N and E were fighting again two days ago. When I pulled up in my driveway, the insults were being hurled like stones from hard hurt faces as each rode their bike amongst a group of kids divided into two.
"You're just a black idiot," N yelled, her mouth pouting out in anger. "Black people are coming in and taking over this country." I wondered which relative's mouth she was speaking out of when she said that. The way she spoke it, it had that ring of repeat about it. N lives with her auntie, though her father lives and breathes in the next suburb. I do not know where her mother is. A long line of pain. Woundedness and a quick sharp tongue combine in a girl who is quick to take offence and quick to give it, her words often hurtful or careless.
When you're angry, especially when you're a kid, you'll hurl whatever ammo you've got. It's not so easy these days, however, with an African American in the White House and an Australian government that has at least made the symbolic gesture of saying sorry, to hurl those sorts of abuses with much effect.
"Yeah?" hurled back J in response. "What about you whiteys then? You think we come in and take over the country? You the ones who came and stole this country! Ever hear of the Aborigines?"
I think that's the biggest sentence I've heard J speak. He and E are of Ethiopian parentage, 11 and 10 respectively. I think they came here about five years ago. Bless his heart, after his retort to N he said in an aside to me, "Sorry. This isn't about you."
"Yeah," yelled E. "This is a black country!"
N yelled something in retreat. I could feel the hurt radiating off her like waves, like the green stuff that comes off Sims when they haven't had a shower. I wondered how much of this situation was N's fault, with her crackly exterior? Of course, it could never be one-sided, and most kids are nasty. I imagine E has a high bitch factor of her own going down. Still, I feel a particular empathy for N, irritating and occasionally hurtful though she can be. I pray for her. It's not long before boys and drugs and alcohol will rear their heads as convenient and particularly pleasurable possibilities for assuaging her pain.
I went out this afternoon to return and borrow some DVD's. N and E were sitting, something akin to side-by-side, in the gutter. This is how their relationship goes.
"They're talking to each other again," J offered from his bike, standing with the two little Indian kids who live in one of the houses round about.
I bought them a packet of Pods from Blockbuster. I seem to have this overwhelming urge to feed everything in the street that breathes. I was pleased with them, I told them, "For talking to each other even though you don't like each other." They looked quickly at each other when I said that, their smiles breaking out despite themselves.
"We haven't forgiven each other," E said.
"We just play with each other anyway, even without forgiving each other," N said.
I surmised that you have to have forgiven each other in some form to play with each other. Surely forgiveness doesn't mean you have to forget that you don't particularly trust each other, or even like each other all that much?
We pondered such philosophies in the late afternoon sun and agreed that people really suck sometimes. N had gone into the front yard of someone's house, and returned with some very small little sour oranges. We sucked on them and the Indian boy laughed at my face-making. We ate sour oranges and sweet chocolate Pods in the late afternoon sun.
Showing posts with label forgiveness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forgiveness. Show all posts
Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma. Further, he refuses to be the scapegoater, and instead becomes the scapegoat personified.
In Paul’s language, “Christ redeemed us from the curse…by being cursed himself” (Galatians 3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with him!], we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Wow! Just gaze upon that mystery for a few years!
Evil is not overcome by attack or even avoidance, but by union at a higher level. It is overcome not by fight or flight, but rather by “fusion”!
Richard Rohr from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 189
God became human so the human can become a god. Noice work :)
I had some vague experience of this when I was talking last night about ... oh, to me, the worst thing about myself ever, the thing that creeps me out the most, the failure of leaving my marriage. I was talking with Mark a little about why I was, as he put it, "stymied", why I felt stifled and unable to pursue the things I wanted to pursue while being married to him.
We didn't talk too long about it because I don't understand it. It upsets me and it scares me. It is a blindness in my soul and it scares me that it will always be there, this giant numb hole. But to even be able to talk about this thing I have been so so ashamed and embarrassed about - there is healing simply in the talking.
But today I feel hopeful for this ... monster part of me (this is how it feels like). Not that it is going to go away in one fell swoop, obviously. Everything is tediously processural. But just that there is the chance that it might.
That hope comes from putting it out there in the open. The world doesn't collapse in on itself when you do. It makes me understand from experience how it is that hiding my bad behaviour is to do more evil to myself on top of that which originated my bad behaviour in the first place. And I don't want to hate Susie that I'll keep treating her like that.
It's much easier to discuss it these days. Mark has a new life, with a new girlfriend, and he is happy. But it is still painful for him - I can see it in his eyes - and for me too, and so there is great poignancy to the discussion. But you can't discuss your evildoing without forgiveness being asked for and forgiveness granted. This is surely the way giant chasms form in relationships, big enough so that trust and the kitchen table fall down the middle, when people refuse to admit the damage they do to each other.
