, 9 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
People often say that forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. What we don’t say often enough is that giving yourself permission, without censure/shame, to feel emotions that naturally accompany being wronged but are stigmatized as pathological or less than pious is also a gift.
If you can’t or don’t want to rush through your anger or grief or resentment, if you don’t want to absolve that person or allow them proximity to you (even if it’s affective proximity), forgive yourself for being human. Because uncomfortable emotions are a part of that too.
One of the best things anyone ever did for me when I was especially angry at a person who had done me considerable harm was to refer me to Rumi’s poem: The Guesthouse.
It is possible to “let go” of all of those things & withhold absolution. I can have closure and all that and not offer “forgiveness”. I learned this from my mother, God rest her soul, a woman who had survived a violent marriage. I feel comfortable saying she never forgave him.
But she continued to live, modeling kindness, generosity, love, and care to everyone who knew her. She was an expansive soul. But she would have fought anyone tooth and nail for suggesting that she *needed* to forgive that man, even decades after she left.
There are more ways to be spiritual than to offer absolution to oppressors. There’s a wide world of approaches to making sense of difficult life experiences. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not throwing shade at any victims here for handling grief the best that they can.
But finding some measure of peace in a turbulent world means that one approach is not desirable, or appropriate in every circumstance.
My sister-scholar @todnethomas said something the other day about “The Gospel of Esaw Garner” and I love the possibilities that this construct provides, for thinking of the less “polite” ways that grief manifests as spiritual practice (but that we often fail to recognize as such)
Especially when we are considering the grief of Black women. Especially.
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