(photo: Tom Delaney, Stearns County, Minnesota 2025)

The colors and shapes of the natural world are a joy to behold. As much as nature is set up to perform amazing displays of splendorous color, we ourselves are set up to behold these displays and experience emotional responses of awe, wonder, and joy at them. It is a great symbiosis between ourselves and all the natural world. It is always there, offering itself to us. When we get distracted from the joy that is ours in the natural world, feeling down about ourselves and our lives, we can always reconnect with the natural world to feel better — more joyous and more peaceful at the same time. I took this photo earlier this week when I myself experienced completely unplanned and surprising awe, wonder, and joy near Cold Spring, Minnesota. I am a big fan of what I call the “God of Surprises” — just when you think you have God figured out, the God that shows you there is so much more than what you think. This skyline reminded me of the God of Surprises. It reminds me that what I may think is possibly true knowledge and helpful, but it can never encompass all the endless possibilities and magnificent splendor of God. It keeps me humble…which is also part of today’s topic.

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Today let’s take another look at the Admonitions of St. Francis of Assisi and how they relate to forgiveness. As I explained in my most recent previous post, Franciscan Wisdom for Forgiveness: Balance, the Admonitions are a 13th century compilation of the words and teachings of St. Francis. This document includes a vast number of the short teachings of St. Francis. One of these is:

Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor worry.

This is an especially relevant piece of wisdom when it comes to forgiveness.

The best scientific research into forgiveness tells us that a full and lasting forgiveness happens when we move beyond deciding to forgive (decisional forgiveness), to using empathy and replacing our negative emotions or “unforgiveness” about a hurtful event and person with positive emotions. In this we also understand that emotions are embodied experiences that we have, linked to both our mental and physical selves.

The hallmark feelings of unforgiveness include anger and worry, just as pointed to by St. Francis. We typically feel anger toward the person who hurt us, and about the event in general. Worry is also a typical, immediate response.

Anger can initially serve a healthy function of giving us the mental and physical energy to defend ourselves, remove ourselves from a hurtful situation, and avoid getting back into it in the near future. Over time, an unresolved and abiding anger within us can outlive its healthy purposes, and slowly turn into the resentment and bitterness of unforgiveness. Over more time, this resentment and bitterness can grow and start affecting other parts of our lives and current life relationships even though the resentment and bitterness is actually originating from a past hurtful event. In the worst cases, resentment and bitterness can take over our lives and life relationships.

In the same way, worry may serve an initial healthy function of giving us the mental energy to figure out what is happening in the hurtful event, how to get out out of the situation, and how to stay out of the situation. However, unresolved worry within us from a hurtful event can slowly turn into the ruminations and hypersensitivity toward possible offense or hurt that are also characteristic of unforgiveness. Our ruminations and anxieties may have us expending a lot of time and personal energy struggling with:

• what exactly happened in the hurtful event
• what caused the hurtful event
• why the hurtful event happened to us
• the injustice of the hurtful event and how could the hurtful event have happened to us
• our current and future safety from things like the hurtful event
• consequences of the hurtful event for ourselves
• consequences of the hurtful event for the person who hurt us (or lack of consequences),
• whether the hurtful event will happen again
• what needs to be done to prevent the hurtful event from happening again
• whether we are a damaged person or person of less worth because of the hurtful event

The unresolved anger and worry of unforgiveness can make us feel totally miserable and degrade our quality of life in terms of how we feel about ourself and our life, the quality of our relationships with others, our physical and mental health, and also the vitality of our own spirituality. It is a serious situation that needs a remedy and healing.

St. Francis offers a two-part remedy to anger and worry: patience and humility. Both patience and humility are about removing yourself from seeking a place of control or what I often call “running the show.” When we’re talking about hurtful events, giving up control sounds a little scary because control is usually what we wish we would have had, and wish to have especially after the hurtful event. We may think that if we have control:

• the event would never have happened
• we could eliminate the consequences of the event for ourselves that we do not like
• make awful consequences happen to the person who hurt us
• make our world just

The only problem with all of that, besides the fact that those things are often impossible for us to accomplish with control, is that none of them result in the thing we’re really after for ourselves…and that’s inner peace.

When we are caught up in seeking control, regretting a past event and wishing we would have had more control, working on becoming more controlling so that the hurtful event will not happen to us again, working to control the consequences of the event on ourselves (maybe to the point of being able to think, feel and act like it never happened), and working to control the consequences to the person who hurt us, we have little hope of inner peace. The more obsessive and uncontrollable (paradoxically) the seeking of control happens, the more distant an abiding inner peace for ourselves becomes.

