LifeLines. Malcolm Doney
her attackers, that was what her faith asked of her.
However, not everyone shares that faith. And not everyone who shares it, could make such a decision to forgive.
Forgiveness divides people. When the journalist Marina Cantacuzino, founder of the Forgiveness Project, was collecting stories of forgiveness and reconciliation for an exhibition called The F Word, she noticed that some people see forgiveness as a noble response to atrocity – and others see it as ridiculous. Even for those who believe in forgiveness, for most it will be a journey, not just in the face of the kind of brutal violation experienced by Jill Saward, but in the ordinary humdrum of our everyday relationships. Forgiveness is the WD-40 that smooths the creaking hinges of our relationships – and sometimes keeps the doors from falling off altogether.
‘All friendships of any length,’ says the poet David Whyte, ‘are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.’2 Or as Martin Luther King Jr said: ‘Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.’3
Touring with The F Word exhibition, highlighting people whose lives have been shattered by tragedy and violence, Marina Cantacuzino discovered that the process of being able to forgive has no set rules or time limits; it is not dependent on faith and it is often ‘as mysterious as love’.4
She wanted to know if it can ease what George Eliot in Middlemarch called ‘the hideous fettering of domestic hate’. It can, she concluded, but not in an instant. To forgive is both a choice and a process. ‘I have come to see it as an intention,’ writes Cantacuzino: ‘a change of perspective, a direction to line yourself up for rather than a final and fixed destination. When it comes to considering forgiveness everyone has their limits, especially in the case of murder, genocide, rape, or violent extremism. However, within normal, everyday relationships forgiveness begins to feel more like a necessity than a choice.’5
And forgiveness does not always mean reconciliation. If someone is routinely abusing you, says Archbishop Desmond Tutu, you may be better off getting out of the relationship rather than seeking to fix it. Forgiveness brings reconciliation – if not with the person who has hurt you then with the lingering resentment they create.
The anger, bitterness, resentment and guilt that pursue violation can be potent. Hindsight will suggest alternative routes we might have taken and we may end up blaming ourselves, and also hating others. Sometimes the route to reconciliation is reconciliation with ourselves. This is succinctly expressed in a prayer of absolution found in the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church in New Zealand: ‘God forgives you. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.’
8
Own up
Self-service checkouts are turning us into a nation of shoplifters who steal almost £1.7 billion-worth of shopping a year: that was one newspaper’s interpretation of a report into scan-it-yourself tills, which were ‘just too tempting for one-in-five people, who admit they slip items they have not paid for into their bags’.1
Some people never seem to do anything wrong. It’s always someone else’s fault. Footballers seem especially good at this kind of body swerve. ‘Never touched him, ref,’ they maintain, all injured innocence. ‘He dived!’
But it’s all as old as the Garden of Eden. Take Adam and Eve and the Serpent. God catches Adam and accuses him of eating the forbidden fruit, he blames Eve, and then she blames the Serpent. Unfortunately, the Serpent, being limbless, had no fingers to point at someone else.
It’s the universal story of temptation. We are just minding our own business, all innocent-like, when some devious inveigler catches us off guard and tricks us into doing the wrong thing. It wasn’t me, it was them!
But is the self-service checkout possessed by a demon who makes us pocket the yoghurt? Is that what it means when it says ‘unexpected item in the bagging area?’ If we’re offered a smartphone that’s too cheap; if we’re offered the chance to cheat on our partner; if cooking the books looks tempting – and we crumble, whose responsibility is it?
Mostly we create our own temptation. We wrestle with demons of our own making. We play the blame game only to find we’re in a lose-lose situation.
If we’re always looking for someone else to blame, we’ll never consider owning up. Holding ourselves to account. And if we never face the music ourselves, we’ll never take control of our lives.
9
Stay Friends
Most of us have items of clothing that are old trusted friends. A thin T-shirt, washed soft and comfy; faded jeans that have shaped themselves to the contours of our body. They’re part of the fabric of our existence.
Old friends share some of the same characteristics of old clothes. In the best sense, they’re easy. Shared experiences and deep understanding means that an enormous amount can go unsaid. We settle into one another’s company like an old armchair. One phrase, or the mention of someone’s name, can set us off into uncontrolled laughter.
The poet Alden Nowlan1 plumbs the depths of this kind of friendship in ‘Great Things Have Happened’:
We were talking about the great things that have happened in our lifetimes; and I said, ‘Oh, I suppose the moon landing was the greatest thing that has happened in my time.’ But, of course, we were all lying. The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963 when we lived in a three-room flat...
... That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning and ate cinnamon toast together...
... it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put paprika on the table instead of pepper, except that there was nobody in this country except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
Close companionship fosters intimacy. And shared intimacy gives us permission to be honest with one another. It allows us both to support and challenge one another, because we’re working from a position of mutual trust. There is no guile, no agenda. As the Hebrew proverb goes: ‘Wounds from a friend can be trusted, while an enemy multiplies kisses.’
We need our friends like we need oxygen. The older our friendship, the more we need to acknowledge it, and them – especially when the shadows lengthen. Because that’s when we need company. There’s a verse that is said to come from the novelist Albert Camus or from a Jewish folk song; either way it rings true:
Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.2
Helen Keller, the deaf-blind author and activist knew the value of this, saying, ‘I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.’3 So did A. A. Milne’s Piglet, in The House at Pooh Corner:4
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
‘Pooh!’ he whispered.
‘Yes, Piglet?’
‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’
10
Fear Not.
Fear comes in all shapes