Forgiveness

I was contacted today by a person I haven't seen nor spoken with in many years.  We were friends once, but our friendship had always been rather difficult due to a great deal of dysfunction in this other person's life, and my own admitted impatience in dealing with it.  Over the years, this "friend" had, for all intents and purposes, shut me out of her life completely because of some perceived hurt.  In the past, my eventual apologizing, regardless of whether I was actually wrong or not, was the standard procedure, at which point this "friend" would see fit to begin communicating with me again.

After the third time of being completely shut of out of this "friend's" life, I realized that I was basically being a doormat.  This was about two or three years ago, and a great deal has changed since then.  I let go of any hopes of this every growing into a meaningful friendship, and had no intentions of dealing with this person again. 

Until today, when I got the inevitable email attempting to establish regular contact again.

As always, I turned to Ra, and found the following:

Our understanding of karma is that which may be called inertia. Those actions which are put into motion will continue using the ways of balancing until such time as the controlling or higher principle which you may liken unto your braking or stopping is invoked. This stoppage of the inertia of action may be called forgiveness. These two concepts are inseparable. (34.4)

Forgiveness is highly preferable because it stops karma.  Have I forgiven this person?  I believe so.  I certainly don't harbor any ill-will toward her.  I want to see her be happy and get over all her dysfunction (though that's unlikely to happen, unfortunately). 

So, to forgive is one thing.  To pick up a dysfunctional friendship because I happen to forgive this person is, I think, an entirely separate matter.  It was clear from the email I received that the only reason for contact was to assuage her own guilt due to her own past actions.  I'm discovering that one can forgive while still taking care of oneself, something I had a hard time with in years past. As Ra commented:

Healing is a process of acceptance, forgiveness, and, if possible, restitution. The restitution not being available in time/space, there are many among your peoples now attempting restitution while in the physical. (26.27)

The word "restitution" refers to restoring something to it's original state, i.e., a damaged friendship.  So it's clear from this, at least to me, that forgiveness doesn't necessarily imply "turning the other cheek."

Any comments?

Comments

[shabana]

A good friend is one who never gives any physical or emotional pain to his/her friend......

But life is not like that we get hurt we go through emotional crises and physical pain through those whom we are closely connected like friends, relatives, children, spouse, parents and etc etc...........every pain and every pleasure help us grow, push us towards the balance and our internal vibration, where we are one not the separate self....... here two people are going through pain....one who did something selfish and now she is in state of guilt another is one who got hurt and forgiven her friend for some action....one who will step forward and will try to solve this problem will be free from her mid quickly......all angers and emotions are nothing just the practices to make us free from our brain to make us what we truly are...............one day we all will be in state of mind where if we will be hurt by someone we put the bandage on our wound it would be like working in our kitchen our one hand cut the other with knife.........we will never punish one hand for cutting other........hope it would happen.............LOL! little things happen in big cities( don't remember in which Indian movie I heard this)