Forgiveness is about letting go of another person's throat.

<The whole thing is asinine. "Religion" has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God because it puts rules to something with no rules and creates a mythology about performance -- that we can perform our way into the appeasement of the deity. It also devises rules, but the problem with that is, the only rule to a relationship with God is that love for us exists, there is nothing we have done or can do to earn or deserve it, and it's going to flow unconditionally our way whether we want it to or not and weather we acknowledge it or not. So, the rules cannot bring freedom, they only have the power to accuse. It's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are. We have sort of an accepted rationalism within which we frame religion and we think that belief, intellectually, is the same as relationship. In our Western conversation, that’s become an incredible impediment toward actual wholeness, where the heart and the head are aligned and relationship – with not just God but with each other – is nothing but a set of contracts which are agreed to at a certain point, then signed, sealed, delivered, done. But some of us learn, over the course of our life, that a full spiritual life is not about pleasing God, it's not enough to say we believe in God, it’s more about learning how to trust God, to live in relationship with God. That's a huge watershed, because trust is a whole different ballgame than appeasement or pleasing. Without trust there can be no context for relationship. The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important. Pain, however, has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly ... and if left unresolved for very long, we can almost forget that we were ever created to fly in the first place. But if we can be kind and loving towards ourselves, with God’s help, we can begin the process of healing, submitting to God’s overwhelming love as the source of healing. Submission is not about authority, though, and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect. We must always remember, however, that healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time. Most importantly, forgiveness is not about forgetting. Forgiveness is about letting go of another person's throat. – sort of William P. Young>