Forgiving and forgetting is it only a concept to be revisited?
This is something I have picked up from New York Times.
This is something I have picked up from New York Times.
The article that came up as “Forgiveness “ has spawned a healthy discussion and a little internet forum. I have already circulated it around even though it has come 18 months too late for any usefulness to this country. But the point I want to emphasize is that different people have different threshold and the bitterness is truly embedded in ones Long Term memory. Forgetting is one form of escape I believe. But forgiving needs an active contribution.
We had tsunami how quickly we forgot and embarked on full time War.
Now the war is over and the healing has not yet even commenced but another political war started. Now that the political war is over we have commenced an international war of attrition.
It is going in endless cycles.
We are still in the box (I call it the Hate Box) and out of the box philosophy has not even considered as a viable option.
What I have done is to picked up few of the posts at random and reproduced it here to start a healthy discussion in this country. We are supposed to have three to four powerful religions of reconciliation. Are the followers ready?
I have also made a little comment below to show my ignorance and the apathy I myself had cultivated inside me.
Comment 1
True that Bishop Tutu in his Truth Tribunals showed us that reconciliation cannot occur without forgiveness; however, you did not include the most critical aspect of the reconciliation process. There was no reconciliation or forgiveness without full and complete confession on one's evil deeds to others. Those perpetrators who admitted their deeds, who accepted full responsibility for their actions, who atoned openly for their violence to others--only those--were given forgiveness and allowed reconciliation.
Of course we would want to lift the burden of victimization from ourselves, the seething and anger and wretched hatred we feel when another has betrayed, harmed, or abused us, and we would want to find a way to forgive in ways consistent with justice. As normal human beings, we do not want to be stifled or compromised by the pain of our hatred toward another. Yet, we cannot extend forgiveness this if the perpetrator does not even recognize the harm he or she has done. We cannot do this if the perpetrator takes perverse and continuing pleasure in the agony caused to us. We cannot forgive if the perpetrator gives no promise of never again causing such pain to others. All we can do is bargain within ourselves to release ourselves from the hold of the perpetrator. We can say to ourselves, "He has done this to me, and I have suffered. However, he will never have another moment of my life, and so I choose to let go and move on. I choose this for myself." And we do this for ourselves, not for the evil person. We do mindfully choose to let go of anger and rage in order to reclaim our own lives and our own power. We do this so that we can live fully again.
Comment II
I was born in Warsaw and have always thought of myself as Polish, although I was Jewish as well, certainly enough so, that at ten, as far as Hitler’s ethnic cleansing was concerned, I became marked for extinction. When the call came for my mother and I to move to the Ghetto, my non Jewish father said, never, and without my mother who was forced to hide we moved to another apartment where no one knew us. The time was early 1940 and I was 11. As yet, there were no walls around the ghetto and most people could not even fathom the idea that a nation which had produced a Goethe and Beethoven could engage in mass murder of children.
With typically German efficiency, following a perfidious plan, the walls went up, the people were caged and made ready to be exterminated like vermin. When the horrific truth finally became evident that the “civilized” world was going to allow it to happen, for most, with the exception of a few heroes who decided to fight, it was too late. After three years of torture they could not gather the energy to save themselves or perhaps, did not want to do it and face the “civilized” world which had betrayed them. Mein Kampf has been published in 1933 and in Germany alone 5.000.000 copies were sold. Hitler’s megalomania was never a secret. The “civilized” world knew and did nothing.
The memories of Holocaust and other mass murder crimes live deep within all of us but few of them compare to the mass murder of children as demonstrated by the mountain of baby shoes behind a glass at the Auschwitz museum. When I thought of the small feet of the children who perished I realized that it was not just one madman who needed forgiveness, it was the whole Civilized World which had betrayed them. It is to them to them I screamed.- How could you? You, who call yourself civilized? You Popes and others professing love each Sunday and You democratically elected Presidents and Judges. You shook your heads, did nothing and proverbially washed your hands. You are all to blame. Yes, you are worse than Hitler. You are all bad and I hate you. Can there be a more poignant proof of pervasive inhumanity in the civilized world. If that is civilization? I don’t want to be civilized.
