Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
Photo: mell242
The cycle of violence can be broken. On interTactica this week, we get acquainted with two people, featured in our "Healing of Memories" dialogue, who haven't given up on hope.
In 1990, Father Michael Lapsley was a chaplain in exile, working with the African National Congress (ANC). He had left his native South Africa some fourteen years earlier, on the heels of the Soweto massacre, because of his opposition activities to the system of Apartheid.
But now was a more hopeful time in the history of South Africa. Nelson Mandela had, at long last, been released from prison. Soon after, Father Lapsley received a small package of religious magazines, unbeknownst to him most likely sent by South African security operatives. As he opened the first periodical, a sophisticated letter bomb blew both his hands, broke all windows, shattered his ear drums, destroyed one of his eyes, and tore a hole through the floor.
In talking about the new journey that started on that day, Fr. Lapsley likes to quote one of South Africa's great leaders, Chief Albert Lutuli, who once said, "those who think of themselves as victims eventually become the victimizers of others."
In the long months of healing that followed the attempt on his life, Fr. Lapsley had to face psychological trauma the size of his physical injuries. "Quite early on after the bomb, I realised that if I was filled with hatred and desire for revenge, I’d be a victim forever. If we have something done to us, we are victims. If we physically survive, we are survivors. Sadly, many people never travel any further than this."
He says this renewed victimization process can be seen from the private sphere, to within nations, all the way to international conflicts. "We don't have to look very far to find dramatic examples", he says. "People give themselves permission to do terrible things to others because of what was done to them. Of course, sometimes there is competition for victimhood."
But after two years of recovery and healing, "I did travel further, going from victim to survivor, to victor", he says. "To become a victor is to move from being an object of history to become a subject once more. That is not to say that I will not always grieve what I’ve lost, because I will permanently bear the marks of disfigurement. Yet I believe I’ve gained through this experience. I realise that I can be more of a priest with no hands than with two hands."
His new mission soon came knocking. As he returned to South Africa in 1992, he found a country with many, many survivors, from those decades of organized victimization and abuse. As Desmond Tutu set in motion the process that was to become the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Fr. Lapsley started on the idea of holding workshops called "Healing of the Memories", where people could share their stories in private, restorative settings.
Witnessing, from pain to hope
Kaethe Weingarten shares with Fr. Lapsley a gift for putting her personal life and her decades of clinical practice and family therapy together to weave riveting stories of witnessing and healing. Her collected writings and books would fill a shelf of honorable size, while the maps of her travels would circle a few times our little blue dot in space.
"The themes of my professional work have been the themes of my personal life", she says: "silence, voice, witnessing, and hope. For the most part, I have engaged these themes in the domains of trauma, illness and death. However, from talking about these matters to people in other contexts, I found that the lessons I learned have had relevance to them as well."
In "Compassionate Witnessing and the Transformation of Societal Violence: How Individuals Can Make a Difference", Kaethe Weingarten talks about her work in Kosovo and Serbia. She explores how the collective humiliation associated with a people's "chosen trauma", sometimes dating as far back as six centuries ago, can spark incredibly vengeful impulses through new generations. She explores the means to share and overcome the intergenerational transmission of hurt.
She writes: "To the witness on the outside of the conflict, it may look like the two parties are engaged in a victim-perpetrator oscillation, such that victimization justifies aggression leading to activities that create perpetrators out of former victims. What impedes these oscillations and interrupts cycles of violence, and how can individuals play a part in doing so? How can individuals make a difference in shifting the legacies of chosen trauma?"
Her answer is for each of us, each at our own individual and collective level, to engage in a process she calls Compassionate Witnessing: "Our job as caring individuals is to acknowledge losses, to support mourning and grief, to humanize the enemy, and to witness individual and collective pain with as much heartfelt compassion as we can muster."
"We should love our neighbours as ourselves", says Father Lapsley. "But what happens if we dont love ourselves? What hope is there of loving the 'other' if our experience of life has made us feel worthless?" The task of lending a truly compassionate ear is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the risk of falling ourselves into psychological distress.
These are very real hazards, and may explain why so many seem to shut off and turn away from other people's pain. "But it is better to start", says Weingarten,"better to try than to not try." As she writes: "Hope is something we do with others."
--
Philippe Duhamel
interTactica — a liberation blog
Father Michael Lapsley and Kaethe Weingarten are only two of the remarkable resource people who join us March 25 to 31, 2009, in our online dialogue on Healing of Memories: Overcoming the Wounds of History. Join us as we explore the various dimensions of pain and recovery from past individual and collective trauma, the tools and resources available, along with the potential for restorative justice and transformative reconciliation.
