Today’s recording begins with Kathy Leard reading the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-15. We’ve left it in because sometimes it can be helpful to hear something old in a new voice — and Kathy’s is full of compassion. We’ve left in just a segment of the reading from the morning of July 7th.

Then Lisa Danner begins to talk about verses 6 and 7 regarding forgiveness.

She begins with a story of some children from our church family demonstrating simple forgiveness that they’ve learned to do readily.

Lisa notices that the final verse about forgiveness from God is contingent on our own forgiveness of others — unlike the other needs being expressed in prayer. It seems to be a relational commandment from Jesus.

Lisa gives an example of forgiveness from someone she admires — but notes that it’s a forgiveness that is happening apart from the offender. This is valuable, but is also what Dr. Leah Coulter calls unilateral or one-dimensional forgiveness. Lisa notes that you can hear in this language an invitation to give more credence to what Dr. Coulter calls a two-dimensional forgiveness, which consists of both the vertical step of prayer, to confess and prepare ourselves to forgive, and the horizontal step. (And in personal reference mentions Sterling and Sir Giles, who are cats — with her ever present humor.)

Lisa talks a bit about her own journey with forgiveness. She then talks about Tara Brach’s framing of forgiveness, which includes the involvement of the limbic system — that part of our brains that gets triggered with fight or flight responses.

And then she goes on to share one further lovely example of a difficult process of forgiveness from a Ted Talk. And lastly, reminds us that what allows us to move toward forgiveness with one another is the unconditional love we are grounded in — through our loving Creator. Hear Lisa’s stories and examples in the recording below.

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