Revenge-Forgiveness Cycle, Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s, The Book of Forgiving. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaVXxnKWkAIs5py.jpg:large
When I was a kid, my mom found child psychology, and it made me crazy. If I had done something wrong, she said, “Let’s talk about it.” On at least one occasion, I remember saying, “Can you just punish me, so we can get this over with?” Then we had to talk about that too. Oh my gosh! I thought I was going to scream! In each of our lives, we have things that have happened that make us want to scream with frustration, grind our teeth with rage, and cry rivers of sadness. In their Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Desmond Tutu and daughter, Mpho, write, “Hurt, insult, harm, and loss are inevitable aspects of our lives…it is not the trauma itself that defines us. It is the meaning we make of our experiences that defines both who we are and who we ultimately become.”[1] How do deal with pain? How do we make sense of trauma? As it turns out, the Bible actually has some amazing things to show us about that process.
The first step of processing any hurt or loss we have experienced is to tell the story. Lay out the facts. The story is told that one Sunday, a boy and his mom were having lunch. “So honey,” the mom asked, “what did you talk about in Sunday School today?” “Oh it was great! We talked about this mean king, named Pharaoh in Egypt, and how God sent in tanks, F-15s and marines to free God’s people. Then God asked Moses to help, and he made a pontoon bridge across the Red Sea, and God’s people got away.” The mom asked, “Is that really how it happened?” The boy replied, “No, but you wouldn’t have believed me if I told you the truth.” If we want to find healing, though, we have to lay out the truth, at least as we understand it. No sugar-coating it. As the Tutus write, “Telling the story is how we get our dignity back after we have been harmed. It is how we begin to take back what was taken from us, and how we begin to understand and make meaning out of our hurting…When you tell your story, you no longer have to carry your burden alone.”[2] Surprisingly, when we read the passage from Jeremiah, God is doing exactly this—telling the story of what the Israelites did and said, and how they thought everything would be wonderful. John, in his first letter, talks about the importance of telling the truth, but from the perspective of those who have done the hurting—to come clean and tell the truth, and find God’s forgiveness. The Tutus continue, “When we tell our stories, we are practicing a form of acceptance. When we tell our stories, we are saying, ‘This horrible thing has happened. I cannot go back and change it, but I can refuse to stay trapped in the past forever.’ We have reached acceptance when we finally recognize that paying back someone in kind will never make us feel better or undo what has been done.”
The second step of processing any hurt or loss we have experienced is to name the hurt. How were you hurt? What have you lost? I am profoundly grateful for passages like the one in Jeremiah, because God lays it out there—you betrayed me, you worshiped other things, you thought I didn’t care because you didn’t care. As I read this in Jeremiah, I can almost feel God’s pain. Desmond Tutu writes, “A hurt is a hurt. A loss is a loss. And a harm felt but denied will always find a way to express itself…The only way to heal this hurt is to give voice to what ails us. It is only in this way that we can keep our pain and loss from taking root inside us.”[3] When I was a kid, my dad said he would give me a dime for every dandelion I dug up. I thought, “Yeah baby! I’m going to rake it in!” And then he talked with me about how important it was to get the whole root, and showed me how to dig it out completely, so that the dandelion wouldn’t regrow again. Naming our hurts completely, truthfully, really does allow us to recognize and not be controlled by our hurts.
When I was a teen-ager, my Mom’s deeper understanding of relationships was really tested, because there were times I didn’t even know what I was feeling, but I kept doing and saying things anyway. I don’t know how she put up with me—I’m not sure I would have put up with me. The curious thing about forgiveness and reconciliation is that it has to begin somewhere. She thought it began with talking. I thought she was insufferable. Haha But she was patient. She told her story about the pain I had caused, and she named the hurt—so I could see it in her. And then I had a choice. I want you to hear today, that however much you have done to hurt another person, God is even more patient and loving than my mom. Where my Mom sometimes struggled with her own demons, John writes that in God there is no darkness, only light. God is love, and when we tell the story of the hurt we have given or received, God creates space for us to choose. Will we turn the hurt to more pain—in violence towards others or self-destruction towards ourselves—or will we allow God to restore us, so we can live in right relationship with each other and with God? It’s the kind of healing and hope we long for…and God is more than able!
[1]Desmond and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World (NY: HarperOne, 2014) p. 70.
[2]Ibid, pp. 71–72.
[3]Ibid, pp. 96–97.