I guess I had always thought a lot about forgiveness, but I first became interested in its true nature in the shock that followed the Amish School massacre in 2006. In October of that year, an average American fellow (who, unbeknownst to everyone including apparently his wife and himself, had sprung a leak in his marble bag and had been losing them one by one for a while) decided to rape, torture and kill some schoolchildren. Arming himself to the teeth with firearms and other implements of his compulsion in a bag, he went and found the most innocent, trusting children he could find: the children of an Amish village school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. When it was all over, he had killed five girls and himself. By the time the parasitic news media had begun to thoughtlessly thrust cameras and microphones into the faces of the grieving community and ask how they felt about it, the Amish had begun to forgive the killer.
What??! This revelation took my breath away. How? Why? Well, clearly they were trying to follow what they thought were Jesus’ teachings. I have no doubt that they are right and that is what Jesus taught.
But that is not what consumed me: what I wanted to know was the nuts and bolts of it. How does one go about forgiving such a heinous, awful thing? And how do normal folks, like me, go about the process of feeling forgiveness. What does it feel like? What did it really mean to forgive someone?
I puzzled and puzzled till my puzzler was sore (props to the Good Dr. Suess). I thought about talking to a local preacher of some denomination or other about what they thought it meant. I thought about forgiveness as I lay in bed at night. I thought about it while walking down the street.
I wasn’t carrying as horrible a burden as death or anything like that, but there were a few things that I would have liked to get past that had happened over the course of my several decades of life. I had this sense that, if I could somehow truly forgive the perpetrators of the hurtful acts, I would finally be free of the agony that the memories had shadowed me with all these years.
The answer came to me, finally, in a flash. I had started a therapy called EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is a therapy developed in the ‘70’s and it especially helps people who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, which was often called “battle fatigue” in the old days.
During a session in which the therapist leads you through a series of reframing exercises using rapid eye movement or other bilateral stimulation, it suddenly came to me. Like a lightning bolt, I had the thought that forgiveness was nothing more than deciding to put down the burden of caring about someone else’s bad act or acts. The awareness dawned in me and I felt a wave of relief.
This was something that I could do. I could feel the dregs of the past washing away as I contemplated a visual image in my mind of putting down the heavy bags I’d been carrying all these years. I symbolically laid the bags on the doorstep of the person or people who had done the horrible things and left them there. Their acts were theirs; the consequences of those actions are theirs to live with. I don’t hate them anymore; I don’t even give them another thought.
In the days and weeks and months that are accumulating since that one session, I continue to feel the benefits of forgiveness. I am happier, less stressed, more free than I can remember being since I was a child.
Whether you need to find the seeds of forgiveness in your faith, or whether you simply want to reap the benefits of forgiveness, I urge anyone who is carrying a burden due to a wrong by another to find a way to forgive. There is no downside and no regret, only increasing freedom from the poison left by the shadows of the hurtful or hateful actions of others.
