Hosted by Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at Saint John’s University, Collegeville Minnesota Tuesday October 2, 2012 & Thursday, October 4th 2012 at 7:30 p.m. with responders from the Jewish and Muslim communities for discussion
Bigelow Chapel, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
by: Fr Michael Lapsley, SSM, Institute for Healing of Memories
My talk today is entitled “Pain Knows No Boundaries: An Interfaith Journey of Healing and Hope.” Let me begin with a quote from the eminent Christian theologian Donald Shriver who said,
Some say, ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone.’ I think it’s precisely the opposite. Laughter can separate us; pain unites us. It’s what in one way or another we all understand.
Again and again in our Healing of Memories work the world over, people bear witness to the truth of Dr. Shriver’s observation. The sharing of pain helps us feel less isolated and alone and connects us with our fellow human beings at a very deep level and when people feel understood and connected, healing can begin.
Sharing of pain also fosters mutual understanding and therefore can lead to reconciliation—not always, but in some cases. In my talk today I will relate some of my own experience of Healing of Memories work in an interfaith context.
Let us begin with the recognition that all human beings in one way or another seek to understand the meaning of our lives. The book of Genesis, for example, describes the early Hebrews’ attempt to explain the very existence of the world and our place as human beings in what they understood as God’s creation. Many religions share a similar preoccupation. So, for example, in Confucianism we find the statement,
The hawk soars to the heavens above;
Fishes dive to the depths below.
That is to say, there is no place in the highest heavens above, nor in the deepest water below where the moral law is not to be found.
Or in the Qur’an, we read,
His place is so high that nothing can be imagined higher.
He is so near to us that nothing can be nearer.
The eminence of His position has not placed him any further away from his creatures, and
His nearness has not brought them on a par with Him.
For most of us, our quest for meaning finds expression in our search for identity. We know, for example, that as human beings we are part of and yet separate from the rest of creation. Our parents gave us a name that marks us as unique and distinct from every other human being on the planet. Most of us also have a family identity, however family is construed in our particular culture, and so it goes through language groups, tribes, and nationalities. While these identities are parts of the cultural treasure of the human family, problems arise when we lift our own identity above all others.
Perhaps that is because religious faith goes to the heart of what we experience as of ultimate importance. Our faith goes to the very heart of our understanding of what it means to be human. This is equally true for those who subscribe to no faith tradition for this too is how they make sense of their place in the world. So if we elevate our religious identity above all others, there is a danger that we will imagine ourselves to be somehow more human than those we perceive as ‘the other.’ In our world today, it sometimes seems as if a disproportionate number of conflicts have a religious dimension. A wise man in Sri Lanka once said to me “Do not look at what human beings have done in the name of the founder of a religion; look rather at what are the core teachings of the great religions of the world.” And so it is true, that within the great faith traditions there are common life giving values around kindness, compassion, gentleness, and justice.
Minor variations of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you,” are found not only in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, but in many of the world’s religious teachings. For me, it was quite startling when I discovered that what I rightly perceived as the treasures of the Christian scriptures were echoed in the Upanishads, the Qu’ran, and Bagavad Gita, for example. So we read in a Buddhist sutra an expression of the bodisattva ideal, as follows:
I take upon myself the burden of all suffering; I am resolved to do so; I will endure it. I do not turn or run away. . . . At all costs I must bear the burdens of all beings. In that I do not follow my own inclinations. I have made the vow to save all beings.
Or a proverb from an African traditional religion of Kenya and Tanzania,
Guardianship is not to give an order, but to give oneself.
Or yet again, in Jainism,
To be moved at the sign of the thirsty, the hungry, and the miserable and to offer relief to them out of pity—this is the spring of virtue.
There are those who want to push a faith exceptionalism that would confront that, and indeed, I am not trying to say that all faith traditions are the same. They are not, but there is a profound commonality of values that should be acknowledged and which is itself a treasure in a world where different traditions intermingle on a daily basis. Religious narratives differ, but they are all about human beings trying to make sense of the human experience. In my recent memoir, Redeeming the Past, I wrote that I reached the conclusion that the future of humanity is not a uniquely Christian future, but rather an interfaith future, including deep reverence for atheists, agnostics, and those practicing indigenous spiritualities. I have always been very religious, but doubt has been a consistent part of my faith journey.
I have come increasingly to respect doubt. It brings with it a welcome kind of humility. Who among us would assert that he knows, really, who God is? Doubt opens the door to valuing the perspective of ‘the other.’