My thoughts went suddenly to Africa and the 3 year old I saw on BBC the other day who was going blind because there is no water to wash his eyes and then, to the 5 year old little girl I saw working full time in a rug factory in the Middle East. I bought the rug she made and I know that everyday I waste enough water to wash a hundred little eyes in Egypt..
I fully expect to live to be 85 surrounded by my grandchildren because that is my current life expectancy. But, I also realize that if I was a woman in the Congo I would probably have died thirty years ago.
Of course that was just the beginning. How many children did the enormous atomic mushroom over Hiroshima killed and how old was the little boy on fire lit by napal in Vietnam? How many of the little faces of Tutsi children in a gigantic field of refugees fleeing for their life will ever have a chance to grow up? Those questions must be by now firmly implanted in the collective mind of “civilized” people, who like I have seen what I saw shook their heads, gathered their own children around themselves and then went on with their lives as usual.
Could it not however be possible that the millions of small souls who have chosen to die so visibly at the hands of others during the last century did it so that, the millions of others who will follow will have a chance to live and grow. Is not Mandela and his bloodless miracle in South Africa proof that it may be so, that humanity can forgive and win and that children need not die?
Yes, by forgiving Hitler and the “CIVILIZED WORLD” perhaps I can forgive myself.
And find peace. After all “ALL FORGIVENESS IS SELF FORGIVENESS”
Comment III
When I shared the events surrounding the recent loss of my dad at age 86 with a handful of close friends, and later with a group of acquaintances, many individuals told me that my experiences brought them some comfort and moved them to reconsider their own lives. If it is useful to you in any way that is an added blessing.
My dad was blessed with twenty-five years of inexplicable good health according to the account his cardiologist gave me three years ago. The doctor explained that most cardiac bypass procedures will add an average of only ten to fifteen years to the life expectancy of patients like my dad with poorly controlled hypertension and advanced cornorary artery disease before they become occluded again. Yet here was my dad still inexplicably driving around Tuscon and reading the Wall Street Journal.
But as his cardiologist was quick to note -- as inexplicable as all of this was -- the circumstances surrounding the success of his open heart surgery at the Tuscon VA Medical Center were even more improbable. My father had gone in for a routine cardiac catheterization that day. As the procedure progressed he became so stricken that a call went out over the PA system for any cardiac surgeon who was in the building.
Evidently it was not my father's time because the physician who caught the page was one of the world's leading heart surgeon who was in the building coincidentally. This did not prevent him from rushing to my father's bedside and scrubbing up. Once he had cracked my father's chest the situation was far graver than anyone could have anticipated.
The cardiologist explained to me that this physician was probably one of only handful of surgeon's with the requisite skill and determination to save my father's life at that time. My father was so gravely ill that this gifted surgeon had improvised a sextuple bypass procedure and totally re-routed the blood flow in my father's as he went along.
When I received a call from my mother that my father was gravely ill in the Cardiac Care Unit I had been so estranged from him since childhood that I had little emotional investment in his recovery. The psychological stakes were so low for me at that time that I had no desire to rush to his bedside for what may have been the last time.
Dad recovered with no emotional support from me -- his eldest daughter. What is even more telling is that if he was hurt or surprised we never spoke of it. His and my mother's lives were an ongoing stream of medical and psychiatric crises most of which I did respond to. After all I was a licensed highly trained healthcare professional myself.
In my late 30's I was finally diagnosed with full blown chronic post traumatic stress disorder due to neglect and severe physical abuse that I had suffered from my earliest childhood. Much of it at the hands of my father. The severity of these events had left me so incapacitated that I was removed from my home by the State at age 15 and required three years of protective custody from my parents to heal enough to pull my life together. The prognosis was poor but I surprised everyone by receiving a scholarship to an elite libral arts college where I went on to excel. I thought that was the end of it but now I found that like some golem these events had been called back to life.
