Forgiveness, conscious, willing and loving is an activity of the feelings of humanity. Through this grace, we release the pent-up rebellions, resentments, tensions and self-justifications as well as the self-condemnations which create the major portion of the ills of mind and body. Forgiveness replaces these by the constructive feeling of understanding love and tolerant kindness. A conscious healing of the soul takes place when the individual arises in the dignity of its own awareness that the power of forgiveness lies within the heart and proceeds to generate a feeling of forgiving love towards every person, place, condition and thing which has knowingly or unknowingly done wrong. Sometimes it takes a little time to want to forgive a seemingly unjust act. The soul rather enjoys nursing the grudges and the hurts and builds a shell of distrust around it, living in a constant repetition of the errors of self or others. Thus, there is conjured up out of the realm of imagination, the repetition of the original wrong which lives (and corrodes through its living), the very peace of mind and heart, the very strength and vitality of body which every individual seeks. 

In the Lord’s Prayer is a very thought-provoking statement in the invocation to the Father of all to “forgive us our trespasses as (in the same measure) we forgive those who have trespassed against us”. We are asking that the Lord of Life deal with us as we deal with our fellow humans. To receive the fullest blessing of the grace of forgiveness for ourselves, we must want to and really enjoy forgiving the life which has seemed to do us wrong. We must be as willing to forgive ourselves as we are to forgive each other. The guilt complexes, the obsessions buried in the subconscious minds of all that erupt as disease of mind and body, are due to the lack of forgiveness of the soul for certain imagined or actual transgressions of the Law of life. 

This does not mean that we should be lax in our exertion of personal vigilance over transgressions. It does mean, however, that we should be willing to invoke the grace of God through those errors that have already been made and to turn our faces toward each new day unencumbered by the errors of the days and years that have passed. 

When a teacher undertakes to convey certain facts to the students under their supervision, s/he does not continue to remind them of their former errors when the students have once learned the principle and make those errors no longer. Why then should an All-wise Supreme Being revert to the principle of punishment when the child has learned the lesson and no longer creates the causes which have manifested as the ills that appear on the screen of life? Each individual can and must wipe their slate clean and write anew. The quality of forgiveness is the way and means of wiping away the mistakes of the past and setting one’s own world at peace so that the grace of God may enter in. 

Each evening, in a period of retrospection, look back through your day and consciously try to sincerely forgive all the mistakes made by yourself and others. Enter sleep at peace with the world, your fellow humans and God. Then you will arise refreshed in mind and body, able to proceed.