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.

Australian Studies books shortlisted for ASAL’s Alvie Egan Award 2019 @austlit17 We are pleased to have received word that Volumes 1 and 2 in the Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives series edited by Anne Brewster have both been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature‘s Alvie Egan Award 2019! The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction
Geoff Rodoreda
ISBN:978-1-78707-264-0 
Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature
Xu Daozhi
ISBN:978-1-78707-077-6 
The award is for the best first book of literary scholarship by an early career researcher (ECR) on an Australian subject, published in the preceding two calendar years. The winner will be announced at ASAL’s annual conference in Perth on 2-5 July 2019. Thank you to ASAL for the honour, and congratulations to both authors and the series editor! Read more about the award here. 

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 5 in a series on Finding Forgiveness.

It was Palm Sunday in Florence and the processions of waving olive branches filled my heart. I was sitting in the portico of a palace, when the mobile phone rang and told me that my abuser had died.

Was it really all over? I remembered the festivals when the family gathered together — the darkened room and sitting on his knee and his desire for me to make him happy. It was when I arrived in England that the tears started. Now I had my final chance to put it behind me, if only I could face that coffin. I knew about coffins. After all, I had worked briefly for an undertaker, which had taught me about that. I knew the feel of the dead — I knew how to

• Love them
• Talk to them
• Give them their final blessing
• Sense their presence or absence

Saturday dawned well. The taxi would come at 8.15 for a train that would get me there at 11.15. The train rumbled through the beautiful countryside. When I got to the coffin, he looked old — not like I remembered him at all. He was fatter then and there were no glasses. I tried to imagine this old man young — the thick lips, the fatter cheeks. His hands were red with bruising — had they put drips in when he died? They looked oddly, in this Holy Week season, like crucified hands. Had I crucified him? Was that how he had seen it? These were the hands that had touched me, that had given me, so early, the delights of sex. And now, they were red and raw. I could not touch them yet. I had to look at them and get used to them. Would they rise up and touch me again?

I started to talk to him. Did he remember our time together — the darkness — how he would make me into a proper woman (did he not realise I was actually a child?) And then I moved to the gifts, the gifts born of the experiences that he had given: the large pieces I had written, the struggle to be a composer and finally a priest. I talked of the hymns I had written and I sang him my hymn on love:

Could I set him free? I, who held onto things so long, whose house was filled with a collection of sentimental junk from which I could not be separated? What would it mean to let him go?

What was the good he sought? And I knew. He had wanted to be a priest but what he had done to me had stopped him.

I had certainly stood alone throughout my life. Plagued by loneliness, depression, with very little family to speak of and alienated by this experience from the ones I might have had, I had been on a long journey, carried by my faith and the religious rituals that I and my friends had devised:

And now we both were moving on — he to his eternal rest and me onto I knew not what. But I knew that my faith would lead me, as it had for so long, and that it would not rest until I found my eternal home, but that it might be more restful with him gone if only I could let him go.

This was the real prayer. And then it happened. To the side of the statue of Jesus, he appeared as a young man in his brown sports jacket, which I had forgotten; I knew he was waiting to go. He had come out from the old dead man: the young soul, waiting to go into the arms of his Lord or to be reborn, however you saw it. I went to my carefully packed bag and found the oils, put on the stole and opened the small bottle of oil. as a memorial,” I thought. I went over and touched his forehead. It was cold and firm. I made the cross again on his forehead and started on the ancient prayer:

The young man in the sports jacket was surrounded by angels. And then I knew he was gone. I sat on the chair, away from the body and imagined the magnificent Elgar setting of the text of Praise to the Holiest in the Height. I heard it in all its majesty with unusual joy.

[1] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell. @Stainer and Bell p. 83

[2] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell. @Stainer and Bell

Academic publishing group Peter Lang has entered a new distribution agreement with NBN International (“NBNi”), a UK-based physical and digital book distribution company that is part of the Ingram Content group. Under its terms, NBNi will handle trade sales and distribution for all Peter Lang books in print, regardless of language, in the UK, British Commonwealth and non-German and French speaking European countries. Peter Lang is committed to the fastest and widest distribution of high-quality academic research and by using NBNi’s extensive distribution network, the publishing group guarantees optimal distribution and visibility of its publications to libraries and booksellers in these regions.

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 4 in a series on Finding Forgiveness. 

The Church often preaches an instant forgiveness with little informed help:

Christians have too often met [survivors of abuse] instead with indifference, suspicion and incredulity. They have been reluctant to address their cry for care and their cry for justice. They have preferred to advise, preach and give their counsel rather than to listen, learn and simply be alongside. They have thought that they know the journey to be travelled and the speed it should take, and have sometimes compounded suffering and harm through what was imagined to be pastoral ministry. [1]

Others indicate that forgiveness is not at all possible and leave people in the permanent state of survivor. This book sets out the lengthiness of the journey but the possibility of an arrival:

VIA NEGATIVE

Bilinda[2] (2014) (who lost her husband in Rwanda) presents us with four choices at the outset:

• To acknowledge the reality of what had happened
• To reject revenge
• To acknowledge the common humanity of all involved
• To believe that God’s love could enable repentance on the part of the perpetrator.

