Tag Archives: Psalms of lament

The Process of Forgiveness (1): Owning the Hurt

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purpleFlower1When I suggest that forgiveness is a process, the implication is that there are several steps to the process and we take them one at a time. It isn’t as simple as that. There are steps that can be articulated to give us a sense of direction for the process, but they are all so closely interrelated that it is more like disentangling a tangle of yarn than a matter of climbing steps on a ladder or a staircase. The image of the tangled yarn, something that often feels more like a tangled rope around our necks, suggests that the process has a lot to do with loosening something that is tight, which is precisely what the Greek word aphesis, a word often translated as forgiveness, is about. Letting go that which has tied us up simply takes time.

Desmond and Mpho Tutu have written a valuable book called The Book of Forgiving that helps us understand the process of forgiveness. In my own reflections I don’t come up with precisely the same list, but it comes close and the four-step process in Tutu’s book gives us something to work with.

The first two steps listed by the Tutus are: 1) Telling the Story and 2) Naming the Hurt. These two steps are so closely related that they feel like one step to me, albeit a more complex step. I am inclined to call this first step: own the hurt. This step seems simple but it can be difficult emotionally because it means facing the pain and that is—well, very painful. It is, however, pain that is necessary for healing just as an infection has to be opened before it can be healed. Community is important as one almost always needs at least one sympathetic listener and often there is need for many more than that. The importance of telling the story is that when another has invaded us by injuring us, we are suffering on the terms of the perpetrator. The first step of suffering on our own terms is to tell the story, to face the truth of what has happened to us. We cannot forgive what we have not seen and faced for ourselves. As long as the truth of injury is repressed, it holds us in its grip. Over the years I have listened to people tell their stories, some of them about childhood sexual abuse. This listening makes it clear that the very act of telling the story changes the story from what it was before. Something moves within us when we tell our stories.

The many psalms of lament model for us this step of owning the hurt by telling the story. There is a communal element to these psalms as they seem to have had cultic use in Israel, and in fact are sometimes collective laments, and they have a long history of use in public worship in Christianity. These verses from Psalm 31 are one sample among many that could be picked out from the Psalter:

I am the scorn of all my adversaries,
a horror[c] to my neighbors,
an object of dread to my acquaintances;
those who see me in the street flee from me.
                      I have passed out of mind like one who is dead;
I have become like a broken vessel.
                   For I hear the whispering of many—
terror all around!—
as they scheme together against me,
as they plot to take my life. (Ps, 31: 11-13)

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that Bishop Tutu chaired is, to date, the most powerful instant of a communal telling of stories. Everybody who wished was allowed to tell the truth of the injuries they had received during Apartheid. Perpetrators were also invited to tell their stories and were granted amnesty for doing so. Telling the story also makes it clear that much more is at stake that the forgiveness by the victim. Those in South Africa who listened to the testimonials, from the bishop himself to those watching on their TVs, were challenged to forgive what had happened.

There is a danger in telling the story. Doing so does not automatically begin a healing process. It can do quite the opposite. Asking God to blot our abusers from the land of the living (Ps. 69:28) once we have told the story of waters rising up to our necks (Ps. 69:1) hardly moves us in the direction of forgiveness. Telling the story of victimization and listening to it can enrage us and lead us to seek revenge. Worship in Holy Week involves telling the story of Jesus’ sufferings that culminated on the cross. What these observances should do is deepen our compassion for the victim, leading to compassion for all victims. Instead, Jews learned over the centuries that it was dangerous to be walking about during Holy Week if there were Christians around.

This is why I include “own the hurt” as an integral part of this first step. It isn’t enough to tell the story; it is necessary to tell the story in a listening way. That is, we must listen to ourselves when we tell the story. The importance of at least one more person listening is that a good listener can help the teller listen more deeply to him or herself. The mimetic desire to hear the story between two or more people increases the listening that is happening. Since the abuse we have experienced is inscribed in our bodies, we need this deep listening to reach our guts so that the muscles tightened over what has happened can loosen. The act of loosening happens in our bodies before it happens in our heads and we can’t put our hearts into forgiving until our guts have done it. I have listened to enough people to have learned that there is a strong and clear distinction between those who listen to what they are saying and those who don’t. Those who listen well to themselves move towards healing. Those who do not listen to themselves remain stuck with their pain, trapped with no exit until they do learn to listen.

