Saturday of Lent III - Penance
Forgiveness is not the comfortable, often somewhat superior, “I forgive you” that comes so easily to human lips when emotions have cooled. Things are then smoothed over but the resentment descends into the unconscious together with a hidden condition that the forgiven injury shall not be repeated. The ultimate experience of forgiveness brings a change of heart, a metanoia of the spirit, after which every seeming injury, injustice, rejection, past, present or future, every so-called blow of fate, becomes, as it were, an essential note in the music of God, however discordant it may sound to our superficial hearing. And the experience excludes nothing which means that in this moment of forgiveness all one's sins and weaknesses are included, being at the same time both remembered and known as the essential darkness which has revealed to us the light.
Helen M. Luke (1904-1995) was born in England. In midlife, she studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, then moved to the U.S. and established an analytical practice with Robert Johnson in Los Angeles. In 1962, she founded the Apple Farm Community in Three Rivers, Michigan, "a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives." This quote is taken from her reflection, Old Age, (c) 1987.
