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June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality
This is the sixth and final part in a series on Finding Forgiveness.
My searching has taken me into many different areas — sometimes rewarded with success, sometimes less so — most of them involving, ritual, prayer creativity and music.
Around the years of my searching, the landscape of our culture has changed in a huge variety of ways; this quest has enabled me to find my place within these various changes. The danger of the present situation is that people become defined by their childhood experiences which are often seen as a pathology. For a long time, I lived with the idea that there was a June who had not been abused and was not wounded. The notion that I could be healed and attain that imagined personhood was quite comforting — that these early experiences could be taken away. This was, of course, a lie. There is no alternative me — only the one with the life story set out here.
The real question is how we use the legacy of our younger lives. Some talk of leaving them behind, others of forgetting them and others of forgiving. The last term has been popular with the Church, which, as we have seen, has been concerned more about the product — the final destination — rather than the complex route of getting there. It has ignored, in particular, the place of anger in the complex process. Indeed, the stages of forgiveness are not unlike those set out by Elisabeth Kubler Ross for the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression/sadness, acceptance/celebration. These stages may overlap and may last a lifetime. However, it is important to enable people to move beyond the stages of victimhood and surviving, towards celebration.
It has been suggested to me by well-meaning helpers that forgiving is also for the benefit of the perpetrator and that a carefully monitored face-to-face meeting between the survivor and perpetrator is mutually advantageous. But in this narrative the perpetrator is dead. But the concept that forgiveness is a gift bestowed to aid the perpetrator is to misunderstand the power of forgiveness for the survivor; forgiveness (often fueled by understanding) enables the survivor of injustice to let it go or rather, as I prefer to regard it, to use it as a mulch that is recycled in a life:
The idea of unfinished projects and unused experiences as mulch derives from Alan Bennett:
Creativity is a real player in the game of recycling. I called my book on healing The Wounds that sing. The story of highly creative people shows how they plumb the depths of their lives to produce their creations. But these people are regularly pathologised, because they often experience life so intensely and have considerable mood swings. Support is also necessary. I have had good professional support for some time: establishing a group of friends who can cope with me in my darkest moods has been an effective way of managing the most difficult parts of myself.
Belonging has always been a problem for me. The isolation of childhood abuse is very wounding. It was only in the middle of my life, that I found places where I really felt I belonged. The history of the Church, in relation to people who are different, is not good. There often appears to be more concern about who to keep out, rather than who to welcome in. There are exceptions, one of which I found at St James’ Piccadilly, but my experience of the Church has often been bruising. Yet I hang on in there; it is still my spiritual home. In the end, to rediscover gratitude is a real antidote to depression. Gratitude can be expressed for little things as well as big. Each night I write down five things for which I am grateful that day.
It is via gratitude that we approach wonder or amazement. There is a sense in which wonder restores the innocence that may have been taken from us quite early. This is how God comforts Job, in that enigmatic book in the Hebrew Scriptures. God shows Job the variety and the wildness of nature, reveals Job’s place in a greater cosmic scheme, a place that can be reached in this life, not only via dying.[4] Dying was my way out for so many years and now the rediscovery of the liminal space in this life — embracing it and finding ways to access it — has been an important part of my journeying into the Divine loving.
It took a great deal of prayer and support to do carry out this ritual of forgiveness. I had been worrying for many years about how to resolve my story. It did not involve courts and lawyers but a private acknowledgement. It involved a grasp of ritual as a way of dealing with the past.
It was a very long journey and involved so many different stages and emotions. It demanded a great deal of perseverance and in the end I tried to encapsulate in a very long song to the tune of My bonny lies over the ocean.
Forgiveness Journey
[1] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell, p. 98. @Stainer and Bell.
[2] Bennett, Alan (2016). Keeping on keeping on. London: Faber and Faber, p. 103.
[3] June Boyce-Tillman, started in Norway 2008
[4] Brown, William B. (2014). Wisdom’s wonder: Character, Creation and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom’s literature. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge UK: William Eerdmans Publishing.
[5] Written by June Boyce-Tillman March 29th 2018 (Maundy Thursday) finished on Easter Sunday Aril 1st.
