To Forgive

Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
Corrie ten Boom

Over the next several blog posts we are going to explore the subject of Resilience – bouncing back from hardship, adversity and trauma. Each post will explore a specific way we may be able to adapt to the challenges and difficulties in our lives. Based on an article in Psychology Today – “I Get Knocked Down – But I Get Up Again”, the second tip is:

Seek Out Your Hidden Strength

My dad is a Holocaust survivor. He survived with the help of others and through his own fierce will, anger, and bravery. As a child, I would wonder and worry about whether I’d have the personal power to survive something so terrible. I’ll never forget the sense of relief his answer gave me: “Worrying about that question is futile. Don’t even try to imagine how you’d handle a holocaust, because in the face of a crisis like that, you’d become someone else—someone with a strength you couldn’t even picture or imagine now.” —Ken Page, L.C.S.W., “Finding Love”

The weather that morning – gray, gloomy, bracingly chilly – matched the atmosphere of the place we were visiting.

Dachau. The infamous Nazi concentration camp, outside Munich, Germany.

As we (Michael and my family) walked through the grounds, our mood became increasingly dark as the sky, our spirits cold at what we saw. The gates through which we entered – “Arbeit macht frei” – “Work will set you free”. The guard towers. The trenches. The fences ringed with razor wire. The stark barracks. The crematorium. The burial grounds holding the ashes of untold thousands murdered there. Each a symbol of unfathomable hatred, inhumanity and horror.

Much of our visit was spent in silence. What does one say? How does one even begin to comment adequately or appropriately on what we saw and were challenged to remember? The museum on the grounds was almost too much. In fact, it was impossible to read it all, to look at all the images, one more sickening than the other, to take it all in. The unimaginable story that place told penetrated our entire being in a way that will never be able to be shaken. Perhaps it never should. Perhaps those images, those memories should never leave us. We must never forget what can happen when we allow our prejudices and our fears to overwhelm us.

One small image stood out for me above the rest. It was the frame containing the different colored “badges” or triangles that identified the reason prisoners had been detained there – yellow for Jews, green for professional criminals, purple for certain other religious believers, and pink for homosexuals, for example. Then there was black, for those with disabilities of various kinds. That one, an intensely painful reminder that our now 25-year old son Matthew, who lives with autism and severe intellectual disabilities, would also have been one of those forced to live – and most likely die – at a camp such as Dachau.

These images, the horrific story they so vividly tell, remain seared in my mind and in my heart. As well they should.

I was reminded of a story I had read 15 years earlier – “Love Your Enemy” – by Corrie ten Boom. ten Boom was a Dutch woman imprisoned at the Ravensbrϋck women’s concentration camp in northern Germany, because she and her family helped many Jews to escape the Holocaust. Her story of pain and sorrow, that lead to freedom and redemption, and ultimately to healing and forgiveness, is seared just as vividly in my mind and in my heart.

Her story, taking place just a few years after the war had ended and her release from the camp, of coming face to face with one of the cruelest guards she encountered there, is nothing short of breathtaking for me in its power and inspiration. It is the story of this harsh guard, before whom she had previously stood naked, vulnerable, humiliated, under whose watch her beloved sister Betsie had died, who came to one of her talks two years after the war had ended.

Corrie ten Boom, after surviving the camp and the war, felt led to write and speak about her experiences and about how she found healing from them, how she learned to forgive the almost unspeakable evil she and millions of others encountered during that time. She also reassured others that they could find forgiveness from whatever imprisoned them too.

It was in a church basement in Munich when she came face to face again with this cruelest of guards – one of her worst and most painful nightmares come to life. As the story goes, after her talk, the guard came up to her, with his right arm extended, to greet her. He did not remember her. But when he heard her say that she had been imprisoned in Ravensbrϋck he was compelled to approach her,

Fraϋlein … will you forgive me?

She froze, not knowing what to do, what to say.

As he stood before her, his arm outstretched, his hand reaching for hers, for what seemed like hours, she wrestled inside with what to do. Here she was, just having spoken passionately about the need to forgive in order to move on, the need to release the pain in order to heal, and when confronted with forgiveness directly, she wasn’t able to offer it. But she knew what she needed to do.

So, mechanically, she thrust her hand into his, and as she did she writes,

… an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulders, raced down my arm and sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. “’

I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart.’

“For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands – the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

Forgiveness. It is just about the most difficult thing that any of us can do. But when we can give it, it is an inconceivable gift. It is most especially a beautiful gift to ourselves. In this mission of compassionate listening, I hear it all the time. I hear the anguished cries of those who are carrying around resentment, hatred, bitterness, unresolved anger and pain that weighs them down. A burden that poisons their spirits and prevents joy in life to be found.

I have been asked, often, over the years, whether or not I am angry about my son Matthew’s condition? Do I resent his disabilities? Am I bitter about his limitations and therefore, mine, as his needs demand so much of my time? Can I forgive God for giving me this broken child and the burden his brokenness brings?

But the answer is “No”. I am not angry. I do not resent. I am not bitter about anything connected to my son.

And, “No” I do not forgive God, because I do not in any way believe that God has given us a broken child nor burdened us with him. There is no need to forgive something that I do not even believe has taken place.

That is not to say that at times there is no need to forgive – someone’s careless, insensitive comment about him or a callous attitude about what it’s like to care for a child with such disabilities, or even myself, when I am impatient or tired or overwhelmed.

And it was Corrie ten Boom’s story about her forgiveness of a man who represented the most evil of evils of our modern history that reminds and inspires me to believe that there need be no hurt, no anguish and no act that cannot be overcome. That nothing need keep me from finding joy and peace in this life, no matter what my challenges and responsibilities. That the pain we carry within us only serves to rob us of the good life we are all meant to live.

I refer to her story often. If she could forgive as she did, I can forgive anything, too.