Gradually in my forties and early fifties I took an increasing interest in my father's World War II experiences as a machine gunner in the Army Air Corps. I drove out to Van Nuys Airport to tour B-17's and the other planes that my father had flown in and speak with the Vets who were touring with the vintage planes. Then I read autobiographical accounts from army airmen in the European Theater on the Internet.
I realized that World War II had given my dad PTSD ( the VA had awarded him a ten percent disability for 'shell shock') and that my father had unwittingly passed the condition on to me - his beloved eldest daughter- and that I had the poor health and emotional scars to prove it.
At this point my war was over, I was able to see my father as the World War II hero he was for the first time. He enlisted at seventeen having never held a gun and wound up as a gunnery sergeant and expert marksman despite his original plan to avoid combat.
Soon my father (who had thrown out all of his combat memorabilia along with his medals and commendations) in accordance with his his feelings of shame around his eventual breakdown began to recount his experiences openly with me. We visited surviving members of his squadron and as he became a hero to me, my dad was able to reevaluate his life and see himself as a hero as well.
During the last two and a half years of his life he became for me the dearly beloved father that I had always wanted and is still my hero. I treasured every moment we were able to spend together. I explained to him the Catholic concept of grace as being an unearned divine blessing which described our situation quite accurately.
My philosophical quagmire!
It is nice to see how different individuals approach this common phenomenon in different ways. It is time we develop a technique to address this problem in a more detached way. I think it has to do with how we remember things good and bad. To add to this there is often a confusion whether to forgive or forget. I think it is more forgetting than forgiving. It is a defense reaction we all have.
We may even forget to forgive!
I say that saying sorry is qualitative (sometime quantitative-How often we say sorry but keep our anger within?). But sometimes we say sorry with little empathy (since the desired effect was achieved in the first place to annoy somebody). Having not to say sorry is Total Quality Empowerment ( Total Quality Management Principle utilized to full strength). We do not want to lose a customer, Don't we?.
We are still in the box (I call it the Hate Box) and out of the box philosophy has not even considered as a viable option.
What I have done is to picked up few of the posts at random and reproduced it here to start a healthy discussion in this country. We are supposed to have three to four powerful religions of reconciliation. Are the followers ready?
I have also made a little comment below to show my ignorance and the apathy I myself had cultivated inside me.
Comment 1
True that Bishop Tutu in his Truth Tribunals showed us that reconciliation cannot occur without forgiveness; however, you did not include the most critical aspect of the reconciliation process. There was no reconciliation or forgiveness without full and complete confession on one's evil deeds to others. Those perpetrators who admitted their deeds, who accepted full responsibility for their actions, who atoned openly for their violence to others--only those--were given forgiveness and allowed reconciliation.
Of course we would want to lift the burden of victimization from ourselves, the seething and anger and wretched hatred we feel when another has betrayed, harmed, or abused us, and we would want to find a way to forgive in ways consistent with justice. As normal human beings, we do not want to be stifled or compromised by the pain of our hatred toward another. Yet, we cannot extend forgiveness this if the perpetrator does not even recognize the harm he or she has done. We cannot do this if the perpetrator takes perverse and continuing pleasure in the agony caused to us. We cannot forgive if the perpetrator gives no promise of never again causing such pain to others. All we can do is bargain within ourselves to release ourselves from the hold of the perpetrator. We can say to ourselves, "He has done this to me, and I have suffered. However, he will never have another moment of my life, and so I choose to let go and move on. I choose this for myself." And we do this for ourselves, not for the evil person. We do mindfully choose to let go of anger and rage in order to reclaim our own lives and our own power. We do this so that we can live fully again.
Comment II
I was born in Warsaw and have always thought of myself as Polish, although I was Jewish as well, certainly enough so, that at ten, as far as Hitler’s ethnic cleansing was concerned, I became marked for extinction. When the call came for my mother and I to move to the Ghetto, my non Jewish father said, never, and without my mother who was forced to hide we moved to another apartment where no one knew us. The time was early 1940 and I was 11. As yet, there were no walls around the ghetto and most people could not even fathom the idea that a nation which had produced a Goethe and Beethoven could engage in mass murder of children.
