“Who Says You Can’t Teach an Old Dog a New Trick or Two”

To blame is to clearly identify what we see and dislike most about ourselves in our reflection through others.

Frank Moffatt

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that we had hoped would never let us down probably will and during the course of our life we too will let people down and the pain they suffer will be none the less.

Over the course of our life we will have our ego smashed (heart broken) likely more than once and it will hurt every time and we will likely smash other’s egos (break someone else’s heart) and our actions will hurt them none the less.

At times we will fight with our best friend and blame them for our unhappiness, without considering the fact that the fight has harmed then none the less.

In our relationships, once the honey moon is over and the feelings of infatuation fade, we will see things in our partner that we dislike most in our self and vent our self anger upon them in hopes of releasing our pain, but ultimately our pain will be none the less.

We will eventually lose someone in our life and one day we too will pass and what we gave is what we will get none the less.

For us to find true compassion we must:

Seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

Seek rather to understand, than to be understood;

Seek rather to love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Prayer of Saint Francis

With the term – dying – St Frances refers to the elimination of ego and awakening to ones spiritual self – all loving – all forgiving – all compassionate.

A little boy came running excitedly to his mother saying: “Mom, there is a boy out there in the woods who is mocking me. Everything I say he says after me. If I say: “Hello,” he says: “Hello.” When I say “Who are you?” he says: “Who are you?” “So I got mad and jumped over the fence and went into the woods to find him. But he wasn’t anywhere. So I yelled, “I’ll punch you in the nose.” And he said the very same thing, exactly as I had said it.”

The boy’s mother told him, “That is only an echo answering you Billy. If you had said: ‘I love you,’ it would have said the same to you.”

She went on to tell her son a a similar story about a dog who went into a room full of mirrors. He eventually died of exhaustion trying to fight his mirrored ‘enemies.’ If he had only wagged his tail once, he would have had all of them wagging their tails in friendship.

As a parent we have reflected many of our behaviors upon our children. Thus we must teach our children honesty from our deepest core and admit that as a parent we were flawed and made countless errors. Then we must ask our children for forgiveness – for it is when we ask our children for forgiveness – we allow them to understand that they are our equals and that everyone is flawed.

It is through this humility that we give our children the greatest gift we can give them – we give them the opportunity to forgive us and it is through that forgiveness that they learn to forgive themselves.