The paradoxes of gratitude and forgiveness

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Late in my life, I discovered the paradoxical properties and the enormous power of gratitude and forgiveness.

Cost and benefit

When you tell someone you are grateful, you give them more than it costs you.

When you forgive someone, it costs you nothing and relieves them from whatever burden they were carrying.

So gratitude and forgiveness seem to provide some benefit to the recipient and either a cost or little benefit to the donor.

That’s the paradox.

Giving gratitude and forgiveness makes you richer, not poorer—providing you have plenty.

Utilitarian giving

“It is better to give than receive,” goes the saying. It comes from one attributed to Jesus in Acts 20:35. JC said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Better? Blessed? Whoever said it and whatever was said, it’s true whenever you have an abundance of whatever you give.

Jesus didn’t make the utilitarian argument, as far as we know. But I’ll make it for him. If you have a million dollars, the value of a dollar received is about zero. But the benefit to the person you give the dollar to can be enormous. Thus the net benefit is considerable.

The more you care about making the world better, the greater your benefit from making it better. And so, the way the world is made, you’ve benefitted from your giving.

(If you don’t care about improving the world, you don’t get that benefit. But it also says something about you, and you know it. Nonetheless, you are forgiven and will one day change your mind. )

I don’t need gratitude, though gratitude is nice.

I don’t need to know that it has made the world better.

All I need to know is that it is likely to have made the world better. That’s enough. Every dollar has that potential. (And consciousness turns the potential into the actual) See: Sacrifice to realize potential

Abundance

For anything I have in abundance—much more than I need—I can gain more by giving that thing than by receiving it. You can, too.

I have more than enough love, so it is better for me to give love than to receive it. I have an abundance of knowledge—better to give (by writing, for example) than to receive (by reading.) I have an abundance of money—so better give money than receive. (Although receiving money is nice because I have more to give.)

Deciding who to give to takes time (and practice), and I don’t have enough. But I’m working to become better at giving.

I have enough forgiveness. I have done some things that are regrettable, disreputable, and shameful and have been forgiven of them all. Not necessarily by the person I harmed, but at least by my imaginary God and me.

So I’ve got forgiveness to spare. It’s yours.

Resentment, forgiveness, gratitude

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die,” goes another saying attributed to Malachy McCourt. I’ve taken that poison with exactly that hope. The poison didn’t kill them, and it made me sick. So I’m not taking it anymore.

And I’ve found that forgiveness is the antidote to all the poison I’ve taken.

I’ve made gratitude part of my daily practice. And whenever I have a chance to forgive someone—anyone—for anything, I take it.

Expressing gratitude does not reduce the gratitude I have available. On the contrary, paradoxically, the more grateful I am, the more I can be grateful.

Expressing forgiveness does not reduce my ability to forgive. On the contrary, paradoxically, the more I forgive others, the more I can forgive—including myself.

Judged by the average of humanity, I deem myself a pretty good person. But, judging by the ideal of what a person could be, I’m deficient. And I forgive that.

I could be more courageous. I could work harder at what I care about. I could have more self-discipline. I could waste less time. If someone recorded every thought that went through my mind in a day, edited them down to the worst couple of minutes, and posted them publicly, you’d see pride, envy, egotism, contempt, greed, irritation, flashes of anger, shame, and some porn.

They pop into my mind from time to time unbidden.

I forgive myself. I forgive the ideas. I forgive whatever puts them in my mind.

A lesson in forgiveness

Once upon a time, my mother did something that offended me, so I stopped talking to her.

It went on for years.

I was seething with justified anger.

I cultivated the resentment that I had built growing up. I nurtured it. I could have done something about it, but I refused to.

I hurt myself, my father, denied my kids the experience of their grandparents, trying to hurt my mother. I was taking poison and hoping she would die.

Finally, I came to my senses. I apologized. I did not ask for forgiveness. I just took responsibility for what I had done. Maybe she forgave me. Perhaps for her, there was nothing for her to forgive. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that I had faced a terrible version of myself; I had accepted responsibility, I had apologized, and I had forgiven myself.

I decided this: If I can forgive myself for this, I can forgive anyone for anything. That was probably too grand. I am sure there are people and acts I would still find unforgivable. If someone did something horrible, I still might want to punish them or see them punished. But without resentment. There is nothing that has happened that needs forgiveness and remains unforgiven.

My aspiration remains: hold no resentment.

Forgive what you can.

Gratitude and forgiveness: better to give than to receive.

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