With typically German efficiency, following a perfidious plan, the walls went up, the people were caged and made ready to be exterminated like vermin. When the horrific truth finally became evident that the “civilized” world was going to allow it to happen, for most, with the exception of a few heroes who decided to fight, it was too late. After three years of torture they could not gather the energy to save themselves or perhaps, did not want to do it and face the “civilized” world which had betrayed them. Mein Kampf has been published in 1933 and in Germany alone 5.000.000 copies were sold. Hitler’s megalomania was never a secret. The “civilized” world knew and did nothing.
The memories of Holocaust and other mass murder crimes live deep within all of us but few of them compare to the mass murder of children as demonstrated by the mountain of baby shoes behind a glass at the Auschwitz museum. When I thought of the small feet of the children who perished I realized that it was not just one madman who needed forgiveness, it was the whole Civilized World which had betrayed them. It is to them to them I screamed.- How could you? You, who call yourself civilized? You Popes and others professing love each Sunday and You democratically elected Presidents and Judges. You shook your heads, did nothing and proverbially washed your hands. You are all to blame. Yes, you are worse than Hitler. You are all bad and I hate you. Can there be a more poignant proof of pervasive inhumanity in the civilized world. If that is civilization? I don’t want to be civilized.
My thoughts went suddenly to Africa and the 3 year old I saw on BBC the other day who was going blind because there is no water to wash his eyes and then, to the 5 year old little girl I saw working full time in a rug factory in the Middle East. I bought the rug she made and I know that everyday I waste enough water to wash a hundred little eyes in Egypt..
I fully expect to live to be 85 surrounded by my grandchildren because that is my current life expectancy. But, I also realize that if I was a woman in the Congo I would probably have died thirty years ago.
Of course that was just the beginning. How many children did the enormous atomic mushroom over Hiroshima killed and how old was the little boy on fire lit by napal in Vietnam? How many of the little faces of Tutsi children in a gigantic field of refugees fleeing for their life will ever have a chance to grow up? Those questions must be by now firmly implanted in the collective mind of “civilized” people, who like I have seen what I saw shook their heads, gathered their own children around themselves and then went on with their lives as usual.
Could it not however be possible that the millions of small souls who have chosen to die so visibly at the hands of others during the last century did it so that, the millions of others who will follow will have a chance to live and grow. Is not Mandela and his bloodless miracle in South Africa proof that it may be so, that humanity can forgive and win and that children need not die?
Yes, by forgiving Hitler and the “CIVILIZED WORLD” perhaps I can forgive myself.
And find peace. After all “ALL FORGIVENESS IS SELF FORGIVENESS”
Comment III
When I shared the events surrounding the recent loss of my dad at age 86 with a handful of close friends, and later with a group of acquaintances, many individuals told me that my experiences brought them some comfort and moved them to reconsider their own lives. If it is useful to you in any way that is an added blessing.
My dad was blessed with twenty-five years of inexplicable good health according to the account his cardiologist gave me three years ago. The doctor explained that most cardiac bypass procedures will add an average of only ten to fifteen years to the life expectancy of patients like my dad with poorly controlled hypertension and advanced cornorary artery disease before they become occluded again. Yet here was my dad still inexplicably driving around Tuscon and reading the Wall Street Journal.
But as his cardiologist was quick to note -- as inexplicable as all of this was -- the circumstances surrounding the success of his open heart surgery at the Tuscon VA Medical Center were even more improbable. My father had gone in for a routine cardiac catheterization that day. As the procedure progressed he became so stricken that a call went out over the PA system for any cardiac surgeon who was in the building.
Evidently it was not my father's time because the physician who caught the page was one of the world's leading heart surgeon who was in the building coincidentally. This did not prevent him from rushing to my father's bedside and scrubbing up. Once he had cracked my father's chest the situation was far graver than anyone could have anticipated.
