Forgiveness from a Native Perspective: Healing Generational Abuse

This is a touching story of forgiveness out of the First Nations Community in Canada. It demonstrates the generational nature of abuse (both in “Indian” Schools and in the family) and it offers a vision of forgiveness. Special thanks to the Hawaii Forgiveness Project for the story.

Forgiveness Amongst the First Nations People                                                 

Recounted by Lency Spezzano

The First Nations woman stood in the center of the seminar room, and trembled with fury.

She was enraged, and she wanted to fight for her dignity and her pride. There was a man in the room, a fellow Native, whom she saw as a transgressor in the extreme. She preached to us of her love for her family, and for her people who had suffered a holocaust of cultural genocide.

The man revealed that he had been a sex offender during his youthful drinking days. He was so filled with regret and remorse that eleven years after the fact he turned himself in to the authorities, to begin a long series of rehabilitative seminars and counseling sessions.

He had been willing to convict himself with his guilt; his challenge now was to win back the truth. Regardless of the mistakes he had made in his life, his true nature as a child of the Creator was perfect innocence. He said that he hoped someday to be able to find forgiveness within himself.

He had abused others as he himself had been abused in the residential “Indian” schools the Canadian government had forced on the First Nations people for over a hundred years. There the children had been torn from their families, separated from their siblings, raped of their language, religion, and heritage, and were taught that everything “Indian” was evil or inferior. Without their families to protect them, the children were preyed upon by sexual predators who were hired by the churches to supervise the dormitories, and teach the classes.

When the children graduated from high school and returned to their villages, they brought the pattern of abuse home. Drugs and alcohol were used by many as an attempt to escape emotional suffering, which caused more damage to families and communities, especially due to their natural physical intolerance for alcohol. Violent death and suicide became common place, as did sexual and physical abuse.

I helped the woman recognize that her issue with this man was that she had not forgiven her own perpetrator for the violation, shame, and loss of innocence that occurred when she had been raped as a girl.

If she could find it in her to forgive her perpetrator, she could recover the innocence and joy she knew as a child. If she could allow this man in the seminar to stand for the one who had hurt her, she could forgive both of them at the same time. If she could free her mind of the judgment she had placed on them so that she could see them as innocent, she could win back their innocence as well as her own.

Without hesitation, she agreed to do the healing that would be required. The man crumpled forward from the torment of his guilt. For him to step to the front of the room to represent the woman’s perpetrator would be the greatest act of courage and willingness of his life. With great effort, he was able to rise and face the woman in her pain.

My husband, Chuck, suggested that she choose two women friends to walk with her and support her as she crossed the room, each step representing a step forward in her forgiveness

Clutching each other, the three faced the man, and wailing from pain, began their slow but steady progress toward joining him in the truth. As they came close to him, their faces brightened, and soon the tears were tears of joy and release.

As the woman reached him, she gave him the gift of his innocence and therefore was able to receive it as her own. When they embraced, they were filled with love and gratitude for each other.

During the remaining days of the seminar, whenever I saw her around the compound, she was skipping like a child, a big grin on her face. Forgiveness had made her so lighthearted that she proved the adage, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Many people are convinced of personal guilt so great that it separates them from their Creator’s love and acceptance. In the face of the miracle of forgiveness, Reality registers the only Truth in our minds: we are still just as God created us. We are perfectly innocent regardless of our mistakes, and we will one day share God’s evaluation of who we are.

In the year following this seminar, the young man continued to work on self-forgiveness. He started a support group for sexual offenders, knowing that he was in a position to help others.

To learn more about the Hawaii Forgiveness Project, go to http://www.hawaiiforgivenessproject.org

Forgiving the Unforgiveable

This article tells a powerful story about Azhim Khamisa's search for peace and understanding after the murder of his son. We use it during our forgiveness retreats....David

Azim Khamisa was looking for a killer when he first met 19-year-old Tony Hicks. He wanted to find the cold-blooded murderer who’d gunned down his son, Tariq Khamisa, a college student working as a pizza deliveryman on a fateful night in San Diego in 1995.

When Azim Khamisa met the man who, as a 14-year-old gang member, had pulled the trigger of the gun that killed his only boy, he was on the lookout for a monster. “It took a long time to develop the courage to come eyeball-to-eyeball with the person who pulled the trigger on your child,” Khamisa told a conference room full of police officers and community leaders on Feb. 3 at the Aurora police headquarters. “It took courage and a lot of meditation ... I remember looking in his eyes. I’m trying to find a murderer, and I didn’t. What I saw in him was another human being. I was able to climb through his eyes and touch his humanity.”

That meeting took place five years after Hicks had committed the crime. It happened four years after Hicks became the youngest person in California’s history to be tried and convicted as an adult for murder charges. For Azim Khamisa, visiting Hicks as he served a 25-years-to-life sentence in prison was a single step in a long journey toward forgiveness and peace. “I recognized a spark in him that was no different than the one in me, or in any one of us,” Khamisa recalled. “He murdered my son. He’d done something horrific. That did not make him inhuman. I told him, ‘Not only have I forgiven you, but when you come out, you have a job at (my) foundation,” he added, referring to the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, a nonprofit he’d founded nine months after his son’s murder as a means to break the cycle of youth violence in communities across the nation.

That spirit of forgiveness proved redemptive for Azim Khamisa, just as it did for Tony Hicks and Ples Felix, Hicks’ grandfather and legal guardian who would go on to play a major role in the nonprofit and related youth programs. It was also a key theme during Khamisa’s address to a roomful of Aurora police officers and community leaders, a small gathering that served as a substitute for an event originally planned at Aurora Central High School.

A powerful snowstorm and a spate of school cancellations on Feb. 3 moved the event to the Aurora police headquarters, but the tone behind Khamisa’s message didn’t change with the shift in venue. A follow-up to Arun Gandhi’s appearance at Central last year to commemorate the annual “Season of Nonviolence” event, Khamisa’s appearance touched on many of the tenets central in the philosophies of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., César Chávez and Arun Gandhi’s grandfather, a man the world dubbed “Mahatma,” a Sanskrit word that meant “great soul.”

“I was very moved by (Khamisa’s) story, his commitment to changing the patterns of violence,” said Karen Paschal, the senior minister and spiritual director of the New Dawn Center for Spiritual Living. Staff from the Center worked with the Aurora police department and Aurora Public Schools to organize the second yearly celebration of the “Season of Nonviolence” event. “I felt like it would be something that people would want to hear ... Through a violent act, Azim touched the spirit that was within him and was moved to forgiveness. That is what brought him to peace.”

Following the loss of his son, Azim’s first commitment has been to youth. Since 1995, he’s addressed millions of students at thousands of appearances across the country. In addition to founding the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, he’s also worked with Ples Felix to develop the Constant And Never Ending Improvement program, a national youth advocate initiative that currently operates in seven states.

The program stress spirituality, restorative justice and literacy as an alternative to incarceration. “CANEI is about progress ... The kid who killed my son was under orders from a gang leader. We want to teach these kids that we all have an internal navigation system. If we can connect you to your spirit, what lies within you is far greater than what lies ahead of you or what lies behind you,” Khamisa said. “We do rituals, we do meditation, we do yoga ... We’d love to bring it to Aurora.

That message resonated in a small conference room packed with police officers and school resource officers on a snowy day in Aurora. Following his address to the officers and officials, Khamis fielded questions and insisted, “We are able to do this well because of our story.”

Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
http://www.aurorasentinel.com/email_push/news/article_9d1d6240-5326-11e1-84be-001871e3ce6c.html

Gangster's Granny: A 70-year-old former nun is using grandmotherly love to transform some of Ecuador's toughest streets.

Gangster Granny by

John Dickie and Ioan Grillo

Ecuador is caught in the cross hairs of Latin America's drug war. Gangs of every size and dimension can be found on the streets of this tiny country.

But now, an ageing peace activist is trying to give the young people in these gangs hope and a way forward. She has built a haven for the gangs called Barrio de Paz, 'Neighbourhood of Peace', and has become a grandmotherly figure to the gang members, helping to guide them into a life of non-violence. Seven-a-side football is a tough workout at the best of times. But the game we play on a sweaty street in Ecuador's biggest city, Guayaquil, is particularly testing.

Our goalkeeper, Pablo, bears six bullet wounds from various shootings - although to be fair, he is in surprisingly good shape and still seems to have all his reactions intact for catching the incoming footballs.

The striker we are trying to stop from breaking through our defence lines is a boss of the Latin Kings, the biggest street gang in Ecuador, which also has thousands of members in Spain, Italy and the US.
Recently, some Latin Kings broke into a Spanish prison to try to murder a rival. We think about doing some dirty British sliding tackles to stop the striker, then we decide it would be unwise.

But despite the fact that we are two paunchy British journalists playing some of the hardest gang members in Ecuador, it is a surprisingly good-natured game.

Following house rules, the teams are awarded points for clean play, points when they celebrate goals in creative ways - salsa dances, overhead summersaults - and extra points if women players score a goal. Street football between rival gangs can become quite a carnival.

Curiously, the brains behind this novel version of the beautiful game has never kicked a football around in her life. Nelsa Curbelo is a bespectacled 70-year-old who spent decades as a nun before helping broker peace processes in Latin America’s bloody civil wars.

But the concept of this street football fits in perfectly with the philosophy of all of Curbelo's work - promoting peace and believing in the essential goodness of human beings."These people you see are no different from you and I," Curbelo says. "We have just had different opportunities. They need a chance to transform themselves and an environment that will allow them to do it."

'Being peace'

The idea of peace processes for gang members, gangsters and street thugs is an important concept in Latin America today.Across the continent, from Mexico's border cities to Brazil's favelas, criminal violence is overwhelming communities and leaving never-ending piles of corpses.

Most governments have opted for military approaches, sending soldiers onto the streets to shoot the gangs into submission. In many cases, the troops have also shot dead bystanders and inflamed the violence further.

Curbelo has a very different approach. Her foundation Ser Paz - which literally means 'Being Peace' - tries to give gangsters a chance to lay down their guns and escape the street war. Furthermore, rather than getting the bosses to leave their gangs, she encourages them to use their organisations and structures in a positive way.

"The [gang] organisations can be used for good. When a member is sick they will often get support from other members," Curbelo says. "But the organisations can also be used for bad and create problems that are very hard to deal with. It is better to work with them than against them."

Ecuador currently has less severe gang-related violence than Colombia or Mexico, but it has similar root problems to these countries - including millions of poor, marginalised young people and weak government institutions.

In Guayaquil, which has a population of 2.3 million, there are an estimated 60,000 gang members, in groups including the Latin Kings, Masters and Iron Nation.Gang members were involved in many of the city's 600 homicides last year.

'War on the streets' 

Curbelo said that after decades of fighting the repression of military dictators and insurgent guerrilla groups, she saw that there was a new problem right outside her front door. "There is real war on the streets. And it is between young people, who are fighting and dying," she says.

Curbelo went into the cities' worst slums and talked directly with the toughest crime bosses.
After gaining their trust, she brokered peace processes between gangs and the government. Gang members handed hundreds of weapons in to the army and, in return, the government helped them set up businesses, including a printing shop and a barbers.

Many gang bosses made the deal because they were looking for a way out of their violent lifestyles - lifestyles in which they were constantly watching their backs, fearing that rivals might be trying to kill them. But they also trusted the elderly former nun because of her particular human qualities.
"She came to visit me while I was in prison. She listens and understands and offers advice. She is a great human being," says Jorge Arosemena, the scarred boss of the Iron Nation gang.

Giving gang bosses a ticket out of jail and money to start a business is controversial. Many politicians say that street thugs need punishment not amnesty. But Curbelo's programmes have had concrete results - reducing violence in certain neighbourhoods, at least in the short-term.

As we watch rival gangs play football into the night, neighbours tell us that they are normally scared to come out onto these streets, but the crowds and lights at the tournament make them feel secure.On this evening, at least, the gangsters are only shooting footballs.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2012/02/20122682121898381.html

Turning Enemies Into Friends in Israel and the Palestinian Territories

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch

In early Jan. 15 senior rabbis, ministers and imams traveled together to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We are from among New York City's leading religious institutions. Collectively, our houses of worship are home to tens of thousands of prominent New Yorkers.

Anyone who appreciates the hectic schedules and unique demands upon congregational clergy realizes that it is no small matter to bring 15 spiritual leaders together for five days. So why did we leave our congregations for a week? Why did our congregants insist that we go and even pay for our mission?

In the post 9/11 world, religious rapprochement is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. To ignore dialogue is to invite destruction. If we do not find ways to live together in dignity we will die together in agony. Religious moderates must build new bridges of coexistence or religious extremists will burn the last bridges of peace.

Our presence in the Middle East was intended to broadcast that we can live together, work together, travel together, dream together and build together. In a world awash in religious conflict, we wish to model a different way: the way of coexistence, respect and peace.

It was a tough trip. We did not paper over our differences. We visited the heart of the conflict. There were moments of despair. We met with presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament and mayors on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. We met with priests, imams and rabbis. We met with journalists, academics, students, villagers and farmers.

Daily headlines do not begin to tell the story. None of the people we met -- not one -- believed that the Middle East is closer to peace today than ten years ago. If this is the truth, we need to hear it. Progress rests upon the solid rock of reality, not the shifting sands of fantasy.

Despite it all, many of us returned to New York guardedly optimistic. None of the people we met -- not one -- felt that the status quo was sustainable. Everyone understood that a way must be found to break out of the suffocating reality. There is broad agreement that the present is not working and that a new future must be forged.