Put together from other writers, there are many stages in what is a long and complex process:

• First stage — a safe place for the expression of anger and fear
• The need for the offence to be accepted as real and not forgotten[3]
• ‘Forgive and forget’ owes more to King Lear than Christian theology [4]
• The second stage — naming the shame and guilt
• The third stage — reconciliation with the self and giving up self-persecution by damaging behaviours
• Giving up the survivor identity — can be done through creativity, ritual and a supportive community[5]

Forgiveness is a process not a product and can be lifelong for the deepest wounds. Not to forgive is to damage not the other person, but one’s self. It is to let go of the past and not be continually trapped by it. I have learned this slowly and painstakingly. I have had good tools:

• Faith — meaning-making
• Prayer — re-centering
• Ritual
• Creativity
• Support by people with a similar meaning frame as yourself
• Belonging
• Gratitude
• Wonder
• Embracing paradox

Questions: Where does forgiveness come from? Where are you in that process, personally and culturally? Does your church teach forgiveness or simply preach it?

[1] The Faith and Order Commission (2016). The Gospel, Sexual Abuse and the Church; A theological resource for the local church. London: Church House Publishing, p. 40.

[2] Bilinda, Lesley (2014). Remembering Well: The Role of forgiveness in Remembrance. Anvil, 30 (2), contacted 1 February 2018.

[3] Flaherty, S. M. (1992). Woman, why do you weep? Spirituality for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.p141

[4] Fortune, Marie (2002). Pastoral responses to sexual assault and abuse: Laying a foundation. Journal of Religion and abuse, 3 (3), pp. 9–112.

[4] Shooter, Susan (2016). How survivors of abuse relate to God. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 12–14.

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 3 in a series on Finding Forgiveness.

In part 2, I shared some personal examples of which have enabled the process of establishing an authentic interiority following traumatic experiences in myself.

Since then a number of people have come to me with a similar history to mine. They somehow know mine, I think, at some level. Some come for advice and some to tell me old stories. As a result, I wrote this hymn reflecting on it all to the tune Finlandia — usually used for the hymn: Be still my soul.

What I have set out in this book how I have recycled and turned the legacy of the past into a rich compost that can grow into celebration and creativity. This has been partly though music (the freedom song of the title): hymns, longer works and the one-woman performances. These have played a significant part in the healing process for myself and others. Recently, in South Africa, after a performance of my show Seeing in the Dark (which is on the subject of abuse) an unknown man came up to me in tears, talking of his own healing and thanking me for telling his story.

I am hoping that my story may help people managing the complexity of their own life-story, to mulch it down into authentic interiorities. God has been good to me. I still find a Christian frame one that enables me to make meaning effectively. Within this frame, life is a journey into understanding Divine love in all its varied forms. In an age where love is often portrayed as an erotic relationship between two people, my life has revealed both the cost and the blessings of loving. People enculturated in other faiths may well make meaning differently. The important thing is to have a sense of a wider picture, into which your story fits. The Christian frame that I have used offered me s hope — perhaps the most significant of all virtues. I have had a long joyful journey but the destination has been worth it.

RE-MEMBERING

[1] Berry, Jan, and Pratt, Andrew (2017). Hymns of Hope and Healing: Words and Music to refresh the Church’s ministry of healing. London: Stainer and Bell. p92. @Stainer and Bell

[2] June Boyce-Tillman to the tune Adapted from the Handel aria: Lascia ch’io pianga. Berry, Jan, and Pratt, Andrew (2017). Hymns of Hope and Healing: Words and Music to refresh the Church’s ministry of healing. London: Stainer and Bell. p123 @ Stainer and Bell

Effective today, 1,235 monographs published by Peter Lang have been made available as Open Access content in the OAPEN library. They cover all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences with a strong focus on Economics, Finance, Business and Management. The books are available under a Creative Commons license as fully downloadable PDF files at no cost to libraries or users.

The Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is a collaborative initiative to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. With a total of 1,235 titles made freely available on the platform, Peter Lang is pleased to become the largest Open Access publisher on OAPEN and to send a strong signal for its continuing dedication to support the broad dissemination of high-quality academic research.

To search for Peter Lang books in the OAPEN library, click here 

To learn about Open Access publishing at Peter Lang, see www.peterlangopen.com

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 2 in a series on Finding Forgiveness. 

In Part 1, I explained how we can establish an authentic interiority following traumatic experiences. Here, I will describe two examples which have enabled this process in me:

A ritual of mutuality – Liturgies of Separation

At the end of the marriage Church could offer us little help because of its theology of the sanctity of marriage vows, carefully enshrined and imposed by the weight of the Marriage Eucharist. The acknowledgement of divorce in religious terms is still a hole-in-the-corner affair. And yet, if there is a weighty liturgy at the beginning of marriage, surely there must be some sort ritual at the end? A social worker in the Conciliation Service offered us a reversal of the marriage ceremony, conducted like a presiding minister.” Hold hands; look into one another’s eyes and repeat after me”:

“Thank you for the good times we have shared together.”

