The famous quote from Alexander Pope, “To err is human; to forgive, divine,” is explained as referencing the belief that all can be forgiven by God. Can we count on divine forgiveness for our shortcomings and misdeeds, and is this a good example we should emulate more in our own conduct?

The purpose of forgiveness is divine because it is what the divine realm offers each and every person regardless of their past history, their doings, their thoughts, and their makeup. The conduct of life is governed by many, many things—much that is cultural, learned from parental and family member influences, and often that is a destructive experience leaving children cynical at best and mean-spirited and cruel at worst. Given that you have immortal souls, what is to become of you if you become worse and worse through exposure to life and meeting up with consistent mistreatment and corruption on all levels, both by the institutions you interact with as well as perhaps your own family, and certainly the interlopers who find ways to perturb things and cause harm directly through spirit manipulation and extraterrestrial programming, and so forth? Given the huge legacy of negative karmic trauma, it is a wonder that the world is as nice as it is, in some respects, and certainly on the part of many individuals and even organizations of like‑minded people coming together for a high purpose. This shows there is something within human beings that rallies around the idea of being compassionate and understanding. This is the prelude and the path to forgiveness—the realization that you are only human and to hold you to a standard of perfection is not realistic and doomed to fail as a useful guideline. When people are less than perfect, even drastically less than perfect, what is to become of them if their soul is immortal? How can they ever find their way back to divine alignment once again? There needs to be a process. This is where forgiveness comes in because once people are corrupted and out of alignment, in major respects, it is quite a challenge for them to return to a straight and narrow path and avoid temptation or even to have the ability to be loving, understanding, and compassionate themselves once they have been hardened into cynicism, fear, and hatred by being preyed on or wounded severely by their own self-judgment, often in response to unrealistic expectations of people around them, especially parents in many cases. To recover from lifetimes of being damaged by experiencing negativity, there needs to be a time of rejuvenation and rest and recuperation in the light. How could that happen if we were not willing to forgive all that a person has done in their lifetime in the physical? If they were not welcomed back to the light, they would flounder for sure because they would be in the land of the lost, the depraved, the fallen angelics who turned away from light but are now cut off entirely from the divine through their choosing and are in danger of not surviving at all. That is too great a penalty for human misdeeds and this is why we forgive, and forgive, and forgive, over, and over, and over, even when people have a series of lives succumbing to depravity because they have been thrown out of alignment long ago and not been able to recover. There is always a possibility of salvation. This is planned to be the focus of each life—to work on the problem, to right the wrongs of the past, overcome the liabilities that have crept up and piled on to create an ever-increasing burden. Overcoming such a legacy is far from simple, but many have done so, and this becomes a project of a soul collective, to work on its most troubled members through compassionate outreach, through sacrifice to be with them in life after life as a good influence, as a counterpart, a buffer to help shelter them from the worst of outside influencers, and so forth. So forgiveness is practiced by many individuals as an aspect of the love they are capable of sharing and that is because love is a divine attribute and energy, and forgiveness is a loving vibration that is very much the essence of love energy because it is love unrestricted and untainted by hesitation, reservation, doubt, fear, or skepticism, and this gives forgiveness its power. It is the purest form of love because it is a kind of total love. It is love with all impurities stripped away, and if you think about things in this perspective, you can see that to not forgive is nondivine because it is focusing on the negative, the defect, the lack of perfection exhibited by a person, and this is always a small component of their being, so to make that the deciding factor in how they should be treated is not only applying judgment, but condemning them to a lesser status, to a darker experience and consequence. It may be their own doing and the consequence of karmic forces to bring a punishment their way, but to be the punisher will diminish you and it is a role that is a compromise and a nonalignment in its own right. So we would hold out forgiveness as the highest of attainments, and that is why it is special, because it shows a strength and a purity of loving vibration that is at a pinnacle of expression and is something that is deserving of the greatest respect and appreciation.