Geez, you’re fat!

You stupid loser!

Way to go, Einstein!

I mean… how could you do that?!

No wonder nobody likes you!

I don’t think you’ll be winning a metal for best parent anytime soon!

You’re such a lousy person – your spouse must be disgusted with you!

You don’t have friends because you don’t deserve them!

Your personality sucks!

You’re a failure: An utter… abject… reeking… failure!

If there is a hell, nobody deserves to go there more than you!

If somebody could say the wrong thing at the wrong time, you’re the one I’m betting on!

You have no willpower whatsoever. None. Zippo!

Okay, who said these things… and to whom did they say them?

YOU DID… you said them about yourself to yourself – these and sadly, many more! Things you would NEVER say to others, you perpetually say to yourself. And that is, or should be, an eye-opening thought to spend some time contemplating.

If you think about it, we could stand to be a whole lot more compassionate to ourselves, eh?

The next time you find yourself saying something critical to yourself, do this: Imagine standing in line behind a complete stranger at the bank or the grocery store, and then saying to ‘them’ what you just said to ‘yourself.’ You’ll be surprised at how mortified such a thought can be – and then you’ll also begin wondering why you would be so unkind to yourself.

How odd it is that we save our nicest side for complete strangers while unloading our hatred, angst, frustration and negative emotions on ourselves. If it’s wrong to say such things to others, you can be certain it’s equally wrong to say them to yourself.

We may think we’re deserving of such criticism, but we aren’t. ‘How can I be so certain,’ you ask? Because everybody – everybody – does the same thing. All of us have had our moments when we turned on ourselves, unleashing a barrage of very unflattering criticisms that were, well, not very nice.

And while we may feel justified in saying such things to ourselves, the fact is that sooner or later these same feelings (or God help us, exact words) get expressed to those closest to us. We unleash these negative feelings on our children, siblings, spouses, etc. Negative emotions never remain behind secured walls deep within us. They always find their way to the surface.

So, as you go about your day(s), be on guard for any negative self talk. Then imagine saying such things to a complete stranger. Then laugh… and cut yourself some slack. You deserve it. You’re awesome. No, wait, it’s more than that… you’re divine!

This principle made me search my memory bank for a time I might have been confronted with the unforgiveable and nonetheless chose to forgive. I guess I should consider myself blessed that I couldn’t find such an occasion.

Don’t get me wrong, it was easy to bring to mind how I had been wronged along life’s path. There have been broken friendships, strained relationships and toxic partnerships – all of which ‘I thought’ required forgiveness on my part – but would I really say that in all of that I came face-to-face with that which is/was unforgiveable?

Not really.

Most of what I considered to be moments of extending forgiveness were, in reality, only the equivalent of small acts of kindness – like when someone crosses in front of you as you’re seated at a crowded movie theatre and says, “excuse me.”

“Sure,” we reply. “No problem.”

Life can bring about some pretty challenging situations and I have no doubt that some of you reading this blog have in fact been confronted with the unforgiveable and yet somehow found a way to forgive. To me, you are a hero! I ‘hope’ I have that same fortitude within, but cannot say for sure.

I know people who have had to wrestle with how to respond to genocide and ethnic cleansing that claimed the lives of family members. I think of Yale professor Miraslov Volf and his story as told in his book, “Exclusion and Embrace.” I think of countless people in the present-day conflicts occurring in the Middle East, parts of Africa or South America – people who have held a dead child in their arms all because of a conflict they neither asked for nor desired to be associated with. And yet so many of them find a way to forgive.

For many of us (particularly in America) I think we should ponder the words of the Dali Lama regarding forgiveness in light of our journey. As I reflected on his words I began to discover that many of the times I ‘thought’ I had forgiven had probably not even come close to forgiveness – true, deep, systemic forgiveness – at best perhaps they qualified as polite pardons.

By reframing these events as being far from unforgiveable I also began to increase in compassion for a world challenged with horrors I will hopefully never know. It made me count my blessings and desire to redouble my efforts toward peace and reconciliation on behalf of others.

I pray it will happen. But even if it does, for many, it will be too late.

Can or will they find it in their heart to forgive? Unbelievably, many already have.

“Once blood has flowed,” says Raymund Schwager. “It is as contagious as the plague; violence begets violence.”

In his book ‘Tomorrow’s God,’ Neale Donald Walsh says, “Humanity’s struggle is not a military struggle, it is a struggle for the mind. If it were a military struggle, then the struggle would be over, because the mightiest military would easily win. Yet your histories, and the world events to this very day, prove that the mightiest military cannot win anything. It can subdue, but it cannot be victorious.”

Subjugation and victory are not the same thing.

Only when you change people’s minds can you claim victory in the struggle to bring peace and harmony to humanity. And this will only occur when humanity understands that its problem is not a military problem. It is not a political problem, and it is not an economic problem. The problem facing humanity today is a spiritual problem.”

If the two thoughts above are correct, then I think the idea of ‘forgiveness’ is our greatest strength in realizing peace. Forgiveness clears the table and allows us to join each other in the present moment, looking around the world and asking: What in God’s name are we doing?!

Forgiveness. Hardcore forgiveness. Nothing less.

But when it hits your home that isn’t so simple is it? When you are the one who has suffered loss, that isn’t a concept that works so easily, is it? And in an insane world of destructive and unspeakable horrors committed by our own species against our own species, who wants to go first?

Maybe someone, or a group of someones, already have.