It deprives you of the honey that flows from the forgiveness once granted, and the grace and dignity that is attached to this holy ground of confession and absolution. And the way that the bad behaviour floats down to smaller sizes when it happens. And then suddenly you can see a bit further than you could before. This is healing. Of the incremental variety.
I am grateful to be on the receiving end of forgiveness granted. It explodes the hope out, like seed pods on the wind.
I had some vague experience of this when I was talking last night about ... oh, to me, the worst thing about myself ever, the thing that creeps me out the most, the failure of leaving my marriage. I was talking with Mark a little about why I was, as he put it, "stymied", why I felt stifled and unable to pursue the things I wanted to pursue while being married to him.
We didn't talk too long about it because I don't understand it. It upsets me and it scares me. It is a blindness in my soul and it scares me that it will always be there, this giant numb hole. But to even be able to talk about this thing I have been so so ashamed and embarrassed about - there is healing simply in the talking.
But today I feel hopeful for this ... monster part of me (this is how it feels like). Not that it is going to go away in one fell swoop, obviously. Everything is tediously processural. But just that there is the chance that it might.
That hope comes from putting it out there in the open. The world doesn't collapse in on itself when you do. It makes me understand from experience how it is that hiding my bad behaviour is to do more evil to myself on top of that which originated my bad behaviour in the first place. And I don't want to hate Susie that I'll keep treating her like that.
It's much easier to discuss it these days. Mark has a new life, with a new girlfriend, and he is happy. But it is still painful for him - I can see it in his eyes - and for me too, and so there is great poignancy to the discussion. But you can't discuss your evildoing without forgiveness being asked for and forgiveness granted. This is surely the way giant chasms form in relationships, big enough so that trust and the kitchen table fall down the middle, when people refuse to admit the damage they do to each other.
It deprives you of the honey that flows from the forgiveness once granted, and the grace and dignity that is attached to this holy ground of confession and absolution. And the way that the bad behaviour floats down to smaller sizes when it happens. And then suddenly you can see a bit further than you could before. This is healing. Of the incremental variety.
I am grateful to be on the receiving end of forgiveness granted. It explodes the hope out, like seed pods on the wind.
Been thinking about Jesus' command to love our enemies. Such a basic, foundational tenet of life in God. The bringer of heaven to earth. And yes, just a bit difficult, right? :) Understatement of the century when you're rankled with envy, or shrivelling with rejection, or boiling with rage, right? Yep. So hard that it seems undoable. And it is, apart from God. Yet even with God, depending on the wounds and how deep they go, it can be a big journey to even get to the point of being able to consider the possibility.
I had been a believer for about two years when I was 24. I was in the kitchen of my grandmother's house and she said to me that my father had been talking to her about what a horrible father he'd been, and how guilty about that he felt. I'd never heard of him saying anything like that before and my reaction was strange, a mixture of physical sickness and some weird mixed up kind of low-level-hardly-want-to-admit-the-bastard-has-any-effect-on-me thing. Of course, he would have been drunk at the time, but alcohol loosens up lips that are too wounded to open themselves up in normal time, so you have to take what you get. It was a difficult experience for me. My father had deeply wounded me (so deeply that to this day I still can't physically hug him. But again, you take what you can salvage, right?) And I remember that time, the day etched into my memory, just an everyday in my grandmother's kitchen, with the light shining through the window. And I felt a fluttering, a sense, a suspicion, that maybe God was asking me to forgive him. It became a thorn that kept pressing into my side and so eventually I gave up and gave in and goddamn it if it didn't feel like dying. And yet on the other side of that (and I veered from side to side; forgiveness is not a one-off event) I found cleansing. It didn't magically make the relationship amazing, but some of the flotsam that had accumulated around my heart started shifting, some of the anger dispelled.
I've been pondering whether to write anymore about The Romance-That-Never-Was Man (hereinafter called RTNW - I was trying to think of a cool acronym, and all that I could come up with was RATNOW or ROTNOW, and the first is not true and the second I do not wish. So it just stays RTNW). He has been a reader of this blog up until a couple of weeks ago, and I guess he may very well come back here and read again. But tough. This is my blog and my space and my side of the story which I'm sure seems most ridiculous to you - but dammit if I'm not as territorial as a tiger at the moment. If you don't like it, click somewhere else.
I just realised anew before how my family dynamics of keeping silence has affected me. Dysfunctional families always breed silence, and there is nothing contemplative about it. And so in my new incarnation as a person who is less inclined to hold other people up in their stuff at the expense of myself, I am going to talk about him.
In an overdramatisation, it feels in some respects like he has become my enemy. Such sweetness at the beginning of our friendship and such silence and dismissal and, the last time I ever texted him, what felt like outright callous indifference when, after I had admittedly consciously pushed the envelope all week (by having the temerity to want to talk to him), he ended up responding that he wasn't going to text anymore because his fingers hurt and he was wasting his credit. Which made me feel so terribly loved that my hands shook with rage and some switch flicked right there which hardened some part of my heart. And there were reasons for his behaviour and yes I knew what I was getting myself into and blah blah blah, and he was in a bad place and yada yada yada but the end feeling in my heart, at certain times, has effectively made him my enemy. I find myself thinking of awful things to say to him, biting, cutting words to show him how hurt I feel. Words to hurt him and make him feel as dismissed as I feel. Words to wound, words to cut off.
