Roberta Grimes

Forgiving

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 27, 2025 • 8 Comments
Human Nature, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!

 This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust, abounding.
No more falsehoods or derisions,
Golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!

 When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

I have been astonished as I have gone about this past week in Massachusetts, counseling some of my longtime and very-much-beloved legal clients, by how many people have mentioned to me their surprise at Erika Kirk’s public forgiveness of her young husband’s assassin. Well, of course she forgave him! She and Charlie Kirk and the organization they founded together, Turning Point USA, teach Christianity, and forgiveness is the very base and core of everything that Jesus taught. There can be no real love without forgiveness. And as for our personal spiritual growth, unless we forgive completely every great wrong that is done to us, then very much spiritual growth will be impossible for us ever to achieve. Erika Kirk said as part of her message during Charlie Kirk’s extraordinary funeral service that was held last Sunday in a football stadium, and was streamed worldwide to what now is estimated to have been more than a hundred million people, that she forgave her husband’s assassin because Jesus had said from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34). But Jesus gave her even much bigger reasons for forgiving Charlie’s assassin, as Charlie himself could have told her during his lifetime! Forgiveness of even the worst wrongs ever done to us is the greatest gift that each of us can give to ourselves.

We come into this lifetime as what amounts to unsophisticated Neanderthals. Have you ever watched a baby closely for very long? They are cute, yes, but they are selfish and unthinking. They live lowly me-me-me sorts of material lives bent on just survival, and on grasping for the simplest pleasures in the basely material world that they perceive to be around them. But the only reason why we come into these lifetimes at all is to learn to grow spiritually. It’s a hard, rough place, this world sadly is, and the worst thing about it, saddest of all to say, is the evil in the hearts of some of the other people who share this world with us. By contrast, our true home is all love and light! Still, we need the ugly, negative stresses of this world to push against, as the  most effective way for us to achieve the elevation in our spiritual vibrations that we so eagerly crave. This kind of spiritual growth needs negativity as a stressor, especially in spirituality’s lower ranges. And back home, we come to hunger for spiritual growth, because we know and are close to some much more spiritually developed beings, which of course are all around us in our eternal home! So, even though we are not thrilled by the thought of it, eventually we plan another lifetime on earth, with plenty of pains and stresses planned into it, hoping that in this next lifetime we will at last raise our spiritual vibration enough that this can be our last necessary earth-lifetime.

As infants, we are not much in contact with home, and we are fearful and selfish. But most of us are soon back in contact with home in childhood, and we then easily can maintain that close contact throughout our lives. We have come to earth with active use of only thirty to forty percent of our vast, eternal minds, stripped down now for efficient spiritual learning. But that is by no means all that we have for support while we are here! In addition:

• Each one of us has a primary spirit guide while we are on earth, who helped us to plan this lifetime, and who is with us throughout our lives, always in close communication. Most people consider that small voice in their minds to be simply a part of themselves, and too often they will feel free to ignore its prompts; but it is always there, trying to keep us on the life-path that we planned with our spirit guide’s loving assistance.
• We also may have one or more additional spirit guides for specific purposes, helping us to learn skills or to master difficulties at various times in our lives. If you are writing a book, learning to play the piano, fighting an illness, and having marital troubles, you might have six or seven additional guides for brief periods, just for those specific issues.
• Most of us will travel out of body most nights while our bodies sleep, and nearly all of us have complete amnesia for these frequent experiences. The silver cord that keeps our spiritual body attached to our material body, and keeps our material body alive, is unbelievably stretchy, and the astral plane which includes our eternal home is right here but just at a higher vibration, so astral travel is a lot like changing television channels. So, while our material bodies are in their deepest phase of sleep, we consult with our spirit guides, we visit with loved ones, and we stay in close touch with what are in fact our true eternal lives.

So, even though as infants we have little awareness of who we truly are or why we are here, by the time we are leaving the first decade of these lifetimes, with the love of our parents and with their guidance, and with the further gentle guidance of our loving home-based-team we can begin to be quite aware of who we are, and more and more clearly we also can begin to understand spiritually why we are here.

Or else… for some, not so much at all. If you will again read the three points above by which our personal home-teams stay in very close contact with each of us throughout our earth-lives, and are ever more carefully guiding us, but so very quietly, so utterly subliminally and respectfully, you will realize that it can be easy for the more aggressive and negative folks among us to choose to flat-out ignore their guidance. So for them, effectively their spiritual guidance is optional. Not only is it optional, but there is a lot that can go wrong, and can prevent some people from ever really hooking up with their home-team guidance at all. And that is how serial killers and other evil people can come to be as they go about their lives living solo in this cold and often cruel material world. People without parents, and especially those without male figures for their childhood and youthful training and guidance; people who never have been taught to distinguish right from wrong by any earthly mentors; and especially those who have been maltreated, or have had evil examples in life on which to model themselves, or both: these poor, benighted souls are not going to ever even hear the faint and always lovingly and very respectfully whispered guidance of their spirit guides from deep inside their own minds.

