from Working Underneath An Autobiography
The word forgiveness is the most “unforgiving” term that there is. It implies no compromise, it holds no limit on time, and it will not stray from its goal.
It also tends to be a “loathed” word by victims, since many victims believe they should not have to do the work of forgiveness without their perpetrators also taking responsibility for their own actions. Victims do not necessarily buy into “forgiveness” as a separate state of mind or action. And therefore it begs the question” How do you forgive someone who does not believe they are in need of forgiveness”. The arrogance of perpetrators has turned many victims away from the possibility of engaging in the work of forgiveness.
From out of my own experience of child abuse, to forgive my perpetrators was beyond my comprehension. In imagining the possible outcomes of forgiving my abusers, I remained focused on the perpetrators and their slippery evasion of responsibility. In the face of that evasion a resolve “not to forgive” rose up every time the possibility of forgiving presented itself and settled like cement on my spirit. I could not see this as my responsibility, nor could I see it as necessary to my “survival”. In fact it often feels healthier not to forgive… because that too says I have a voice.
My journey to engage in the forgiveness of my abusers started on an adult level when I was in training for priesthood. How could I meet in a pastoral capacity with the perpetrators of others in jail for instance, hear their stories and offer forgiveness to them, if I could not accomplish the same for my own abusers. When I worked at Guelph Reformatory as a student chaplain, I met up with many “perpetrators” of “break and enter” crimes, assaults and criminal behavior that was a direct result of unleashed anger with no mechanism in place to contain that anger in the face of outside conditions of provocation, substance or alcohol abuse. Many were the human “products” of orphanage experiences and child welfare foster care systems and child abuse victims themselves.
These men…were they responsible for the abuse of others? – Absolutely “yes”. Were they able to be on the street living reformed and violence free lives? - Probably not without first a massive change in reforms and the societal contexts to which these men returned again and again. And so was I glad that their rage was contained under lock and key? – “Yes” And yet, as I listened more and talked less, I heard the similar thread running throughout the patterns of their early lives….
In trouble at 7 years old – translated as “boys will be boys”;
In trouble at 12 - translated as “a short stint in reform school will knock it out of him”;
In trouble at 18, translated as “a criminal with no future”.
Indeed their current stint in Guelph represented just one in a long line of encounters of rage mixed with a lack of socialization options, that ran headlong into a legal system that is in no way integrated with support systems for mentoring or recovery from early experiences of their childhood abuse… abuse that is a part of a cycle of behaviors that 75 % of inmates have also experienced. No way out… therefore…act out.
I actually found it quite easy to offer forgiveness as a priest, which many of them actively sought, at least in the name of creating the possibility of some spiritual level of peace. But I found myself having to consider the forgiveness in my own heart of society itself, for our profound abandonment of male children in particular and of many abused children in general.
Did I however translate that understanding of the need for spiritual peace in the lives of my own abusers – No it did not help in that way. The wounds were too deep and the resentment too all pervasive.
My next efforts to forgive my own perpetrators of my abuse took the form of a theological search to understand the traditions of forgiveness…as taught in Christian churches. None fit:
“…Forgive seventy times seven?”… Forget it… I don’t have the strength;
“…Turn the other cheek?”… No way …I would never survive that way.
And more popular reinterpretations did not work either. Such as ‘forgive and forget” or “you have to forgive to be able to move on” etc. One thing did help me recognize my difficulty was when I realized I was not getting the whole biblical message of what was needed in order to forgive. That the church does not include the whole and necessary balance of all sides in biblical stories when teaching from the lectionary (these are weekly passages set aside for reading during church services throughout the year and upon which sermons are often based). In fact, more often than not, these important balancing aspects of stories and biblical “directives” are pointedly avoided in sermon discourse.
I first understood the full impact of this omission when studying theology from a feminist perspective. The directive “Wives obey your husbands” was read and expounded upon at length in sermons, and further reinforced in wedding vows and was to be the general spiritual attitude adopted by good Christian wives. But the balancing directive, “husbands love your wives as you would your own bodies” was left unexplored from the church pulpits.
Domestic violence would become shameful if the second directive to husbands was equally emphasized from the start of a boy’s life! The phrase “children honor your father and mother so that your days may be long in the land your fathers have given you” was included in church teaching and in fact tied children, especially male children, to the legacy of successes or failures of their fathers in the world. This admonition, coupled with “spare the rod, spoil the child” meant that children could be beaten and yet they must honor their abusers, if they were to “inherit” their family legacy thereby remaining in good standing and belong. But the balancing directive to fathers “Do not provoke your children to anger” was not included or expounded upon for its intersecting impact on other directives. Parents were not taught to respect the emotions and impact of their actions on their children.
At this point in my journey to understand and achieve a state of forgiveness in myself, it hit me like a tone of bricks that my father was indeed guilty but so was the church in which he was raised, in which he was an priest by condoning in teaching and active denial, the violence against my mother and the abuse of myself and my other siblings. The implications of these omissions were massive for me.
But did this understanding of the environment in which my father actions were condoned bring me any closer to forgiving him… still the answer was still “No”.
The next encounter came at a time, after 7 years of priesthood, when I was intensely involved in an unearthing of my abuse experiences and coping with the present day impacts of the same on my relationships and vocation as a priest. After I had invested so much work in becoming a priest… I ultimately left the church, and renounced my priesthood, unable to cope with the church’s betrayal of women and children’s lives and now in my understanding, of men’s lives as well. I also came out as having a same sex partner, something the church had deemed as perverse and sinful. I could not reconcile the Church’s silence on violence against women and child abuse, with their active persecution of gay and lesbian committed same sex relationships. I was encouraged all my life to remain silent on the issues of violence. But then to be forced to remain hidden about what I believed was a freely chosen and not abusive relationship was not something, as priest, I could condone in my spiritual engagement of others’ journeys.