“I am sorry for all the times that I have hurt you.”

“Goodbye as my husband.”

“Hello as the separated parent of our children”

And then the same process by the other partner. Some people might want me to write that, as we looked at another, we knew that our marriage was restored. But that is not what happened. After it, we sat apart in separate chairs and wept for what might have been, but could never be. I am glad of the friendship and our mutuality in caring for and protecting our children. Now we are good friends. We are separated parents and joint grandparent. As we all sat down for a celebration meal for our granddaughter winning a gold medal — our two sons, my eldest son’s divorced wife with her new partner, my ex-husband and me — the family gathering appeared to me as a miracle.

A song

My relationship with my mother was a mess. It had not been sorted while she was alive. In May 2005, I was at a conference designed to produce a book on peace-making, Rik Palieri, (Palieri 2008) a colleague of the protest singer Pete Seeger, had talked about how he had achieved reconciliation with his father, by composing a song that he sang at a family gathering. In this song he saw his father’s abuse in the context of cultural views of manhood in the US. In an open air café in Madrid, while eating paella, this song was written. My mother was dead, but I thought I might achieve a measure of resolution of our complex and troubled relationship. I situated her in the culture of womanhood in her days. In verse four there is a reference to Ibsen’s The Doll’s House and how my mother’s generation were trapped in a particular form of marriage. This meant that often all of a woman’s energy was focussed on one small group of people. The song forms part of my one-woman performance Juggling: A question of identity, where it is sung as a letter to her, and has moved many others wherever it is used.

The author with her mother:

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

The song was an important part in mulching down the difficult parts of my childhood. However, now these provide compost for the creativity which has characterised my life as a hymn and song writer, a composer, conductor, teacher and priest.

[1] @Stainer and Bell

The Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding early career researchers for their contribution in different fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Peter Lang has always been committed to supporting those at the beginning of their academic careers and the establishment of this prize is further evidence of this commitment. The publishing group is delighted to announce the winner of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Comparative Literature:

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert from the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick for her monograph “The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation”

Peter Lang is also pleased to announce the runner-up in the competition:

Marco Malvestio from the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua for his work “The Conflict Revisited: The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction”

Both books will be published in the New Comparative Criticism book series, edited by Dr. Florian Mussgnug.

We congratulate the winner and runner-up and also thank the prize committee for the time and effort spent reviewing the submissions!

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is Part 1 of a series of articles on Finding Forgiveness.

What do we with the past, particularly when it involves serious abuse? Is it possible to mulch it down into a rich compost for current projects or does it remain permanently as a blot on the landscape of the past? Predestination has reappeared at various points in European history. In a religious context, certain people are predestined for heaven and certain others for hell. In a contemporary context it appears as: This is what you have experienced as a child and, therefore, this is what you can expect as an adult.

At present the answer to abuse seems to be a courtroom. We have lost touch with the three aspects of the private, social and public dimensions. The public aspect often concentrates on legal requirements in safe guarding procedures. But in the social and private dimensions we have often confused reconciliation, repentance and forgiveness[1] (Bash 2007 pp58–62, Cantacuzino 2015).

It seems to me that we are in danger of confusing vengeance with justice. This confusion may leave people trapped in the stage of anger, rather than enabling them to move on beyond it, to the important phases of acceptance and celebration. Although the extreme confidentiality of my own youth was unhealthy, over-publicity may be equally pernicious. Yes, the story needs to be heard and acknowledged, but by which people? How many people are necessary? I wonder if the criminal justice system is the best way for stories to be heard. For the purpose of stopping further actions on the part of the alleged perpetrator, the system is essential; I look back at my life and think about which of the perpetrators were actually challenged; I think it was only one — the psychiatric nurse in a hospital. To challenge the ones in my family would have meant serious fractures within the family circle and possibly my being taken into care; here, it would seem, the possibility of the abuse continuing was even more likely. Apart from stopping potential perpetrators, the question we need to ask is how survivors can be enabled to become celebrators and to use their experience profitably for the good of the wider community.

Perhaps the problem is the tools for mulching experience into rich compost for the future. In an age when we are deleting from the school curriculum the arts and philosophy/theology we may find that we have lost vestiges of the tools. These are — in my experience:

• Faith — meaning-making

• Prayer — re-centering

• Ritual

• Creativity

Through these we can establish an authentic interiority (O’Sullivan) in my experience.

In the next post, I will describe two examples which have enabled this process in me….

[1] Bash, Anthony (2007). Forgiveness and Christian ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/MichaelOSullivan7/authentic-subjectivity-and-social-transformation Contacted Feb 2nd 2018

Cantacuzino, Marino (2015). The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a vengeful age. London: Jessica Kingsley