Forgetting

What is a quality of God that we as human beings find hardest to imitate?

Forgetting. We forget the power of forgetting, of how liberating it is to let not the past of ourselves go, but to let the regret and guilt over our past go, and this is the heart of forgiveness. The one who forgets can look to his darkest moments of personal history without mistaking a speck of his own self with what he remembers. That's the fallacy in keeping our guilt over past mistakes: we assume we are the person we once were. And we're not. I am not the same comprehensive self of twenty seconds ago, though the clothing of my personality would fool me into thinking otherwise. I am my freedom, and my freedom is my I.

Woe unto the man who cannot forget his bloodstained past. The thought of that hassles him mercilessly, and so he spends his time in endless distractions, cluttered up in beer bottles and the miasma of captivating television, snatching every chance he has to hide his fearful past with friends or work or money or things . He is torn between running and letting his exhaustion find rest by quitting and staring the demon in its face. One day, dredged out in the cold misery of melancholy, enveloped by the night and the radiating sound of a fearless cricket singing to the outer world, he does just this. He quits. He comes to find, to his shock, that standing firmly on his feet and digesting all angles of his now remote past allows him to -- breathe. He no longer fears what he did in running from it. In resignation he realizes that there is a future. He takes a step on the path of futurity while simultaneously slapping away his past, and suddenly the demon is stolen by a breeze just weak enough to caress his hair.

Forgetting takes a life of discipline in the face of divine grace. The reason we don't forget our past is because we're too regretfully enmeshed with it to even realize that it needs to be let go, and that our refusal to confront what haunts our steps prevents us from grasping who we are to become through the future. Our power to forget is shrouded with moments of forgetting that we contain the ability to forget.

God is capable of forgetting the sins of our past without forgetting our past. What is it to seek forgiveness but to seek to forget our past? It isn't so much that we need to ask God for forgiveness in order for Him to do so. Turn it around. We need to ask God's forgiveness to be fully capable of forgiving ourselves, of realizing that heavenly forgetting is already one step ahead of us. God needs no words as a formulaic condition in order to act in forgiveness; He only needs repentance, your prodigal turning away from the negation of sin back to the shimmering destiny God has in mind for you. The moment you have prayed for repentance with a sincere heart you already have forgiveness, for God hears your heart in immediacy, and your words are always working, sweat-drenched with acid lungs, to catch up.

Sign

I saw the dead spirit of humanity on a minute market window today. Bold, ominous red letters brightened by the sun: NO SMOKING. Not even a full inch below it: a smoking advertisement. Moral: don't do this here, but kill yourself elsewhere, chop chop, off you go, leave me alone.