Have you ever heard the name Charles Roberts? Perhaps it rings a bell. While the media was sensationalizing the event of his actions, it totally whiffed on a story that could literally change the world.

Charles Roberts was the man who entered the Amish schoolhouse, shooting and killing ten young children. It was a massacre of incomprehensible proportions. They stood no chance. Their young lives were innocence personified if ever there were an example of it.

Would you like to speak to their parents about ‘forgiveness’? Would anybody want that task? Do we even have the right to ask such a thing?

In actuality, they would reach us first. They forgave. Every… last… one of them.

They took food to Robert’s mother and sought to comfort her. They spoke of a God who understands what we cannot even begin to fathom. They responded according to their understanding of such a God – God, to the Amish, is a God of love.

 And because of this, they forgave, for when one understands the enormity of God’s love, there really isn’t any other option to think of – not a sane one, anyway.

Initially I didn’t think much of it. I mean, hey, at two in the morning I often go in and out of consciousness as well – without any medication! I also remember wondering what the heck he was doing leaving his house at 2am.

Evidently, so was the press.

Among media that have lost sight of the distinction between news and gossip, it wasn’t long before rumors and reports of rumors began surfacing. Before long the story of Tiger’s indiscretion(s) and those possibly involved in them commanded the attention of media outlets everywhere: TV, radio, blogs, newspapers – everywhere we turned, there was a new story about a new rumor involving yet another accusation.

Eventually all I heard playing in my mind was the Don Henley song “Dirty Laundry.” And before long, a “bubble-headed bleach-blonde” on the evening news was giving us all the lurid and tawdry details we never wanted to know.

So now the question is: What do we do with this story?

Personally, I think it presents us with a good teaching opportunity on many different levels. Anybody who has witnessed Tiger play knows two things about him: he’s a great golfer, and he’s got issues. He responds to poor shots by unleashing a barrage of ‘f-bombs,’ often slamming his club into the ground in disgust. At times his actions seem to belie the anger of someone with deep internal struggles.

Maybe this is because he carries the pressure of having been raised to be the world’s best golfer since he was old enough to walk. Perhaps he carries the angst of coming from a broken home where his parents divorced and were not together in the formative years of his life. Maybe his rage comes from the loss of his father, the person he called ‘my best friend.’

With all of those issues doesn’t it seem like it was only a matter of time before he acted out in unhealthy ways? Haven’t many of us followed similar paths, albeit less public ones?

And what of our issues, struggles and rage? What do we do with them? Isn’t this how we create heroes to begin with – by unfairly projecting our desires to be better onto them, demanding that their strengths compensate for our weaknesses? Hero worship is a dodge, a way of hiding from our own responsibility.

On a talk show this morning a woman argued against forgiving Tiger. “After all,” she said, “he owes us.” Her point was that he has made a lot of money and so that means that he has a higher responsibility to be a role model, etc. The argument seems to be that we have purchased the right to demand a higher moral standard of our cultural icons. Something doesn’t seem right in that equation.

I hurt for Tiger. He’s messed up, badly. And he has to go through the rest of his life knowing that he will be remembered as much for this incident as for his golfing legacy. And even worse, he knows that as his children mature they will be able to find the details of these events as well just by Googling their father’s name. And as for his marriage, Woods is in “intense marriage counseling” but it’s a long and arduous path back to health.

I’ll never forgive Tiger Woods. I’ll never forgive Tiger Woods because Tiger Woods has never done anything to me that warrant my forgiveness. I have no reason to give it; he has no reason to seek it. The real question for those who made him a hero to begin with is: Can Tiger Woods ever forgive them?

What, exactly, was expected (commanded?) regarding these sacrifices that would make Abel’s sacrifice more acceptable than Cain’s? And even though the New Testament tells us that Abel’s sacrifice was ‘better,’ it still doesn’t tell us exactly ‘why.’ We can make good guesses and frame adequate hypothesis but are still left without certainty. And so it is with the post-murder claim summation of God to Cain – “your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” What, exactly, does that mean?

By looking at the earliest traceable religious cultures in history, blood begets blood, i.e., ‘revenge.’ And this is what seems is going on in the Genesis text: The blood of Abel is crying out for revenge against his brother. This interpretation seems bolstered by Cain’s protestation that his banishment will bring about his death via the revenge of another on behalf of Cain. To protect against this, God puts a mark upon Cain so that all will know not to take his life.

Contrasting this theory of the ‘blood of Abel crying out from the ground for revenge’ is what the Book of Hebrews says regarding the blood of Jesus: “…Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the [his] sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24).

By comparing the death of Jesus and his final words “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” with the report of Abel’s blood crying out from the ground, it does not seem much of a stretch to see the text as contrasting a defiled religion attaching itself to ‘revenge’ with a pure religion attaching itself to ‘forgiveness.’ After all, just a few verses earlier in the Hebrews text is the call to “make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy” (Hebrews 12:14).

Based on our sacred literature then, it seems our ‘religious’ options are that we can cry out for ‘revenge’ or ‘forgiveness.’ One of them is clearly in line with an old system where bloodshed begets more bloodshed, while the other leads to forgiveness and the way of the cross and the last words of Jesus.

In listening to the rhetoric today among Christians, which of these two options is more consistently called for? Could it be that the blood of Abel is presently crying out more loudly than the blood of Jesus – even among Jesus’ own followers? If so, wouldn’t that go down in history as one of the cruelest of ironies? Assuming, that is, that there will be a civilization around to even record such a history, if the revengers have their (our?) way.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called ‘children of God.’”