Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

As I grew into my twenties, then thirties, and learned about other mothers – the complications and layers of hurt and mistrust, of envy and control, and about the confusion so many of my friends still carried about who was parent to whom – I began to understand how rare such a simple and powerful trust had been.

Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.

‘And yet. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak. The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.’ Elie Wiesel.

Self-pity is the characteristic I have always most despised in others. Simone tells me that’s because I have so much myself. We all hate the mirror, she says.

There are four steps to true forgiveness,

uncovering the nature of the harm; the decision phase, in which to explore whether to grant forgiveness or withhold it; the necessary ‘work’; and the final step, deepening or discovery.