There is a brand new recycling of an old, ancient lie told to soothe one’s enflamed ego and sense of being wounded and let down in experiencing the world.

The lie is that there is no such thing as failure, and that as a human being it is impossible to fail another person.

I would laugh if it wasn’t such a tragic and poisonous lie.

But the lie is told for a more basic reason than to just insulate one’s heart against hurt:  the lie is told to free one’s self from the pain of forgiveness, from giving forgiveness and even more important, from receiving forgiveness…

…and those pains are freely paid to avoid confronting the root:  Pride.  I think it likely that Pride is the root of all evils in the world.

At any rate, Desmond Tutu has some very cogent things to say about forgiveness:

“The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another. Each time we help and each time we harm we are dramatically impacting our world.

     As long as we are human, some of our interactions will go wrong, and then we will hurt or be hurt or both. It is the nature of being human and it is unavoidable.

     Forgiveness is the way we set those interactions right. It is the way we mend tears in the social fabric. It is the way we stop our human community from unraveling.”

—	Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving