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Editorial:
Trust enough? From
the director: Icons of Culture and Political Identity: A Decade
of Opportunity Comment:
Shaking hands with soldiers At
the end of the day: Trust Remember
1916 Shattered
pieces - a journey in recovering trust Interview
with Rev John Dunlop & Danny Morrison: Truth & Trust Faith
matters lyo
nta kindi dufite uretse UKWIZERA A
Reader's Response to Lion&Lamb #40 Bible
Study: Trust Review:
Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries
of Belonging and Belief Review:
1916: Lest We Forget Difficult
Conversations |
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AT A PSYCHO/SOCIAL LEVEL trust is the glue that gives cohesion and security to human relationships. And theologically, trust is an attribute of love and therefore indispensable to faith in the goodness of life. Consequently, within the social and moral matrix of our everyday existence trust is essential to our personal and communal survival. When trust is active it functions invisibly and is assumed as a natural part of our life together. However, when lost, trust is extremely difficult to regain. Its recovery can be, literally, painfully slow, requiring courageous endurance on the part of the hurt person and openness and vulnerability on the part of the adversary. These commitments need time and safe spaces to develop and are always subject to the moral imperative to test what is said and done for authenticity and integrity. Most importantly, recovery of trust necessities what John Paul Lederach calls “connection to context”, that is “a sense from those involved that their experience is truly understood and valued.” However, we must be careful of being too formulaic about the restoration of broken relationships, for we cannot underestimate the debilitating affects of betrayed trust. Whether the killing of neighbours in ethnic conflict or the ‘murder of the heart’ through infidelity, the result is felt existentially. As Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz poignantly states, “Hurt is an impairment to the core of our personhood and leads to an almost cosmic sense of insecurity.” When people we once lived with, as friends, neighbours, partners, colleagues etc. become our ‘enemies’ the world changes and former certainties give way to displacement and dis-ease. The consequence of serious emotional wounding is to deprive people of the normal health and strength for living. Through the effects of deep hurt a person can be redefined by the negative feelings of humiliation, depression, destructive anger and paranoia. These pathologies result in a sense of powerlessness and numbness and in significant damage to self-worth. And such victimisation can become a tragic double bind as hurt is internalised and transmuted into self-fragmentation with the loss of self-esteem and even the erosion of self-identity. Without the intervention of authentic healing, the one who has been victimised can become, in the self-defeating sense of the word, a ‘victim’ defined by learned helplessness and toxic self-pity. This loss of the power for living is compounded by differing interpretations, between victim and perpetrator, as to the nature and meaning of what happened. As Liz Gulliford identifies, “Victims are likely to see the actions of the perpetrator as arbitrary, gratuitous and incomprehensible, whereas perpetrators are disposed towards seeing their behaviour as meaningful and comprehensible.” Also, victims can for many years experience ongoing feelings that the hurt event is still open and alive while the perpetrator is likely to have a sense of closure and be ready to move on. The incompatibility of these perspectives can intensify distrust rather than facilitate reconciliation. The discovery that the perpetrator has a ‘story’ and interpretation of what happened reinforces the sense of injustice already endemic in the victim’s experience. It is natural and understandable for hurt people to want to distance themselves, physically and emotionally, from a perpetrator. However, distancing rarely removes the experience of threat and felt hurt. Indeed, the negative recall of flashbacks and associations can be just as destructive, as they jump and spark in the victim’s imagination, even with the apparent safety of isolation. The primary result of distancing is the reduction of our enemy to an abstract evil, a one-dimensional creature void of the feelings and conscience that possess the rest of us. In the context of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ we have seen tabloid headlines reduce the nature of others to animals, terrorists, butchers, thugs, etc. By demonising others through the use of pejorative language we seek to distance ourselves from the source of our deepest hurt and also disassociate ourselves from their wrongdoing. Also, distancing serves as a reinforcement that we belong to the community of the righteous, innocent and good. In the psychology of hurt, this distancing is strongly motivated by the instinct to survive. It is what Freud called a protective shield. However, while we find a kind of safety in this polarisation the distance reinforces and confirms the threat, evil, and total untrustworthiness of our enemy. Under the conditions of this alienation it seems almost impossible for the victim to accept the deep ambiguity of life, that every person is an interpenetration of good and evil and that within the human self, destructive and creative tendencies are inseparably intertwined. Yet, difficult to say and harder to hear, it is only with a glimmer of this truth that a deeply hurt person might contemplate the vulnerable journey towards the recovery of trust and the possibility of forgiveness. To put it biblically, but in no way naively, we are to pray for the forgiveness of “our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” This radical definition and recognition of our common brokenness is the Christian basis of forgiveness. It reframes our wrongdoing and that of our enemies in the light of God’s righteousness and love. It offers us a radical perspective on hurt and forgiveness that is simultaneously liberating and offensive. However, before this ends up sounding more ethereal than ethical, it should be noted that forgiveness and trust recovery is not pious sentimentality but a process with behavioural consequences for the wrongdoer. For the rebuilding of trust necessitates new and accountable trustworthy behaviour. In other words, the grace offer of forgiveness to the perpetrator of hurt may be free – but it is never cheap. There are many