A ritual is a series of focused actions taken with a specific goal in mind. In this case the goal is to let go and forgive. While the term is often used in a spiritual setting, many communities and individuals from therapists to business consultants now use mindful action as a tool to break through tightly-held patterns of thought and behavior. Use this process to analyze, specify and release a hurt, thought, injury or issue in your life.Whatever you may think of the efficacy of such a ritual (again I invite you to try it - it won't take but a minute), it's hard not to wonder who the Fetzer Institute are and why they care. One can understand an insurance company's sponsoring a public "Responsibility Project." But forgiveness? And why are they so solicitous as to offer assistance not only in forgiving things which others have done to you but also forgiving yourself for things you've done to others? Here's their mission statement:
Our mission, to foster awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in the emerging global community, rests on our conviction that efforts to address the world's critical issues must go beyond political, social, and economic strategies to their psychological and spiritual roots.
Say what? I'm not doubting the power of forgiveness, and of examples of forgiveness. Forgiveness is definitely one of the miracles of our lives. But who are these folks and why are they encouraging us to be forgiving? What "critical issues" of the "emerging global community" can only be addressed by means of "love and forgiveness," resisting "political, social, and economic strategies"? They don't seem to be a religious organization keen to make us aware that we are sinners but forgiven, or that the "roots" of greed, hatred and delusion are "spiritual." Some light is shed by the biography of their founder and namesake, John Fetzer (1901-91):
The interests that shaped John Fetzer's life can be seen as the seedbed for the 
questions that define the work of the Fetzer Institute: How can the secular and sacred elements of life be better integrated? How can the insights of science and the powers of technological innovation be utilized to explore the capacities of the mind and spirit? How can the wisdom and insight gained through inner exploration be used to better our individual and collective health? And how can the entrepreneurial spirit and financial resources gained from the American business sector be used in the service of creating a better world?
"Secular" and "sacred"! But even more interesting, "the entrepreneurial spirit and financial resources gained from the American business sector." What have that spirit and those resources got to do with love and, especially, forgiveness? Money can't buy you love. But forgiveness?
There's probably something deep going on here, and the Fetzer Institute seems to sponsor things that might provide genuinely helpful and transformative experiences for people, but what I'm reminded of is a scene in "Beyond our differences," that cloying documentary on religion for the World Economic Forum which Bill Moyers showed last December. A rickshaw driver in some Indian city looks across a busy road at motorized rickshaws and says they've put him out of business - he hasn't the resources to to buy one of those. But, he adds with a bright smile, he has to admit that it's better for passengers, who can get to their destinations more quickly now.
Is this the kind of forgiveness Fetzer wants more of? As capitalism spreads, many will inevitably feel aggrieved, and many others might feel they have done wrong. But this is the price of progress, and we mustn't let people stop progress because of it. So let's recognize it as a "critical" problem which must be understood not in "political, social, [or] economic" terms but in terms of its "psychological and spiritual roots." Systematic analyses would be misleading, it's an individual thing, the existential situation of the individual in this difficult world of pain whose halo is the wonder of forgiveness!
Instead of unrest or revolution or even reform... forgiveness on a global scale! (Maybe even the hermeneutics of suspicion might be forgiven.) Online ritual for letting go, anyone?
