We are in the most holy days of the year, once again. As predictable as the sunrise and sunset, we are given an even deeper ability than daily to once a year focus on what we can do to live better the blessed lives we’ve been given.

When we think of “teshuvah” we think about repentance, or more accurately, returning to God by coming back to our better selves, addressing our failings and mistakes, trying harder to live honest and spiritually centered lives. As part of that quest for spiritual wholeness, I also associate forgiveness of ourselves and others.

I cannot explain why on this particular Sunday morning I was led to dig deeply into a situation spanning and occurring decades ago involving a family member whom I thought I had forgiven for acts that affected multiple lives. There was no reason my mind should have gone there. No anniversary of his death, birth, even the events needing to be forgiven. Yet as I dug further into the details of the complex narrative, I realized that although I thought I had long ago forgiven him, perhaps I had not really done so in the deeper sense now being presented.

I had forgiven him based on the possibility that what had happened wasn’t as bad as it seemed, which is a possibility. Yet today I was led down a path of whether I still forgave him if what happened really was as bad as it may have been. I thought I had done that. Yet as I allowed myself to evaluate those darker possibilities by analyzing facts more objectively, I experienced reactions that I had not felt before, nor anticipated now.

Could this person really have been that dark? Capable of these thoughts and acts? I really let myself go there. I’ve always been able to love him anyway but this put those conclusions to new levels of testing. I learned things that shocked and saddened me. Could I really love such a person capable of such deeds if they were true?  It felt as if I were going through a whole new level of testing my capacity to love the unlovable. My ability to forgive was being tested, painfully, as I processed through these new revelations. Yet as I went in deeper, so too did my ability to forgive, to see human failings more profoundly.

I looked out the window and asked God if this is what He’s trying to show me, and there before my eyes was literally a butterfly bonanza in my front yard!! I mean those  flowers have been there for months but so many butterflies right there at that very moment!! The person involved in this story and I had a special connection with butterflies. As if to punctuate the point, one flew right past my face by a second story French door!

That very same night I awoke at 2 AM with a vivid dream, so real that I felt the need to get up and write it down.  In the dream I died. Whatever my cause of death, I had asked to be allowed to write down a statement of appreciation about a certain group of people and all the good they had done to help others. Once I finished doing that I was allowed to proceed.

Stacele must be an angel since in the next scene she is explaining that I am no longer alive in this world. She answered my questions of what this meant, whether people could see me, the basics.  I wanted to know if I could make objects move, like fall, so people could notice. She said no. As we walked we passed a shop where there was a person whom I knew who was the shopkeeper.

She asked me if I wanted to go into that store and I told her no, it would make me feel uncomfortable. That feeling stemmed from a situation I had experienced in the dream right before I died where the shopkeeper and I had had a conflict so there was an unresolved issue between us. I did not want to go into that store for to do so would make me uncomfortable since I was not ready to forgive her. Shortly thereafter I was shown an indicator, like an old fashioned meter with a dial and arrow, showing that 49% of issues in my life still needed to be resolved.

Okay, it was just a dream, although there was another part of it that relates to a different situation in my life that was equally enigmatic and yet extremely accurate and relevant so I’m saving that part for me to ponder in the days ahead should the person involved and situation happen as depicted. (Postscript: since this dream the person in it whom I’ve not heard from in a long while did contact me and we are planning to get together to talk).

As far as this being just a dream, I don’t typically feel compelled to get up in the middle of the night to write dreams down and with such detail. I also was able to fall immediately back to sleep after writing the details down, that ability after such an interruption also highly unusual. (Sidebar: my fitness tracker numbers for breaths and heart rate variability during that time frame were completely anomalous.) All of these factors, and they’re occurring during these holy days, are making me take the dream very seriously.

As the Days of Awe draw to a close, as we have been working to make things right with those we have wronged, let’s work harder to forgive those who have hurt us as well, especially those who are no longer with us. We don’t even know the toll it takes on our souls to leave these situations unresolved, or further, the growth we achieve when we seek out painful places needing healing we don’t even know are hidden inside us. How much more awe inspiring during these Days of Awe when our Creator brings them to us.

Opportunities to forgive are not always within our control. When they are, however, as the shopkeeper in my dream with whom I felt uncomfortable, we can push through that discomfort to heal the schism.  Perhaps every time we work to mend relationships, forgive, work on our failings and forgive others theirs, the needle on our mensch meter moves a little farther in the right direction. When we do what we can, and really dig deep, we will be blessed with feeling the intimacy of our Creator’s Hand on us, leading us to work on those hidden places in each of us, the places we don’t want to face that hold us back from more meaningful lives of truth and integrity.

Yes, love hurts, but it’s a good hurt. For as we learn to love even more deeply, as we see our failings more clearly, we become even more grateful for and in awe of His Love of us.

Shabbat shalom and Shana Tova.

Diane