issues to be tended to in the pursuit of restored trust but fundamental to the victim’s sense of justice and the perpetrator’s accountability is the healing of memory. This is more than the forgetfulness implied by the pseudo-wisdom of the cliché ‘forgive and forget’. The simple fading of memory, through time or denial, has been adequately critiqued as ineffectual and detrimental to healing. The regaining of trust requires what Stanley Hauerwas calls a redemptive remembering. This kind of remembering is paradoxical as it makes non-remembering possible, because memory of the wrong done has been adequately addressed. “It is a forgetting,” says Miroslav Volf, “that assumes that the matters of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ have been taken care of, that perpetrators have been named, judged and (hopefully) transformed, that victims are safe and their wounds healed.” The recovery of trust is therefore not just a virtue but also an ethical process. Audrey R. Chapman has identified six requirements necessary for the regaining of trust that might lead to reconciliation. Although these are considered in the context of communal conflict they are equally applicable to trust recovery in interpersonal relationships: 1. It is necessary to discern the truth of what happened. “Truth is medicine” says Walter Wink, “Without it a society (and a person) remains infected with past evils that will inevitably break out in the future.” 2. There is a need for an acknowledgement of moral responsibility by those who did harm. This is more than truth-telling but an acknowledgement of wrongdoing that involves a commitment to change as evidence of contrition. 3. There needs to be a willingness by victims to transcend the instinct for revenge and explore the possibility of mercy and forgiveness. Fundamental to this is an acknowledgement of the ‘humanity’ of our enemy. 4. Justice must be tended to. This involves a difficult process that wrestles with the ideas and instincts about justice as punishment. In seeking justice we need to consider restorative justice, which looks for reparation and redress for the pain experienced by the victim while offering the perpetrator opportunity for a new and changed future. 5. A commitment to re-establish a relationship between enemies that promotes healing. 6. It is necessary to have an agreed basis for any shared future together. To overcome the legacy of hurt and betrayal from the past requires a sense of security in the present. Without this security there can be no reconciled future. This is particularly true for the one whose past hurt imposes daily distrust of their adversary. David Augsberger, who has significantly contributed to the healing of hearts and homes, is particularly concerned with the fifth point in Chapman’s requirements – a commitment to re-establish a relationship between enemies. He believes that the current emphasis among theologians and counsellors on what he calls the “cultural-values” of “self-actualization, self-emancipation, and self-healing” are too focused on helping the hurt person “feel better about oneself”. Augsberger’s concern is that these individualised objectives diminish the Christian understanding of forgiveness, which is always relational. For him forgiveness and reconciliation are synonymous and involve “risking a return to conversation and the resumption of relationship”. We should, however, be careful not to turn a theological ideal into an emotional tyranny. For forgiveness, in the sphere of human relationships, is not always tied to reconciliation. Augsberger’s relational recovery is the ideal outcome and it necessitates an interpersonal act of forgiveness towards one’s enemy that is matched by an internal state of forgiveness in the victim. That is much easier to conceptualise than achieve, for where wrongdoing has debilitating consequences the trust and confidence needed for such vulnerable engagement is immense. The Christian ideal of restored trust, offered forgiveness and relational reconciliation is to be worked for but the evidence, even among Christians, suggests that very few serious conflicts are constructively resolved. We tend to deal with our hurt not by forgiveness and reconciliation but through the creation of distance. We must therefore never disparage the integrity of each person’s journey towards healing even when it falls short of full relational recovery. For many a recovery of their own sense of dignity and worth is in itself a major moral and emotional achievement. After the de-moralisation of hurt, the restoration of trust in life, never mind the trust of enemies, is not to be underestimated. In the experience of chronic hurt there is no easy healing formula. Some victims of injustice will restore a relationship of trust towards their enemies in an almost miraculous way. Their stories will be told as models of forgiveness and restoration. Others will struggle for years on a journey of freedom from the past, staggering through a maze of emotions, lapsing and relapsing into cycles of hurt and despair, yet tenaciously pursuing the way of forgiveness. And some victims will be defined by their experience of hurt and mistrust all their lives and will never be the same again. However, we must be careful to add, this is not the same as saying they will never be whole. In the complexity of human fragility, fragmented relationships and the dysfunctionality of a divided self, is it any wonder the great liturgical prayer of the Church is, “Lord have Mercy, Christ have Mercy”. DEREK POOLE is Programme Director at the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland. The following references are also offered as recommended reading. The author is conscious of the sensitivity and complexity of the subject and is aware that so much has been left unsaid. It is hoped that this short bibliography will help with further study. John Paul Lederach, Forgiveness and Reconciliation (Pennsylvania: Temple Foundation, 2001) Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, The Art of Forgiveness (Geneva: WCC, 1997) Stanley Hauerwas, A Time to Heal (Belfast: ECONI, 1999) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996) Liz Gulliford, Forgiveness in Context: Theology and Psychology in Creative Dialogue (New York/London: T&T Clark International, 2004) Audrey R. Chapman, Forgiveness and Reconciliation (Pennsylvania: Temple Foundation, 2001) Walter Wink, When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998) David Augsberger, The New Freedom of Forgiveness (Chicargo: Moody, 2000) |
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