Beyond Atonement: The Gift of Self-Forgiveness
The Roman Catholic Church, William Shakespeare, Carl Jung and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous all made it clear: We humans have a dark side. The art world has run with that. Novelist Ian McEwan, for example, published "Atonement" which was made into a film. There has been the recent streamer on Paramount "The Whale." The central characters in both had done acts they deeply regretted. All that eats at them. Charlie in "The Whale," who ditched his family for a male lover, literally eats himself to death. Of course, this deep shame about behavior comes up during Tarot readings. That includes a resistance against self-forgiveness. That wrench in the works is the assumption that what they did is so awful that they don't "deserve" forgiveness. Yet that's reverse narcissism: the total preoccupation with the self, the shutting out of the realities of what it means to be human. A central Zen belief is that to be a human is to be prof