Learning to forgive involves this complex and quite painful process of withdrawing our projections from others. Nothing is easier, it can give a kind of immediate satisfaction to us, to be able to blame others for what has gone wrong in our own life. This is the beginning of persecutions and holocausts. This is the beginning of witch-hunts, the beginning of all kinds of personal or collective inhumanity. It’s the pleasure. This is the terrible part of human nature, that we can take a pleasure in blaming others for our faults, projecting our own problems onto them, making them scapegoats. There is a perverse pleasure in that. It happens over and over again in history. It happens over and over again in our personal lives. It is the darker side of human nature. And again, it is the work of deep prayer that allows us to forgive. Why the only way is the way of forgiveness, why Jesus makes that the axis of his moral teaching (that’s all he tells us to do: to love one another including, specifically,loving our enemies). If we can learn to do that, we learn to go beyond the ego, beyond our fear, beyond our self-hatred and beyond our guilt, by withdrawing the way we project these on to others.
(Aspects of Love 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
