Is God really all-loving and all-forgiving? For example, does he also forgive people like Hitler, Stalin and so on? I have learned that God loves every soul equally. Is this also true in such cases? I can’t stop wondering if there might be something one can do which God wouldn’t forgive. Is there any exception to his Love and forgiveness? I was raised Catholic and the idea of an angry God traumatized me deeply. I am still working on my doubt that God is all-forgiving and loving.
—Carina, Europe
Dear Carina,
Forgiveness implies there is judgment. How can God judge a part of Himself? According to the Masters, God would no more judge us than we would judge our hand. We are, always have been, and always will be, inseparable from God. The only separation is in our awareness. The saints describe the experience of reuniting with God as awakening to a reality that has always been. It is only our preoccupation with a tiny portion of the infinity of God — our body, personal feelings, desires, and thoughts — that keeps us from knowing our oneness with Him right now.
Our transgressions, our sins — no matter how terrible they seem — are not indelible black marks in a book of judgment. Instead they are mistakes resulting from misunderstanding, misperceiving who and what we really are. The original meaning of sin comes to us from medieval archery. To sin is to miss the target. Once we start hitting the target all our misses don’t matter. We can make the most colossal misses — falling into anger, selfishness, greed, hatred, murder, or even mass murder — but if we eventually begin to hit the target our past misses are meaningless.
There is a story told in India that a powerful demon stole the elephant of Indra, the king of the gods. The demon delighted in chasing and goring the gods of Indra’s court. The gods finally rallied and began in turn to chase the demon who fled to the very realm of God. Barely staying ahead of his pursuers the demon crashed into God’s court and came to a sliding stop before the throne of God. Indra and the other outraged gods arrived and were raising their fearsome weapons to destroy the demon when God shouted, “Stop!”
The gods were surprised but obedient. They described in detail the outrages the demon had perpetrated on them. God only smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter how he got here. He is here now. He has found God.”
You can never become anything other than the inextricable part of God that is your essence. God does not judge our wandering far from that understanding in action and thought. He waits patiently, all-lovingly, for us to figure out our true nature. He sends us saints and sages to call us home to Him. Never judging, He whispers to us through our intuition. He helps us through our conscience. He responds to us in prayer in meditation. We are God and God is us. Nothing we do can ever change that.
Warm regards,
Puru (Joseph) Selbie
