growth, and very hard work.” (Dawna Markova)


“The art of yielding for the sake of love is precious. So is expressing sorrow for the pain you have caused- and meaning it. Both arts can be learned just as all other psychological arts are learned: by watching, reflecting, and choosing how you will act”. (Stephanie Dowrick)


“Forgiveness is not an occasional act. It is a permanent attitude”. (Martin Luther King)


“Forgiveness is the means to release yourself and perhaps others, too from an experience of hurt, wounding, suffering humiliation or pain that has already passed. It is what allows you at least some separation from that experience so that you can be fresh to what is present in the moment”. (Stephanie Dowrick)

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Jesus on the cross: Luke 23:34)

“You have learned how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well”. (Matthew 18:21-22)


“Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander”. ( Yehuda Behur)


“Genuine social change requires release from the past”. (Hannah Arendt)


“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
therefore we must be saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
therefore we must be saved by forgiveness”. (Reinhold Niebuhr)


“This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well”. (Francis Bacon)


give, but I cannot forget” is only another way of saying, “I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note-torn in two and burned up so that it never can be shown against one.


“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future”. ( Paul Boese)


Do you prefer to be right or happy?


“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless”. (Gandhi)


“Seeing with better eyes “We can recognize that the offender is a valuable human being who struggles with the same needs, pressures, and confusions that we struggle with. We will recognize that the incident really may not have been about us in the first place. Instead it was about the wrongdoer’s misguided attempt to meet his or her own needs. As we regard offenders from this point of view (regardless of whether they repent and regardless of what they have done or suffered) we will be in a position to forgive them”. (Holmgren)


“Nobody ever forgets where they buried the hatchet”. (Kim Hubbard)


“The capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature-crafted by natural selection- that exists today because it was adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the human species developed”. (Phil Cousineau)


Most of my relatives died in a concentration camp. I have found it very easy to forgive Adolf Hitler because I believe he was mentally ill. What has not been easy is to forgive all of the people who participated who were not crazy….and all of the others who looked the other way and said nothing. (Anonymous)


If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?


“They who have not forgiven an enemy have never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life”. (Lauter)


“It is not ‘forgive and forget’ as if nothing wrong had ever happened, but ‘forgive and go forward’, building on the mistakes of the past and the energy generated by reconciliation to create a new future”. (Cynthia Osiek)


It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. (St. Francis of Assisi)


“All religions stress the power of forgiveness, and this power is never more deeply felt than when someone is dying. Through forgiving and being forgiven, we purify ourselves most completely for the journey through death”. (Sogval Rinpoche)


“To err is human, to forgive is divine”. (Alexander Pope)


“Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven”. (Charles Williams)