People of faith have a unique role to play. Both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad urged us to engage. Both of them emphasized that religion could be a source of enormous support as the politicians seek a political solution. We can help to create a context that is conducive to peace.

Religion specializes in hope. We are good at articulating our common humanity and giving voice to the better angels of our nature. We were also cautioned that if we do not step up the forces of religious intolerance will continue to drag the rest of us towards war. Our era has placed a sacred obligation on the forces and figures of religious moderation to speak out and act out.

There are many good people working to build bridges. In Haifa we met Christians, Muslims and Jews who have built a true house of coexistence. In Tel Aviv we met doctors, nurses and hospital staff who treated illness without regard to race, religion or creed. Even on the Gaza border, in Israeli towns that were fired upon in a barrage of missiles, there were people who were reaching out to the other side.

Peace is made piece by piece, from the bottom up. Progress is advanced day by day, person by person, each laboring in their own corner of the universe, connecting with others who together create an irresistible force. We should connect with those people and strengthen their hand. This daily labor is heroic work.

Jewish sages ask: Who is a hero? They respond: He who turns an enemy into a friend.

This is our task: person by person to help turn enemies into friends.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch is Senior Rabbi, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.  This article was first posted on the Huffington Post website. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-ammiel-hirsch/turning-enemies-into-frie_b_1224995.html?ref=religion

Forgiveness Brings Peace

Forgiveness Brings Peace

by David C. James, Ph.D.

“Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is it healed. ... This is the ancient and eternal law.’
– The Dhammapada

Forgiveness is a universal theme in both the spiritual and religious life. Every spiritual tradition recognizes the necessity to let go of past suffering and betrayal, and find a way to release the burden of pain and hate that we carry.

Theistic religions point to a practice of forgiveness that is rooted in relationship with God as well as our fellow travelers on the human path. Non-theistic religions recognize that the gift and process of forgiveness as an essential part of the journey toward awakening and enlightenment.

In a very practical way forgiveness is, as one author put it, giving up the hope of ever having a better past. Forgiveness allows us to be at peace right now, no matter what drama, crisis, trauma has happened in the past. It is simply the creation of peace in the present.

Studies by Stanford University and the University of Tennessee show that when we don’t forgive we may experience a strain upon our nervous and immune systems, elevations in our blood pressure and heart rates, and a host of other health-related problems.

Unforgiveness is a factor in all human conflict, whether in family or world relations. In our lifetime, the conflicts of Northern Ireland, the genocide in Rwanda, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, street gang violence and class warfare in our own country all point to the consequences of unforgiveness, of hanging on to past wrongs.

So if forgiveness is so crucial to the release of suffering, good physical and mental health and harmony with ourselves and others, why do we not practice it more?

Sometimes it is because we confuse forgiving with forgetting. Our brains are wired to perform some incredible tasks, but forgetting past trauma and abuse doesn’t seem to be one of them. The practice of forgiveness is a letting go of the emotional energy of past hurts and finding peace in our hearts in the here and now. In other words, sometimes we forgive for ourselves and no one else! After all, the one who hurt us may be dead and we are still carrying them around in our heart.

Sometimes we can’t forgive because we have too much emotional energy invested in being a victim of someone else’s bad behavior. To be free of the past though, we must find a way to transcend it and this may very well mean grieving the past and finding a way to rest in a present state of well-being.

These are but two of the many reasons we feel that we can’t forgive. Regardless of why we haven’t yet forgiven, the good news is that there are ways to step into this freedom now. Whether through work with a spiritual companion or a therapist, there a is way we can release the hold of the past and find peace and happiness now. I hope you begin this journey today.

David C. James, Ph.D., is an author, spiritual companion and the Animator of the Olympia Forgiveness Project.
Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2012/01/07/v-print/1939062/foregiveness-can-bring-peace.html#storylink=cpy

Merry Christmas!

In a particular way the birth of Jesus in the Christian Tradition begins a cycle of a life lived with forgiveness as a primary optic.  In the Gospel Canticle of Morning Prayers the author anticipates the purpose of Jesus' life, "In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace."  Peace comes, as we are discovering more fully nowadays, when forgiveness is realized in our hearts and in our world.

May Christmas be a time of celebration for you and your family.  And even if you are not Christian, may these days of holiday celebration be ones where you discover afresh the gift of Forgiveness.

Holy Spirit by Hildegard of Bingen

In this Holiday Season I offer this poem of Hildegard's as a way to find the grace to forgive.


Holy Spirit,
Giving life to all life,
Moving all creatures,
Root of all things,
Washing them clean,
Wiping out their mistakes,
Healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
Luminous, wonderful,
Awakening the heart
From its ancient sleep

Translated by Stephen Mitchell