Such deep listening is owning the hurt. Owning the hurt does not make it hurt less and it certainly does not solve any problems, but it is the first step toward healing and forgiveness. Owning the hurt is the beginning of letting go, which is the second step. This shows us how closely related the steps are. We will look at this second step in the next post of this series.

Proceed to The Process of Forgiving (2)

Freud’s Illusion and the Paschal Mystery

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Cemetary2In December 1927, the New York Times announced that Freud had doomed religion with his book The Future of an Illusion. In The Authenticity of Faith: the Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience, psychologist and professing Christian Richard Beck evaluates this claim. Beck points out that Freud did not debunk religion by refuting the classical proofs of God’s existence but by arguing that religion was ego-centric wishful thinking that we must outgrow. We could respond by suggesting that atheism is wishful thinking; a wish not to be accountable to God. There is that but there is much value in taking Freud’s critique seriously to see if it holds up to Christianity as it is actually lived which is what Beck does.

Beck turns to Ernest Becker to evaluate Freud’s thesis. Becker (the focus of Beck’s book Slavery to Death) argued that denial of death was a prime motivation in human behavior, leading us to seek “heroic” acts levels to stave off the reality of death, an example of what Freud called sublimation. (See Escape from the Denial of Death)  It happens that there have been many scientific studies of Becker’s thesis by his followers and they tend to show that the more one is reminded of mortality, the more rigidly one defends one’s worldview and denigrates others. This applies to any worldview, not just Christianity.

Beck then brings in the Psalms of lamentation (a large chunk of the Psalter) and the spiritual darkness that Mother Teresa admitted to as counter-indications that wishful thinking is the only dynamic in Christianity. Beck could just as easily have brought in St. John of the Cross who wrote about “the dark night of the soul.” Beck then turns to William James who pre-dated Freud in his scientific study of religious experience that was published in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James distinguished between “healthy-minded” believers and “sick souls.” The terms are misleading in that “healthy-mindedness” is superficial and leads to denial of life’s difficulties and so is not really that healthy. Meanwhile, “sick souls” wrestle with cognitive dissonance and inner darkness in a way that makes them more resilient and authentic in the long run. The Psalmist of lament, Mother Teresa and St. John of the Cross would be “sick souls.” Beck notes that the charges Freud and Becker make about wishful believers applies well to what James called the “healthy-minded” but not at all to the “sick souls.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace” seems to fit James’ distinction quite well.

Since there had been no scientific investigations of James’ categories, Beck has filled this gap with his own field work. First, participants were given a questionnaire to give ratings as to how “healthy-minded” or “sick-souled” they were and then they were given a task such as to evaluate an essay by a Christian and one by a Buddhist. Not surprisingly, the “healthy-minded” respondents denigrated the Buddhist while the “sick souls” were much more tolerant in their attitudes. The same result came with tests on comfort with the Incarnation (such as whether one admits Jesus might have had diarrhea) or evaluating two works of art, one imaging healthy-mindedness, the other more focused on life’s pain. In each case, there was strong confirmation of James’ distinction of different believers.

It is worth mentioning René Girard’s theory of the origin of religion in collective violence in this context. Girard does not think that early humans wished for pie in the sky and then made up a religion to get it. Rather, they responded to social crises by killing or expelling a victim. The camaraderie that resulted from this act and the institutionalization of sacrifice was the payoff. (See Two Ways of Gathering) In fact, belief in a heavenly afterlife is quite a latecomer in world religion. The social solidarity of collective violence can easily be achieved these days without a deity. Freud himself made a dogma of his ideas and expelled all dissenters. In Girard’s thinking, it is the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ suffering and death that expose sacred violence for what it is. Girard’s thought adds weight to the correlation between being “healthy-minded” and prone to expelling those who differ. Beck does not say anything about the Paschal Mystery, but the cross at the center of Christianity should be enough to suggest that Christianity has its own built-in critique of wish-fulfillment in Freud’s sense or “healthy-minded” religion in James’ sense. One need only read the Epistles of Paul to see this self-critique at the origins of Christianity. I think Beck would agree since he sees a much deeper love among the “sick souls” than among the “healthy-minded” and he notes that in 1 Corinthians Paul says that love is the greatest virtue of all.

Beck’s exploration of Freud and James is of great importance for coming to grips with a theological anthropology and pointing in the direction of authentic faith and genuine spirituality.