I suppose in a rapidly changing world there is a kind of security and certainty that we look for. The problem with what I see as a kind of false certainty is that it slides very easily into fundamentalism. Fundamentalisms are dangerous, be they religious or secular, because there’s no space for further questioning or exploration and a deep understanding. Fundamentalism is scary, because people become capable of doing terrible things in the name of their creed. This is true whether we are talking about Christians who would deny human rights and even kill others based on their sexual orientation, Muslims who would stone to death a woman they accuse of adultery, or Jewish settlers who feel entitled to burn the orchards and homes of Palestinians who live on territory they covet. In each case, false certainty is the problem and humility is the solution.
My views on interfaith matters were powerfully shaped by my experience in the struggle for the liberation of South Africa. The apartheid struggle was always in some respects a theological battle. The governing National Party held up the State as the earthly manifestation of God’s will and the white government as divinely ordained. Christian imagery and selective quotes from scripture were used to manipulate people, especially black people who were encouraged to be docile and accept their fate because their reward awaited them in heaven. As Marx would say, religion was indeed used as an opiate of the people. For me, this was a terrible perversion of the gospel teachings. Scripture that was the bedrock of my faith was being twisted into an ideological weapon in the service of evil. After deep reflection on my own faith I came to believe in a God who always and ever lifted up the poor and oppressed, and I acted on my faith by joining the liberation movement, even though this set me at odds with a significant segment of the church.
In the liberation struggle we had people of many different faiths and those who had no religious faith at all.
Regardless of our faith traditions we shared vision of a common humanity and a commitment to freedom and justice for all. We learned to trust each other with our very lives because throughout the whole of Southern Africa, the regime hunted us down like wild animals. Comrades were killed either outright by bombings or in mysterious accidents. If they were captured they were detained indefinitely and tortured sometimes to death. Some, like myself, survived with permanent major disabilities. And what was our crime? It was that, however we might individually have expressed it, we dared to believe in a God who had created us as equal with an equal right to a place in the sun. We exemplified an interfaith future by living it in the trenches fighting apartheid; we learned it by living together, fighting together, and dying together. When you’ve been through an experience like that you do not easily subscribe to a narrow view of any faith tradition or an exclusivist or tribal view of what it means to be human.
Sometimes when people plan an interfaith service, they seek the lowest common denominator, but in my own view we should bring the riches of our various faith traditions to the liturgy. During the years of struggle, St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town culminating with the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu became a place of resistance and hope. Of course, it’s true that some Christians and some people of other faiths were unhappy about that. They had a rather narrow view that in heaven there would only be those of their particular tradition and were uncomfortable praying together. Nevertheless, many people of different faiths gathered there in this holy place to receive sustenance for the struggle ahead, and they were not just Anglicans, and not just Christians. The Cathedral became a place for all people to renew their sense of faith and hope.
In the end, we prevailed, thanks in part to the support of much of the international community, who rightly saw that the stakes in the South African struggle involved fundamental issues of human rights that were important to the whole human family.
The international Christian community declared that apartheid was a heresy or a false doctrine. The World Council of Churches created a Programme to Combat Racism which gave humanitarian support to the liberation movements.
The triumph of an inclusive South Africa was symbolized in the inauguration ceremony of Nelson Mandela. Under the apartheid regime, in the inauguration of the president there would have only been Christian prayers. Now, as Nelson. Mandela was inaugurated we had all the great faiths and traditional African spiritualities given equal pride of place in the ceremony. On radio and television other faiths that had been pushed aside were now beginning to be heard. So people waking up in the morning with their radios on would hear religious scriptures from different traditions being read. In some very important sense, this symbolized what we had been struggling for.
I returned to South Africa the early 1990s after more 16 years in exile and became the Chaplain of the Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town.
There, I soon began to realize that everyone had been damaged by the apartheid experience regardless of what side they had been on, and everyone had a story to tell. Many were damaged by the terrible things that had been done to them, some by what they had done to others, and nearly everyone by what they failed to do. Along with a group of colleagues from a number of different faith traditions, we began to experiment with a spiritually based story telling process of healing that soon became what we came to call a Healing of Memories workshop. From the outset, it was an interfaith experience and we invited people to come with their holy texts, especially as they related to healing, forgiveness, and remembering the past.
My experience leading Healing of Memories workshops has taught me that acknowledgment is a very powerful force for healing. The deepest damage of oppression is that it denies our full humanity. People come to believe, “I am nobody.” For example, in families where there is neglect or abuse, children grow up feeling unloved and uncared for, and sometimes their innocence is defiled. What does this do to us as human beings?
The pervasive indignities, humiliations, and brutality of apartheid meant that whole groups of people grew up feeling “less than,” and so their belief in their fundamental human value was damaged.