And so then at some point my thoughts lead back to Jesus' directive to forgive my enemies. And so I enter, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes not at all, into that mystery of proceeding to forgive. I don't know if it is more an intellectual experience or an emotional one or both. The element of will feels intellectual, but it's probably nothing of the sort, and is then perhaps followed by the emotional experience. But whatever way, it is a release when it comes and the end result is an outwardness, a putting myself into the moccasins of another, an understanding that the issue is not of blame, a looking anew at the things he is carrying and a consideration of possibilities as to why he behaves as he does; forgiveness can still follow. And then the urge to hurt, to wound, to revenge myself, subsides. As it must.
It feels good. It feels right. It takes the focus off my own stuff and it feels like a release. Cause in some ways he can't help his behaviour.
But in some ways, neither can I. That's where forgiveness comes in. And self-forgiveness too. For ever finding myself in this stupid position
I had been a believer for about two years when I was 24. I was in the kitchen of my grandmother's house and she said to me that my father had been talking to her about what a horrible father he'd been, and how guilty about that he felt. I'd never heard of him saying anything like that before and my reaction was strange, a mixture of physical sickness and some weird mixed up kind of low-level-hardly-want-to-admit-the-bastard-has-any-effect-on-me thing. Of course, he would have been drunk at the time, but alcohol loosens up lips that are too wounded to open themselves up in normal time, so you have to take what you get. It was a difficult experience for me. My father had deeply wounded me (so deeply that to this day I still can't physically hug him. But again, you take what you can salvage, right?) And I remember that time, the day etched into my memory, just an everyday in my grandmother's kitchen, with the light shining through the window. And I felt a fluttering, a sense, a suspicion, that maybe God was asking me to forgive him. It became a thorn that kept pressing into my side and so eventually I gave up and gave in and goddamn it if it didn't feel like dying. And yet on the other side of that (and I veered from side to side; forgiveness is not a one-off event) I found cleansing. It didn't magically make the relationship amazing, but some of the flotsam that had accumulated around my heart started shifting, some of the anger dispelled.
I've been pondering whether to write anymore about The Romance-That-Never-Was Man (hereinafter called RTNW - I was trying to think of a cool acronym, and all that I could come up with was RATNOW or ROTNOW, and the first is not true and the second I do not wish. So it just stays RTNW). He has been a reader of this blog up until a couple of weeks ago, and I guess he may very well come back here and read again. But tough. This is my blog and my space and my side of the story which I'm sure seems most ridiculous to you - but dammit if I'm not as territorial as a tiger at the moment. If you don't like it, click somewhere else.
I just realised anew before how my family dynamics of keeping silence has affected me. Dysfunctional families always breed silence, and there is nothing contemplative about it. And so in my new incarnation as a person who is less inclined to hold other people up in their stuff at the expense of myself, I am going to talk about him.
In an overdramatisation, it feels in some respects like he has become my enemy. Such sweetness at the beginning of our friendship and such silence and dismissal and, the last time I ever texted him, what felt like outright callous indifference when, after I had admittedly consciously pushed the envelope all week (by having the temerity to want to talk to him), he ended up responding that he wasn't going to text anymore because his fingers hurt and he was wasting his credit. Which made me feel so terribly loved that my hands shook with rage and some switch flicked right there which hardened some part of my heart. And there were reasons for his behaviour and yes I knew what I was getting myself into and blah blah blah, and he was in a bad place and yada yada yada but the end feeling in my heart, at certain times, has effectively made him my enemy. I find myself thinking of awful things to say to him, biting, cutting words to show him how hurt I feel. Words to hurt him and make him feel as dismissed as I feel. Words to wound, words to cut off.
And so then at some point my thoughts lead back to Jesus' directive to forgive my enemies. And so I enter, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes not at all, into that mystery of proceeding to forgive. I don't know if it is more an intellectual experience or an emotional one or both. The element of will feels intellectual, but it's probably nothing of the sort, and is then perhaps followed by the emotional experience. But whatever way, it is a release when it comes and the end result is an outwardness, a putting myself into the moccasins of another, an understanding that the issue is not of blame, a looking anew at the things he is carrying and a consideration of possibilities as to why he behaves as he does; forgiveness can still follow. And then the urge to hurt, to wound, to revenge myself, subsides. As it must.
It feels good. It feels right. It takes the focus off my own stuff and it feels like a release. Cause in some ways he can't help his behaviour.
But in some ways, neither can I. That's where forgiveness comes in. And self-forgiveness too. For ever finding myself in this stupid position
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