Of all the things we can go after in life, inner peace is one of the best things we could ever hope for and accomplish for ourselves. It is a real “gold standard.” Actually, it’s worth more than gold! If you have all the gold in the world, but have a life of nothing but inner turmoil, what good does it do for you? If you were to start sorting out your every day decisions into “this will help me get to inner peace” versus “this will not help me get to inner peace,” you really have a handle on one of the most important things in life and are starting to use real wisdom in your decision-making. Once you realize that you will have more inner peace if the people around you have inner peace, you can start taking it to the next level and, in addition to asking “Will this really help bring me inner peace?” start asking “Will this really help bring another person inner peace?” and act on that.

Patience is one key to inner peace. When we are “doing” patience, we take away our drive for control of the pace of things and the flow of events, and let them work themselves out with a fundamental trust in the good of natural processes and the timing God has for things. We don’t use willfulness to push the pace of things to what our self-centered ego wants, instead we take our self-centered ego out of it. Patience has been regarded as wise and a virtue for millennia because it uses an operating principle that the right things will happen at the right time, and there is a right and best time for everything. The old Greek word for this principle of right timeliness is kairos (καιρός). Usually we we want to “jump the gun” – that’s a phrase from the sport of track and field that means launching oneself into the race before the judge has actually fired the gun signaling the official start of the race. If you jump the gun, it’s a false start and you can be automatically disqualified from the race for doing so. I am reminded of a saying I learned in Ireland that is its own admonition against impatience and the feeling that we need to hurry in doing something. The saying goes, “Don’t be in a hurry! When God made time, he made plenty of it.”

Can there be a kind of impatience where the right moment is too soon for our liking? Absolutely! Think about someone who needs to get into a treatment program as soon as possible…or is just going whether they like it or not. I this scenario, patience is again about setting aside our preferences for the pace and timing of things, and letting kairos happen. We might wish going to treatment would wait until tomorrow…or next year…but instead we are patient with people as they say, “No my friend, today is the day! Because we love you!” That may definitely require some patience while it is happening, but it is the right time for it to be happening — right?

I suppose now is also a good time (did you catch that?) to mention that patience is a skill and capability that takes time and practice to do well. If something is not happening as fast as you want, or happening faster than you want, you ill have a certain amount of patience for it and that same certain amount of ability to get inner peace in that way. At first, it is hard, and inner peace might be very small. But keep at it over time, and patience becomes easier, and the inner peace it brings becomes much wider and deeper.

Now let’s talk about humility. The word “humility” comes from the old Latin word humus — not to be confused with the Middle Eastern dish of ground chick peas and tahini. Humus referred to the earth or the ground. In that sense, being humiliated is the experience of getting treated as low, or like dirt, something to walk over. In the old Latin-speaking Roman world, being regarded as dirt was a pretty degraded and disregarded social situation in which to find yourself. So how did humility ever become regarded as a good thing? How did lowering one’s claims to strength, intelligence, mastery – all of the things that it seems important to have for a good life – somehow become seen as a virtue? It is because humility, like patience, is essentially about finding and keeping inner peace.

Humility happens when one does not approach life in a self-centered way, with avarice and contention, but rather with a selflessness that makes greed and vying for power and esteem irrelevant and pointless. Humility is also closely tied to honesty, in that a humble person never inflates the truth for themself, or boasts, or gets into other kinds of self-aggrandizement. The things a humble person says about themself are reliably well within the bounds of truth, and don’t go beyond those bounds. Humility results in inner peace because it gets “life things” down to what is essential and true, and throws away the “bells and whistles” and “pomp and circumstance” that you can easily get caught up into draping yourself with in hopes that you will instill a sense of accomplishment in others, or at least for yourself. The humble person removes those drapes over what is essentially true about them, for them, and in them. St. Francis is famous for literally disrobing to act out his commitment to poverty and rejecting a life of non-essentials and unnecessary things.

The special power of humility is that once we start to regard ourselves in terms of essentials instead of extras, we also can see the essential in others as well, and our sameness with them. That opens the door to empathy, and the ability to see that we are essentially the same as other people regardless of situations and context. When we can see that, we have the empathy needed to give a full and lasting forgiveness to others as is needed in a good forgiveness process.

The St. Francis quote that we started with states that the inner peace that patience and humility make happen within us will clear out the feelings of anger and worry — feelings that are the hallmark of unforgiveness. Patience and humility are an important part of a research-validated forgiveness process like the REACH Forgiveness Process that can be taught in Live and Forgive presentations, guided retreats, small group series, and wilderness walks. With patience, we know that we can set aside our expectations that something needs to happen first for us, and should be happening right now for us, before we can even consider forgiving someone. With humility, we see and know our essential sameness with the person who hurt us, and can make that critical step of empathy with that person — the “E” in the research-validated REACH Forgiveness Process at Live and Forgive. The science of forgiveness confirms what St. Francis teaches us, “Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor worry,” especially when it comes to forgiveness.

This text is an original work of its author Tom Delaney and was entirely composed without the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

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If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of healing, mercy, and spiritual renewal, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com—Tom will be glad to connect with you in a spirit of welcome, respect, and shared faith.