The river only flows forward. A photo my daughter took at Yosemite National Park.
I made a promise I cannot keep. I said a thing I cannot fix. Truly. It cannot be fixed without causing more harm to everyone involved, including me.
In our centering prayer time recently, we listened to a poem from Kahlil Gibran called “The River Cannot Go Back.”
“Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence,” Gibran writes.
The river runs and flows and can only go forward.
Nobody can go back.
Which means that sometimes there is no fixing.
The good news (if I hold onto it) is that the river always and forever empties into the ocean of God’s mercy. All I can do is hold in my heart the person that I hurt and trust that there will be mercy for them, mercy for me: that I can let it go.
All my failures, all my mistakes.
Let them go.
Let them go and trust that all is held and will be put right somehow, someday. As much as I fear that I’ve ruined things, that I should not, cannot, will not be forgiven? The mercy river flows on, always for all of us. Even me.
It does not seem that there will ever be mercy or forgiveness for me from this person, but the mercy that streams from the Divine cannot be stopped.
Mercy from the Divine who loves all of us. Mercy from me for me.
I can learn to forgive myself. I can embrace forgiveness and pull it close and let it surround and enfold me like a cloak.
May the pain that I caused heal, and may I trust that healing will come, as sure and certain as dawn follows the night. May I know deep in my bones that it won’t be through me, it can’t come through me: not through my words or actions or trying to fix, although I sure wish there was another way. May the pain that this causes me heal, too. May I forgive and love myself.
Amen and amen.
Come, Lord Jesus.
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