“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”  (Jesus to Peter, Matthew 18: 22, NRSV on the question of how often to forgive)  Stuff just doesn’t go away that easily.  It’s not so much that someone has wronged us seventy-seven times.  It’s more that we keep working on the wrongs that really nail us over and over and over.  The encouragement, I believe, is not to be a fool and allow the same person to harm us seventy-seven times – the delightful wallow of co-dependence – but rather to keep working it out, keep working it out.

Whatever the cause of a deep pain, our overwhelming response is anger, the desire for revenge and even hatred of another.  These are natural emotional efforts to protect ourselves.  It hurts.  I’ve been wounded.  I have lost things that cannot be recovered.  There are scars.  The wounds may be physical, psychic or both.

Here’s the thing.  We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers.  We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers.  The first seventy-five times we work at forgiving someone in our head we are probably just learning that lesson.  The problem is that we feel bad about the emotions – the fact that we are still angry about having to give our perpetrator a Get Out of Jail (or Get Out of Hell, as the case may be) Free Card.

Emotions jump up and tell us that we have been hurt, that we have been violated, that we are suffering and in need of repair because of the actions of another.  Pay attention.  These are messengers.  We need compassion.  We need care.  We need healing.

Our Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil response is to let these emotions become our rulers.  OK, anger, take charge.  This feels good.  Let’s get violent, whether in thought, word or deed.  Whether in aggression that is active or cloaked in passivity.  Let’s break some china.  Let’s destroy some things, deliver the pain that will bring this sum back to zero.  Let’s take it a step further to teach a lesson and win the game.  Be done with this sucker.

All of this is compounded by the deep wounds of childhood, wounds that happened before we had any clue of how to deal with them.  Wounds when we were innocent and did not even know that the world should not be, or might not be like the world we were experiencing.  Seventy times seventy times seventy, the iteration and years of learning and coming to terms with these wounds.

Under the Tree of Life, our emotions are our teachers and not our rulers.  They tell us that our little manifestation of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source has been wounded.  We need protection and shelter.  If we are wise, we will give true heed to the inclinations for fight or flight, and we will make, for us, the best choice about the immediate and longer term path out of danger.

Ultimately, perhaps around cycle seventy-six of our desire for revenge, we may begin to understand the edict that we love our neighbor as our self.  We begin to love our self.  We hear our own pain and respond with compassion.  We see our wounds and apply the dressings, or find the person who can help us apply them.  We sit with our self.  Our capital S eternal Self beyond all harm sits, and holds, and cries, and rocks and soothes our small s manifested and wounded self.  We gift our self the Breath of Life that cools, the Healing Water that cleanses, the Leaves of the Tree that create the balm of protection and restoration.

And when seventy-seven rolls around, we might just be ready to turn to our neighbor, our father, our mother, our colleague, the perpetrator of our hurt.  We turn and we offer, from our Self to their self, the seat of welcome and restoration.  Come sit beside me, here, beneath the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

© Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype.  Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.