Inside Greatness : a Compelling Story About Forgiveness

The Importance of Stories in Our Lives

Life itself is the all–absorbing, captivating and forceful terrain of our expressed experience. Others learn from experience through the stories they tell or hear. Our understanding of our own experience deepens as we share our encounters.

As we bring forth the ancient Greek high sense of Oneness, we find it is comprised of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. There are also many other groups of three which have been guiding principles of human life through the ages like Faith, Hope, and Charity. Another is Will, Love-Wisdom and Creative Activity.

Each aspect of a story blends into the other triple ideas that make a whole and offers a kind of light on key parts of the story experience that literally highlights certain parts of life and gives them meaning beyond sheer recognition and creates for the listener an ah-hah, a meaning that we sense as universal. It is an, “Oh yes, I know what that’s like,” or “Yes, I did that too when I wanted to….”

Humans seem to naturally abstract light, or should we call it beauty, from the meaning of a story.

The first story in my book Greatness: 21 Compelling Stories that Open the Heart is about forgiveness. This story is one of the great stories of humankind and addresses one of the hardest things that humans have to come to grips with: FORGIVENESS.

Born of a spirit of towering strength and almost unbelievable compassion, this amazing quality of final vulnerability stings us with its truth. Like the waters of a great dam, forgiveness breaks forth into the heart.

It is the story of the old woman in South Africa who so completely forgave the murderer of her husband and son—her only family, to a few people; the story, a true one, has drawn tears from some and the comment that “in that moment of complete forgiveness and compassion she became the Buddha or the Christ.” Then silence, as we let the words fall like leaves letting go of their branches in the chill of autumn and anointing us with the holy oil of understanding and acknowledgement.

Most of all, story sheds light on the quality of greatness that we so often see in the people around us and also in animals. It is greatness that we all aspire to. Depending on the story, real greatness runs the gamut of human experience, from leadership, seeing and obeying inner truth no matter what the cost, to the ability to use humor to get emotional distance from an experience.

FORGIVENESS

Of all the things that come to us in life, the need to forgive is one of the most difficult. Like a rake scratching the ground it rasps and grates on us. The reason it is so hard is because our ego—our own self-grown idea of our own righteousness gets in the way.

When forgiveness calls us, there is reluctance to apologize. What if… what if keeps coming up for us as we create half-images of rejection, abandonment or anger or even hatred.

The question of how to get beyond it prevails as an unanswerable question until finally we have grown enough within that we are ready to let go of it. Sometimes that moment comes quickly and very often it takes a long, long time.  In some cases it never comes.

Have you had an experience with forgiveness and found it hard to work out?  What have you done about it? What happened within you? Share in the comments below!

It is my hope that you will enjoy each of the 21 compelling stories revealing true experiences from around the world, and find, accept and expand your own greatness through practice of that noble quality.

Rebecca Field

PS: When you purchase the book, you have access to  YOUR GREATNESS GUIDE BOOK,  a companion handbook created just for you! Simply contact us with your receipt number.