The cardiologist explained to me that this physician was probably one of only handful of surgeon's with the requisite skill and determination to save my father's life at that time. My father was so gravely ill that this gifted surgeon had improvised a sextuple bypass procedure and totally re-routed the blood flow in my father's as he went along.
When I received a call from my mother that my father was gravely ill in the Cardiac Care Unit I had been so estranged from him since childhood that I had little emotional investment in his recovery. The psychological stakes were so low for me at that time that I had no desire to rush to his bedside for what may have been the last time.
Dad recovered with no emotional support from me -- his eldest daughter. What is even more telling is that if he was hurt or surprised we never spoke of it. His and my mother's lives were an ongoing stream of medical and psychiatric crises most of which I did respond to. After all I was a licensed highly trained healthcare professional myself.
In my late 30's I was finally diagnosed with full blown chronic post traumatic stress disorder due to neglect and severe physical abuse that I had suffered from my earliest childhood. Much of it at the hands of my father. The severity of these events had left me so incapacitated that I was removed from my home by the State at age 15 and required three years of protective custody from my parents to heal enough to pull my life together. The prognosis was poor but I surprised everyone by receiving a scholarship to an elite libral arts college where I went on to excel. I thought that was the end of it but now I found that like some golem these events had been called back to life.
Gradually in my forties and early fifties I took an increasing interest in my father's World War II experiences as a machine gunner in the Army Air Corps. I drove out to Van Nuys Airport to tour B-17's and the other planes that my father had flown in and speak with the Vets who were touring with the vintage planes. Then I read autobiographical accounts from army airmen in the European Theater on the Internet.
I realized that World War II had given my dad PTSD ( the VA had awarded him a ten percent disability for 'shell shock') and that my father had unwittingly passed the condition on to me - his beloved eldest daughter- and that I had the poor health and emotional scars to prove it.
At this point my war was over, I was able to see my father as the World War II hero he was for the first time. He enlisted at seventeen having never held a gun and wound up as a gunnery sergeant and expert marksman despite his original plan to avoid combat.
Soon my father (who had thrown out all of his combat memorabilia along with his medals and commendations) in accordance with his his feelings of shame around his eventual breakdown began to recount his experiences openly with me. We visited surviving members of his squadron and as he became a hero to me, my dad was able to reevaluate his life and see himself as a hero as well.
During the last two and a half years of his life he became for me the dearly beloved father that I had always wanted and is still my hero. I treasured every moment we were able to spend together. I explained to him the Catholic concept of grace as being an unearned divine blessing which described our situation quite accurately.
My philosophical quagmire!
It is nice to see how different individuals approach this common phenomenon in different ways. It is time we develop a technique to address this problem in a more detached way. I think it has to do with how we remember things good and bad. To add to this there is often a confusion whether to forgive or forget. I think it is more forgetting than forgiving. It is a defense reaction we all have.
We may even forget to forgive!
I say that saying sorry is qualitative (sometime quantitative-How often we say sorry but keep our anger within?). But sometimes we say sorry with little empathy (since the desired effect was achieved in the first place to annoy somebody). Having not to say sorry is Total Quality Empowerment ( Total Quality Management Principle utilized to full strength). We do not want to lose a customer, Don't we?.
In that context both the rights of the offender and the offended should be safeguarded, We have to do it in a business like manner. Acid Test is whether the customer comes back or not. If he does not we have failed in both forgiving as well as forgetting. The technique I use at work is to avoid addressing the issue until my inner anger dissipates to a level of almost zero. Once the anger is gone it is easy for us to get on with the work as usual. Forgetting and the reformation have to be done by the offender and he or she needs more time than the offended. Point is that there should not be any aggravation! I have never delved into this since I tend not to do things to offend others unless of course I am provoked to total warfare. That rarely happens in day to day life. I may need to study this in some depth how others manage this common problem. Anyway this article has made me to revisit this issue in a more academic way or perhaps in a philosophical way.
No comments:
Post a Comment