Forgive us of our trespasses

It is not a commandment, but it's up there as far as the proper, decent and right moral thing to do. "Forgive us of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." It's a good rule of thumb. Each of us grows up as a separate personality within the fields of gravity/space/time that are our unique personal lives, childhoods, parental influences, etc.; Each of us carries such forward, onward into adult life. Given that we each have a personal field of gravity, shaping our space and time, so it is inevitable that differences arise when people meet. It's in the nature of the beast. Trespasses are inevitable, and we forgive these trespasses, because we're probably doing the same thing right back anyway. Rightly, we forgive.

And so, one hopes that there is a certain fairness to forgiveness. One hopes intentions more or less honorable are understood. One would hope that there is some sensitivity. It wouldn't be fair to forgive some people, whose trespasses are gross and ugly, and then not with some people through which trespasses arose over misunderstanding.

Do we apply the same standards of forgiveness to the homeowner in over his head as the Wall Street firm who the taxpayer bailed out? Forgiveness of sins, as a state is concerned, has to do with taxation, it seems. The rich are more forgivable, for their sins, than the middle class?

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Somewhere along the line in his years of practice, even a mediocre writer of middling talent and little gift for creating fiction learns that there is, after all, some realism in his 'depressed view' of the world. In his writing habits, a very practice of resilience, he finds a form to his empathy. He finds a way to see the general wisdom in forgiving human trespass. He finds a way to support a value system, to identify right and wrong, as vague and as tenuous and as new or under-appreciated or against the grain as that wisdom is generally taken.

It hurts, in a strange way, to take the right way, for it will not appear at all proper, if it is worth writing about. On the other hand, it feels good. Like quantum physics, it's all a lot to take in.

Yes, maybe that's it. Deeper higher morality, the 'love thy neighbor' stuff, is harder to understand than all the supposedly practical things concerning behavior, much more difficult to convey. Maybe even counterintuitive. It's easier to have a little moral-sounding nutshell, some nonsense that seems on the surface to make sense, like 'fight evil,' or 'cut taxes,' or 'job creator,' or pointedly blanket statements about Occupy Wall Street protesters as 'immoral,' 'druggies,' 'sexual deviants,' etc. Shortcuts, sound bytes, Limbaughisms, eroding our deeper value systems with moral bankruptcy... and without morality, people quickly become ungovernable.