 So, true, no one ever comes to earth having planned to be an evil monster! But our spiritual guidance is sufficiently subtle that, especially if even a few things go wrong for us in our lives on earth, it sometimes does not take much of a negative push to drive us off what might have been a positively-planned start in life toward ever deeper negativity. And so, it seems to have been the case for Charlie Kirk’s assassin, from what accounts we have seen to date, that he simply went off the rails. He was raised in an intact two-parent family, and his parents said that until about the age of twenty, he seemed to have no aberrant thoughts at all. He then may have been radicalized by his online friends, but his motive for assassinating Charlie Kirk likely won’t be entirely clear until his trial.

Still, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is not our focus today. Why was it so important that Erika Kirk forgive her husband’s killer? Less than a week after Charlie’s death at the age of only thirty-one, she pointed to the fact that Jesus from the cross had forgiven His tormentors and executioners “because they did not know what they were doing” as her reason for forgiving the boy – well, barely a man – who had slain her husband. But from the cross was not the only, and nor was it even the most important time that Jesus ever talked about forgiveness!

For Jesus, forgiveness was a constant teaching. It was nearly as important to Him as was love, and indeed He saw forgiveness as an indispensable precursor to love. Of course He said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the great and foremost commandment. ³⁹ The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:36-40). So, love is most important! Game, set, and match.

²¹ Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” ²² Jesus *said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:20-22). He said,  ^“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions” (MK 11:25).

Jesus also routinely used His forgiveness of sins as a shorthand way to enlist the powers of people’s own minds in their healing. As He did in this example from the Gospel Book of Luke: ²⁰ Seeing their faith, He said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” ²¹ The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?” ²² But Jesus, aware of their reasonings, answered and said to them, “Why are you reasoning in your hearts? ²³ Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins have been forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? ²⁴ But, so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,”—He said to the paralytic—“I say to you, get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home.” ²⁵ Immediately he got up before them, and picked up what he had been lying on, and went home glorifying God (LK 5:20-25).

Even when Jesus had only just risen from the dead on that first Easter morning, forgiveness was on His mind. Here is the relevant passage from the Gospel Book of John: “He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹ So Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.’ ²² And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained’” (JN 20:20-23).

Forgiveness is crucial, because until you have forgiven everyone for everything, whatever you still have not forgiven is going to weigh ever more heavily on your mind. If you are Erika Kirk and someone has assassinated your husband, until you have forgiven that assassin from your heart, then every time you think of your beloved husband, now taken from you, you will unavoidably remember his assassination, and the bitterness of that will only grow ever worse for you. So, free your love for your husband at once from that last, tragic stain! Forgiveness is the gift that you give to yourself.

 And forgiveness really is so easy! Thomas tells me that Jesus taught what they called “prevenient forgiveness”, or words that meant something like it, “forgiving all wrongs at once”. But since this process requires gestures that Jesus’s contemporaries apparently did not understand were important for the process of retraining their minds, this teaching did not survive. But the teaching is so simple. You just gather every wrong with sweeps of your arms and squash it all with your hands into a nice, tight ball. Then with both hands you slowly push it away while you say aloud, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.” And you do that over and over until you start feeling that you truly have forgiven. This does work amazingly well. And it’s permanent! When Thomas first taught me to do prevenient forgiveness this way, back in 2011, I spent about two months that summer completely retraining my mind with this technique. I am amazed to tell you that it worked so perfectly that I have never had to do it again. And now Thomas tells me that this is my last necessary earth-lifetime

I saw the musical Hair in New York City in 1969, I think it was, when I was fresh out of college. I loved it! And yes, a few of the actors did take off all their clothes and dance around naked. The end of the Sixties was a genuinely weird, but still a very hopeful time. I recall asking some people what the Age of Aquarius mentioned in our frame-verse actually was, and being told that we were just on the cusp of it. Someone said that the true astronomical Age of Aquarius, when peace would guide the planets and love would steer the stars, would not be coming until we were a great deal older. Well, we who were young then are pretty old now, wouldn’t you say? So, isn’t it about time for Jupiter to at last align with Mars, so peace can begin to guide the planets, and love can step in and steer the stars?

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)