Acknowledgement is not the same as knowledge. In families there may be abuse happening and everyone knows about it, so there is knowledge. However it’s a guilty secret that is not talked about, so there is no acknowledgment of what is going on. Under apartheid people had knowledge of the terrible things that happened, but there was little or no acknowledgement of the impact that they had on the lives of individuals. From an interfaith point of view, it is as if with acknowledgment we are able to go underneath the various narratives of our faith traditions to their very core that affirms the dignity and worth of each human life. This is bedrock of all religious faiths. It is also a spiritual value that moves even those who profess no religious belief.
We sometime say that a Healing of Memories workshop is a weekend long journey from pain to hope.
We create safe and sacred spaces where people can tell their stories in small groups in an atmosphere of deep listening that affirms the dignity of the story teller. No feelings are discouraged or declared illegitimate. Some people need to let go of anger and even hatred. A little girl we worked with in Fiji once described it as “vomiting out the poison.” Sometimes the pain is almost more than the human spirit can bear. I think of a workshop we held in Haiti. There, one Haitian mother said simply, “I have been humiliated all my life.” The words seared my flesh and entered my soul, and I prayed that the workshop would give this woman an experience of being valued and respected for once in her life. Sometimes the depth that has been touched can be measured by the silence that follows, and in those moments of silence acknowledgment does its healing work. In the Christian tradition, we would say it is a moment of profound grace.
Public acknowledgments can also be healing to society as a whole.
To take just one recent example from the United Kingdom, in 2010 the British prime minister, David Cameron, apologized for the Bloody Sunday massacre that occurred in Derry, Northern Ireland nearly 40 years ago. Fourteen unarmed people died on that occasion and many more were injured at the hands of the British army. It is worth reading the remarks of the Prime Minister because his powerful and unequivocal language would have been profoundly healing for many who heard his words.
The conclusions (of the investigation) are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The Government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of our armed forces and for that, on behalf of the Government, and indeed our country – I am deeply sorry.
This apology changed things.
The victims are still dead, but the survivors felt that finally what was done to their loved ones was acknowledged in a public way, even though the prime minister himself was only a child when it happened. The people on whose behalf the acknowledgment is offered may also be touched, so hopefully everyone is changed in the process. Of course acknowledgment is not the end of the journey. Rather it is the beginning of a new journey. Often people are reluctant to offer acknowledgment out of a guilty fear of facing their collective responsibility for what happened, even if, like the British prime minister, they were not personally responsible. This has been a significant problem in South Africa where the majority of the white population has not begun to come to terms with its complicity in apartheid. There may also be fear that acknowledgment will affect their pocketbooks through a need for restitution or reparations in order to truly set the relationship right.
There is another point I want to make. Some time ago I worked with the Sami people who are the reindeer people who populate the far north of Scandinavia.
They were the target of efforts by a number of countries to destroy their culture and incorporate them into the cultural mainstream. A number of them said to me, “Our church has acknowledged and apologized for its part in our oppression. But the problem is that the mainstream of the society has no knowledge of what happened to us.” So in this case the healing power of the apology was diminished by the ignorance of the dominant culture about what had been done in its name. It is often the case that the oppressed across many generations carry within their very souls the memory of what was done to them, while those from the group who did it are in a combination of ignorance and denial about what happened.
So we might ask white America, do you really understand the pain of black America which people have carried through generations and still infects the present? Do you really know what the daily life of a slave was like? How much depth of knowledge is there about what First Nations have continued to carry about the consequences of what happened generations back?
People come to the United States from many parts of the world and they carry with them the wounds of what happened sometimes a long time past in history. But all of this shapes the kind of people that we are today and can act as obstacles to present relationships. People say to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, if my pain hasn’t been acknowledged why should I acknowledge the pain of someone else? We all tend to put our own pain at the top of the list, and so there comes to be a hierarchy of victimhood where people say, “We are the real victims.” So for healing to take place, there first has to be knowledge of what happened in the past, and then an acknowledgment of wrongness of what has been done.
We live in a world rich in diversity but also riven with pain. Not all of that is due to religious conflict, of course, but much of it is. If we are to live peaceably together, and even to go beyond that to appreciate the riches that each of us bring to the table, we must first be willing to listen to each other’s pain. Do we have the courage to do that? The truth is that we are all capable of being both victims and victimizers.
If we are able truly to listen to each other’s pain, to look into the mirror and acknowledge our own part or that of our ancestors in causing it, then we create the ground for a better world. It will be a world not only with an interfaith future, but one in which the heritage of the human family in all its dimensions will be respected and honored.