When I imagine taking the best parts of all the world’s religions and making one vessel that holds all that is ideal in each of them, I think of Jesus as the exemplar of human forgiveness.
The spring after my father died – I was 16 and in eleventh grade – I leaned on my Christian friends and that version of Jesus to get through. I remember sitting on the floor of my friend’s basement for Christian bible study before school. I remember the sun rising over Easter morning services on the main lawn at Penn State. I remember visiting Gethsemane the summer after my first year of college and feeling like I was one of those Jewish mystics who felt Jesus rise from his grave and live among them. I imagined myself, so many generations ago, one of those early Jewish people who became Christians.
The idea that Jesus was not just a prophet, but a human who lived and walked among other humans and loved all of them, forgave all of them, including those who had him hung on the cross to die. I still feel that presence sometimes – not like a divine force, but the best of humanity, something I can yearn to be and become because a son of God had lived among us. “We are all children of the Universe” is how I might have said this at the time.
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I realize that this is a very idiosyncratic way of thinking about Jesus; it reminds me of how my grandmother talked about the characters in the Hebrew Bible, as if she had lived amongst them and was speaking from inside a tradition that stretched back to them. It was as if Jesus, the prophet who was also human, protected me from a place that connected the generations and transcended time.
From the moment my father died until I was in my second year of college, fearing that I had killed my father was one of the secrets I carried with me everywhere I went. In the weeks before my father died, I felt – like a shaking just below my skin – that if I loved my father enough, I could keep him alive; that it was my job to tend to him through his illness and somehow, magically, he would walk out alive. It sounds crazy as I write this now, but that was one of many excruciating secrets I kept hidden when I went away to college and for many years afterwards.
When I felt guilty beyond what I could carry alone, I thought of Jesus forgiving me. Because he had been human, and had forgiven so many people who had done so many bad things, Jesus embodied this kind of forgiveness that I wanted so desperately but could not give to myself.
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Many years later, when I discovered EMDR and then storytelling, and I began to talk about those childhood secrets, I made a choice to forgive other people so I could begin healing my complex PTSD. I needed to put these traumas in the past in order to heal the wounds where I carried them for so long.
I wrote to the perpetrator and said I forgave him.
I told my mother several times over the years, but it was not something she was able to take in as real until I was helping her to complete her own life story, and when we had the opening to sit with the reality together we both took it. In Japanese tradition, when an important vessel is broken, you repair it with precious metals, so the cracks show in the new vessel. This is called kintsugi, or golden repair. It was like a “golden repair” in my relationship with my mother when we sat together with what had happened to me so long ago, and her refusal to accept that it was true for so long.
That fragile, visible repair of a broken relationship is at the heart of what Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, or repairing the world. It all starts with one human looking at another and acknowledging how they have actively caused harm, and making a commitment to change. Circle practice works like this as well – if you cause harm, even when inadvertent, you start with the other person’s feelings, acknowledging what you have done that caused them harm.
When my perpetrator said, “I WAS WRONG. I apologize. I am sorry,” it began a deep, clearing in my spirit at a place I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t know I’d been harmed there because I’d never been there. When the first couple of people asked me, “How do you feel?” I honestly didn’t know. Or I couldn’t put it in words. I felt the need to experience and process this shift for myself before I could even approach, much less answer that question.
I am just beginning to go into that place and soothe myself now, five months after he wrote, “I WAS WRONG. I apologize. I’m sorry.” Forgiving someone is big and healing; that person acknowledging their wrongdoing is healing and cleansing in a completely different way. One is not better or worse; they are both necessary.
When he acknowledged what he had done, what I had left was the need to forgive myself and love myself as whole and worthy once again. I’m not sure how much others experience this, but forgiving myself for all the places I’ve not honored myself and taken responsibility for myself, this is one of the hardest things I’ve had to face since my mother passed. With her gone from this world, there is no one but myself I can lean on when I am complicit in things that are wrong, when I stand back rather than trying what I know is imperfect but must be done anyway.
I’ve been going back in time in my daily writing, noticing moments when I didn’t trust myself or believe myself or love myself, and I’m tending, soothing, and repairing those messy places one by one. It makes me a little shaky sometimes to feel this responsibility – not right or wrong, just responsible for myself and everything I do and have ever done.
Writing prompt:
What is something that you could forgive yourself for? It could be something big or small, something you did or failed to do, once or many times. What do you need to do to forgive yourself in the present now?