The Echo Of Hate
There is something that is left after you have forgiven someone. And what is left feels like ashes.
Soft flakes of what you can pick up after all that emotion has been burnt away.
Forgiveness can be very efficient at deleting from your mind and heart and soul that shackle that kept you folding over in pain at the memory of the event.
Forgiveness can be the key. But what is left over when you are free has its own existence.
The absence of unforgiveness has its own reality. Its own life.
Like the wind: its there, but at the same time, its not.
The ashes from that which is left from the time of anger, walls, and fear are a showing from God that once something was there, but now that something has been removed from your life.
Like the ashes imposed on us on Ash Wednesday, we can use them to remind us of where we have been and recognize where we are now.
The past has been blown away.
And in that absence of unforgiveness we might feel more than just a remembrance of what once was. We may feel disoriented without those structures that once were part of us. We may feel sadness, even, because that resentment may have been all that was left of our relationship with the other person. After our heart is broken by the harm committed and the relationship breaks apart, no matter what happened between us, we may still want that piece of hope that whatever it was really didn’t matter that much.
So many of us have chosen the relationship over the outrage. Until that point comes of no return. The commitment didn’t pay off after all. It only aggravated the other person into upping his harmful ways to try and drive you away.
Even after being driven away, even after the slammed door, our heart still chooses the relationship.
And forgiveness just lets you close your own door on the pain.
But there is that closing.
There are those ashes, still there in your grate, that need to be swept up and held up to the wind to be caught and flown.
And then there is nothing except the echo of what was.
The ashes of once was.
Cleaning house to make way for what will be.
Lent is a time of acknowledging all those ashes that have been in our lives. And recognizing that there will be more ashes in the days to come.
That some parts of life end. And new parts begin.
And it is, in some ways, a matter of continual sweeping up and clearing away.
Of our souls.
And our hearts.
And our minds.