As the priest to whom I occasionally go to confession knows, (shout out to Fr. ____), I, with my ‘artistic temperament’ (to put it mildly) tend to be the one raising a ruckus that ends with my needing to seek forgiveness.
Sometimes, others hurt me and generally I forgive — I have learned from being on the other side. Occasionally, I hold a grudge, like the one I have towards someone who caused me to lose my wheelchair accessible apartment and who never acknowledged the lapse. Hear my resentment?
But believe me, the resentment I’m carrying toward that person is hurting me much more than it is hurting her.
A dear friend of mine passed away a few days ago after several years of living with cancer. She was one of those people that everyone liked to call ‘a dear, close friend.’
She used to say that everything that happed to you was either a gift or a lesson. The gifts were the clearly good things that happened: getting that great job, enjoying beautiful weather on an important day, having that special person in your life.
The lessons were the hard stuff: a disappointing performance evaluation, a rejection from a desired partner, the feeling of being unpopular and uncool. But you can learn from the lessons so, in truth, the lessons are gifts too.
Thus, she said, everything is a gift — maybe not the ones we want, but perhaps the ones we need to grow. Patterns of transgressions and forgiveness — and the release that forgiveness brings — are gifts embedded in lessons.
Forgiveness is a gift when someone forgives me. Very little experiences are as freeing to me as the feeling of realizing, by someone’s actions and words, that she/he has forgiven me at some level. That awareness of being forgiven makes me feel light and airy, cheerful and generous.
But when I forgive others, the ‘lesson’ of hurt from another becomes a gift to myself as well because the anger and resentment leave my head, heart and body, and I feel lighter and more loving inside and out. Forgiving others releases tension in my shoulders, allows my mind to settle and my spirit to lighten up.
In my research in the area of internal marketing (creating and communicating value for internal audiences of an organization), my colleagues and I are pursuing a study on forgiveness within organizations.
Organizations can be a business, a sorority, a department or even a community. Interpersonal relations strained by a transgression (imagined or, very likely, real) followed by lack of forgiveness can harm an organization’s inner workings and, we predict, thwart achievement of objectives. We reason that if forgiveness releases the body, mind and soul for individuals, then, think what it might do for a work group, an organization and/or a community.
As I get older, I realize that we all form histories with the people we encounter. You and I might have served on a committee together at one time. You might have been in one of my classes. I might have contacted you regarding a question in your research area. Once we meet, we begin a story of our relationship with each other. An organization is a complex web of overlapping, intertwining, strong and weak relationships among individuals. Due to our human nature (and the presence of expressive individuals like me), a proportion of those bonds will require forgiveness.
Forgiveness and letting go of resentments can be a joyous thing to bring to a workplace.
Kate Lawrence is an assistant
professor of business.
She can be reached at
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