The Practice of Forgiveness

This posting is inspired by a very moving story that Marcus T. Anthony relates in his blog about some extraordinary healing that he witnessed during a recent visit to Beijing by the spiritual teacher Leonard Jacobson. No one who knows China could doubt the need for this in the light of the wounds caused by the Cultural Revolution, not to mention more recent events such as the uprising of 1989 and the troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang a couple of years ago. And of course, government censorship and control of the media make it particularly difficult to bring these matters into the light of day – which is why the events that Marcus describes are so remarkable.

However, I don’t particularly wish to single out China, but to raise a more general question about how such collective wounds can be healed, and how we should look at them. One of the things that’s striking about these kinds of trauma is how persistent they can be, under certain circumstances.

Take for example the American Civil War, which on paper ended almost 150 years ago, but which in some sense is still going on. All around the Southern States the Confederate flag continues to be displayed – sometimes in a spirit of fun and playfulness, but far more often in defiance of the alien values imposed by the North and still resented today. The election of Obama has added additional fuel to this world-view, which is more than tinged with notions of white racial superiority.

In a strange way the American Civil War seems less healed than the much more recent Second World War (at least as regards Western Europe), if only because no one apart from a tiny handful of insane fanatics argues that the Nazis could or should have won it. That must be one reason why relations today between the former combatants, all members of the European Union, are on the whole relatively cordial and relaxed.

If we look a bit further East, though, we find a deep unhealed bitterness in the troubled relations between Israelis and Palestinians (which dates back in fact to before WWII), and between China and Japan. In both these cases a kind of ethnocentric narcissism – the belief that one’s people or nation are chosen, special, central or superior – predated the conflict, and was intensified by the persecution which the people in question experienced.

Of course, these are complex issues about whose causes it’s dangerous to generalise, and there are probably far more differences than similarities between the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American Civil War, the Holocaust and the Sino-Japanese war – as conflicts. But I wanted to look specifically at healing and forgiveness: are they enough points in common to be able to see how a healthy collective recovery can take place, and is it a similar process to individual recovery?

The modern concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its treatment dates back to World War I. In those days it was referred to as ‘shellshock’, but this is basically one form of PTSD, resulting from a level of threat to someone’s physical safety and well-being so intense and sustained that it overwhelms their ability to cope and recover. Treatments for PTSD are enormously varied, but they usually include a phase of psychological debriefing, where the experience is fully acknowledged and spoken of, followed by some sort of reorientation process, where the traumatised person acquires new habits of thought and feeling, leaving behind their understandable hatred and resentment for the perpetrator. Without this reorientation there is no healing – just reliving the experience perpetuates the trauma rather than leaving it behind – constantly re-enacting the fear and anger associated with it.

We generally tend to use individual trauma and recovery as a model and metaphor for collective phenomena – for instance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the Mandela government in South Africa after the end of apartheid followed a similar model to the reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators sometimes organised with a view to healing the psychological wounds caused by violent crime. It’s regarded as having been pretty successful, and it makes perfect sense that it should be, given that collective hatred (and healing) is no more than the sum or expression of large numbers of individual feelings.

When protests broke out in many Chinese cities about the dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu islands last year it was with the connivance of the government (no one could unfurl an anti-government protest banner of any sort in a Chinese city without being instantly arrested), which finds it convenient to keep resentment on the boil over the appalling crimes committed by the militaristic-fascist Japan of the 1930s and 40s. (It’s fair to acknowledge that there seems to be a reluctance on Japan’s part too to acknowledge and apologise for these crimes in the way that Germany has for the horrors of the Nazi period.)

The title of this post is a quote from Marianne Williamson: “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world”. It may sound simple, even banal, but it absolutely isn’t. Notice the word ‘practice’: forgiveness isn’t something that one does in an instant of casual generosity; it’s a habit of mind which one needs to work at, especially if one’s been subject to violence, hatred or exploitation. And the thing is, we most of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, and at some time or other. Forgiveness is a practice, and it’s also profoundly practical – without it, the work that we need to do, as individuals and as societies, can never be accomplished.