Forgiveness

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.

Cider

I have something to say that will rock the basis of some of my valued friendships. I like fizzy cold cider. I like fizzy cold beer. Despite the fact that there is, in fact, no such thing as “pear cider”, I even like that.

This is heresy to a great many people. “You just haven’t tried the good stuff” might be the mildest approbation I face in making such a confession, with “You have no taste” or, “You are a complete and utter heathen, and irredeemable”, being more likely to be thrown my way.

However, I can’t even retreat and plead ignorance of the ‘good stuff’. The Castle Inn, in Lulworth Cove, was graced by the presence of my family, the dog, and my in-laws as guests during a recent foray into deepest Dorset. Now, leaving aside the great unresolved feud between Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall about the true origins of cream teas and ‘real’ cider, this fine establishment features no less than twelve of the southern regions’ finest ciders and perries on tap.

I tried the Orchard Pig “Light” Medium cider. I tried the Cider by Rosie. I tried Weston’s Country Perry. I confess to being scared shitless of the Snakecatcher Scrumpy. This is the description they had for it:

“Percentage: 7% | Units: 4 per Pint | Producer: New Forest Cider
Seriously strong, intense in flavour and character, being aged in spirit barrels. The ignorant might call it rough, but the knowledgeable connoisseur would consider it a robust English artisanal country beverage.”

Gack. Other than that, I tried every damn thing they had in there, and finally resorted, in desperation, to getting a ‘top’. This spritzing of a shot of ‘lemonade’ (7-Up or Sprite for you Yanks) on the top of your cider or ale is naturally frowned upon by pub cognoscenti as being an immature teenager drink. But at least I could pretend to the other patrons that I was drinking a pint of something decent (even if the publican himself knew better). In spite of a lot of what an old beer ad used to call “bitter beer face”, I couldn’t bear to cop out with a bottle of Bulmer’s pear ‘cider’ with a glass of ice.

So give me a nice, cold, sweet pint of fizzy Strongbow off the tap, or, if I find myself back in the Pacific NorthWet, pull me one of McMenamin’s ciders or give me a bottle of B.C. Grower’s or even an Okanagan, but leave me out of the tepid, bitter, flat local “artisanal”, “real” cider and perry tasting next time, thanks.

I can hear the rush to “unfriend” me on Facebook, as my “Friends” count drops: 303, 302, 301…

Sometimes you just go for a walk.

Sometimes you just go for a walk. That’s how life starts: you just go along from one thing to the next. Early on your growth is astonishing as you learn to walk and talk inside of the first three years, along with a host of other physical, mental, and emotional milestones. You’re so aware, so in the present.

As you age, you learn to string the ‘nows’ together so you have slightly longer term plans and ambitions. But things don’t always go the way you planned. Sometimes you backtrack; sometimes it’s a dead end and you have to go another way. Sometimes it feels like you’re not moving at all and sometimes you have to stop and take a rest.

Along the way, you start thinking “where am I going anyway?” You try to climb up high to get a better look around you. You might get a better sense of place when you do this. Or maybe you just keep your head down and keep plodding along, content that you’re where you should be and going the right direction. Some people think they’ve got a map, or a GPS or sat-nav that tells them the way. But these human devices can be notoriously unreliable. Many of us get so wrapped up in the mire of past patterns and the fog of the future that we lose all sense of direction: our awareness of now all but disappears.

It’s like you’re just walking in a hayfield, wandering this way and that, and it all seems like a maze: you can’t see where you’re going and only have a hazy picture of where you’ve been. Then, at the end of it, you get a helicopter ride back home and you look down and see this fantastic, otherworldly pattern to the whole path. The whole time you were walking, you were creating an amazing picture in the field. Everywhere you trod forms a piece of the puzzle.

When I look back, that’s how it feels: I occasionally have a glimpse of something shimmering through the haze, a sense that I am right where I should be, that the path is bewildering and the pattern intricate, but that it is actually being formed according to a universal intention.