In this pivotal struggle for direction and meaning, I was often found myself in a mournful state of limbo regarding my professional and personal identity. I was drenched in pain and I found myself mentally “walking in circles” trying to make sense of all I had been taught juxtaposed with all I had come to believe. In this state of extreme “woundedness” I began to read more of the Old Testament and Jewish scholars. Maybe if I could only engage more ancient stories to find the meaning of forgiveness, (before the church “dumbed down” the bible’s potential narrative impact),
I thought that maybe I could still engage the spiritual dilemmas created in my life having still not been able to forgive.
So in my own misery…I read the book of Job in his misery…. After all his troubles Job calls upon God to show “his” face and make sense for Job of all the woes and torments in Job’s life, as Job has been a good and faithful servant of Yahweh and a “good and righteous person” to others - even to his enemies. But his friends keep saying to him… you must have done something wrong to deserve the torments you have encountered. After some time, a seemingly un-empathetic Yahweh appears in response to Job’s cries and has a conversation with this lone and troubled human being, in which he says say to Job….” Where were you when I created the universe?”
The story itself and Yahweh’s “answer” set everything that had happen in my life into a profound balance of inter-relationship with the universe and other human beings, which I had never experienced before. I can only say that at the time this story, written in this way “transported” me out of the my drowning pain, and allowed me to view my experience of personal pain, as connected within a much larger picture of human grief and pain. I took profound comfort in this “story” of Yahweh, described at once both as a vast spiritual entity encompassing the universe itself, and yet at the same time nevertheless speaking personally and directly to the one lonely and seemingly forgotten human life of Job… and yet the pain of Job is described by that same entity as only one small aspect of all that exits.
Our pain is real enough to be spoken about, yet is but a moment in time, juxtaposed to the entire universe and its energy and creative genius. There was hope for my gaining freedom from debilitating pain and my limiting victim identity when that pain was put in perspective with the universal experiences of pain. Even now, years later in my darkest moments I re-engage this balance of my personal pain as it sits in the universe and I am able to engage my passion again to help others and at the same time self-soothe the wounds of my own pain. I believe if I had not found this balance in my thinking and spiritual life…I would not be here today. As a Zen master once said “Today there are millions of people in the world who did not hurt a child.
Did this experience help me to forgive my father? No not yet - but I found I could dismantle a part of that cement wall I had employed to fortify myself against any inclinations to forgiveness, and replace it with a small internal, reconstruction. I realized that my human vulnerability was part of the block and that that vulnerability was not a negative weakness, but a real consequence of being hurt. That it had nothing whatsoever to do with the will or lack thereof to forgive. I was weakened by my experiences as much as I was a strong person because I chose to live rather than die. That weakened state had made life difficult to live fully but not impossible to engage. In fact like a person who is blind employs other heightened senses to override the unsighted losses, so too abused children override the experiences by creating heightened sense of imagination and play worlds in which to live even while the abuse is taking place and yes unhealthy ways of coping too… all in order to find a voice and speak out. This vulnerability became my strength in that I could now consider that my father might also be frail, that he might also have wounds that could not be healed and that his rage was taken out on others less strong.
But it stopped there. I could go no further.
The latest part of my journey and where it has remained of now is studying the Jewish understanding of what must be in place for “forgiveness” to actually be realized and not remain in the realm of words. But rather move into actuality and a way of living. It is this…in order for forgiveness to truly occur… both the victim and the offender must make a complete turn around – a full 180 degrees of change; the victim in his/her attitude toward the offender as unforgivable and the offender in his/her reluctance to take complete responsibility as a free person for individual actions of abuse.
In other words, in order to achieve true forgiveness between them, they must be prepared to give up the previously held positions of victim and offender.
The victim must be free of the anger and resentment that maintains the prison of victim identity and instead consider the possibility that a victim has both the power to speak and the power to forgive another. Likewise the offender must be totally free of rationalizations, indeed even accepting that an abusive childhood does not excuse the damage he/she has caused another, thereby becoming a free person able to accept responsibility and act differently in order to change the cycle of violence against others. In other words … is being open to both receiving and being forgiven. Think about it – a domino effect of forgiveness…think of the work involved…but think also of the possibilities.
Daunting isn’t it? I believe in our heart of hearts, that to stop war, stop hatred, stop hurting each other, cherish the universe and our place in it, that we as a collective humanity do glimpse even if only fleetingly, the work involved in achieving this 180-degree turn. And we also know that this kind of forgiveness can only be engaged if every single human being is involved in what seems like this extra human effort.
Did this new understanding allow me to move beyond just considering forgiveness and into action? Not completely but it did allow me to understand that I was unable to forgive my abusers on my own and to at least give up carrying the worst of my anger and resentfulness alone. Instead I chose to “put it out to the universe” so to speak. This provides relief every day and in terms of my father…he died 26 years ago, so he cannot engage this other half of the 180-degree turn around. And the other circle of my abusers, operating within the church when I was a child… they were disbanded years ago, after an unplanned public exposure of their abuse of others. They remain unchallenged for their actions.
But I continue the pursuit of the meaning of forgiveness for the sake of the health of my own soul, for continued professional growth and social reconnection to the human race and universe within which we live. And when it is safe to do so, I grieve still for all the unforgiving acts we prey upon children in the world.
