Resurrection After Rape Community Group
Discussion, question-and-answer, general social support, and journal processing for progress-oriented rape survivors. No crisis, no damaging or triggering conflicts--this is for individuals who want to contribute to collective, cooperative action toward the goal of making actual PROGRESS through rape trauma. Much of this work is based on the book "Resurrection After...
From whatever perspective you'd like--religious, moral, philosophical, psychological, whatever. But what does "forgiveness" mean, and what are the benefits and risks of it?
The idea that there is a time to forgiveness is ridiculous. If forgiveness about letting go enough so that you can focus on your own life rather than another's, then forgiveness is an internal process. It can't be rushed or else it won't be real. If forgiveness is reconciliation, then the process can't even begin until the offender has worked himself to the point where he truly wants to make amends. Forgiveness is still an internal process, but this time, the offender's internal process. The survivor can hardly be responsible for the timing of the offender's own internal processes.
I'm beginning to think that the difference between the "forgviness=wipe it all clean/aren't you over it yet" crowd and forgiveness as understood by survivors is an insider/outsider thing. It has been a long time since I have read Corrie Ten Booms story (something like 35 years), but I wonder if "wipe it all clean" was really even her understanding or whether that is the way society simply wants to read what she wrote. Just googling for snippets, I ran across the story of her forgiving a Ravensbrook camp guard. The telling of course stresses her "forgiving" and treats a crucial fact as if it were simply a part of the plot line: the camp guard approached her and asked her forgiveness. Forgiveness as a response to repentance is an entirely different animal than the kind of unilatal forgiveness implied by "aren't you over it yet".
I see three reasons why outsiders don't get the forgiveness thing at all and try to reduce forgiveness to pardon or letting go. First, quite simply it can look that way from afar. What is actually happening during genuine forgiveness/reconciliation is internal and far from the eye - this is true whether we are talking about a survivor's or the offender's internal process.
Second is meganrose's point -- In a perfect world we should not have to talk about forgiveness in terms of our abuse at all because in a perfect world rape would not happen.-- Treating forgiveness as "wipe the slate clean" lets us forget that the world is not a perfect world. We just make it go away by saying it is as if it had never been. Or rather, we ask the victim to make it go away by pretending that they are "over it". And of course, asking the victim is a safe strategy - the victim is the one that recognizes social norms and is trying to cooperate with them. The rapist is in violation - how could we expect him to comply with our demand to "make it go away" when his refusal to admit a wrong and even his very existence reminds us that the world is imperfect. No, better to put the burden on the victim and treat crime as if it is something merely in the perception of the victim.
The third reason is that most people's experience of feeling wronged is comes from being on the irritating side of the normal rough and tumble of human beings with different needs and attention spans and priorities trying to share a common space and maintain relationships with one another. We're not all alike and needs do come in conflict and learning to handle these conflicts with grace is a life time process. Forgiveness in this context is like grease - it keeps relationships going by telling us to focus on why we care enough to be connected to each other in the first place. Forgiveness in this context really does sometimes mean just giving people a pass. Not always - even in healthy relationships boundaries need to be set of course. But when boundaries are set in a healthy relationship it is usually done through dialog and negotiation. Respect is a pre-condition.
Rape, attempted murder, family violence, etc are something entirely different. There is no respect. You can't just sit down with a rapist and say "I really need X. In the future I need you to respect X" like you can with a friend. Rape isn't a case of "you sat down in my favorite seat - no I like that seat too" or "you forgot to put the toilet seat down - sigh - again". It isn't even negligence - "you should watch where you are going ... or you will step on my toe ... again". It is an intentional willful act of hurt. It is a person hiding behind the door for the sole purpose of slamming it in your face so that they can gain advantage to do even worse things.
Morally, psychologically, emotionally, we need to distinguish between these two categories of wrong: the normal give and take of relationships and the outright intent to do harm for reasons of power, ego, or privilege. It is totally screwy to apply the forgiveness strategies that make sense in on-going generally healthy relationships to violent willful attacks that deny the humanity and worth of another.
Not that we don't try. I think most survivors intuitively understand that there is something not quite right about applying the kind of forgiveness meant for healthy relationships to rape, even if they have trouble putting it into words. Society is so focused on imagining that no real evil exists in the world, that we rarely talk seriously about what forgiveness means in a context of evil. So how are we supposed to have the words to express our gut sense? I think we are at a disadvantage unless there are other survivors telling us "No, this is different. Real crimes happen and they need to be treated as such".
i also think recognizing the difference between forgiveness in a healthy relationship and forgiveness in an outright crime is hard even for survivors until the own and name the violence. Part of the reason why breaking free from abusive family relationships is SO hard, is that to break away we have to make a total shift from the forbearance that allows healthy relationships to continue to a stance that requires genuine assessment of right and wrong and firm boundaries and resistance against what is wrong.
There is a book, (and it is faith based) called The End of Memory...Remembering Rightly in a violent world by Miroslav Volf. The book 'offers an honest, insightful and gritty theological reflection that breaks new ground among the many recent books on the topic of forgiveness'
"Volf, a professor of systemic theology at Yale University knows firsthand the struggle to forgive. Married to an American and connected with religion, we was automatically suspect in 1980's communist Yugoslavia. Volf was imprisoned and suffered gross abuse and torture at the hands of his tormentor, Captain G"
I've not read this book...typically this type of book does not interest me. But after the last couple of weeks....having this topic be brought up in several different circumstances...Beth's bumping this post was just one and finally the review of this book in a waiting room magazine..I thought..hmmmm must be time to pay attention to this I think :)
Your right!! Plus, I have no patience for the 'academic approach' to anything...much less this topic. Thanks for the reading suggestions..much appreciated (I think I'm going to go for the 'Amish Grace.." Those folks really inspired me, didn't know someone wrote a book already)
Donald Kraybill is a really good writer and philosopher, by the way. I've taught classes on another book of his.
That sounds more like a historical review of systemic philosophy rather than systemic philosophy proper. As I learned it, systemic theology (and philosophy) is the theological equivalent of a psychological theory: a definition of principles and an analytical working of the implications of those principles - in other words the creation of a system. One of the best known medieval examples is Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica a treatise arguing principles of Christian faith from first principles using Aristotilian logic. Rudolf Otto's theology based on phenomenology is another. Paul Tillich's existential theology is yet another.
Sometimes systemic philosophy can be dry (Aristotle is a good example), but not always. Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) relies heavily on our experience of awe (which he calls the numenous) to argue for the existance of God and to give meaning to words used in the bible and elsewhere to describe God or our reactions to the encounter with the divine: words like "holy", "dread", "fear and trembling", "unworthiness", "mystery", "sublime" My reading Otto many years prior to the rape gave me language to talk about some of the more dramatic parts of the rape. Coming face to face with someone who so disrespected the mystery and sacredness of life made me dramatically more aware of the mystery and sacredness of life. I was glad Otto had recovered that language for me.
Paul Tillich's reputation as a systemic theologian comes from books like "The Courage to Be". The book spends little if any time on history. Rather its primary occupation is understanding what we mean by the claim "God exists". He argues that God does not exist as a being but rather as the Ground from which all being flows. It starts out as dry philosophy, but it quickly moves into the implications of having an understanding of God that does not lend itself to static definitions (because once we define something we thing-ify it and turn it from the source of being into being. Rather we must have faith in the process of being. Thus to have faith is to allow ourselves to welcome both being and non-being, hope and despair as things not much. This is not easy because we naturally take refuge in the known and identifiable. Hence the title "The _Courage_ to Be". Dry is about the last thing I'd call that book.
Tillich has also been crucial in my understanding of God. Most of all he gave me a way to make sense of a world where God is both dramatically "there" and "not there".
Basically, when something is called systemic theology there is no way to know what you are getting into without at least skimming through the book.
(And now you also know some of my theological secrets :-) )
There are people in my life that I will probably forgive at some point -- that I "need" to forgive for my own sake. One is dead, so it will be a completely one-sided thing, benefitting only me. But I decided to put forgiveness on hold for a while. I need a better understanding of exactly what it is that I'm forgiving. I'm still figuring that out and dismantling years of denial and minmizing and "I know! I just won't think about it!"
I liked the contrast made here between forgiving someone you have an ongoing relationship with vs. forgiving a rapist or abuser. That was helpful to me. I also needed the reminder that the former prison guard ASKED Corie ten Boom for forgiveness in a genuine way...in contrast to the way someone asked my forgiveness recently: "If you think I may have done anything wrong, you need to forgive me. You should have blah blah blah [shifting all the blame on me]. For your own sake, you need to let go of this and it's wrong for you to be upset." I felt like responding, "Gosh, what is there to forgive? Maybe I need to forgive myself for mistakenly thinking you hurt me, when I was the one in the wrong."