I carry every hurt I have inflicted in my distress and anger, every hurt I have inflicted in my life, hurt I have inflicted for being autistic and abused and maligned, traumatised and unable to cope with relationship with people.
The people who were working to rebuild me when the Diocese launched on me last year and had me publicly flogged and villified, had been teaching me about forgiveness, and they got me a book about forgiveness, the book included a passage on self-forgiveness and how it is as essential to forgive yourself as it is to forgive others.
But, easier said than done, I grew up in an environment that left me unable to love, unable to understand people, and unable to understand forgiveness, eventually, in order to keep myself alive after the horrific events of 2008-2011, I learned to forgive others for the sake of my health and sanity at very least. But I have never learned to forgive myself, and the 15 month public flogging with the eternal wait to be fully, completely and finally destroyed, has taken away the healing work of the people who were working with me, and left me condemned by myself and others, and waiting to be destroyed. Obviously carrying my sins like a ton of rock is not enough. And knowing that the way I have been destroyed is neither fair nor Christian, changes nothing.
There is little hope of me continuing to survive and returning to therapy and being able to overcome my problems, and so I will die damned by the very same type of people Jesus spoke to all those years ago:
'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'.
I think self-forgiveness is not always possible, and I’m not sure that it is fits well with Christianity anyway. Most of us carry a burden of guilt for various things we have done wrong in our lives, and it is hard to shift by our own efforts. Forgiveness, in Christianity, is a gift from God, unmerited, not needing human effort, freely given. Jesus said to the man who was lame, “You are forgiven; get up and walk”, and not “Forgive yourself; get up and walk”.
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