FORGIVING
The Art of Mercy
opening
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I broke your heart, that I was too demanding of your approval, that I forgot to put your name in my acknowledgments. I’m sorry I ignored you at the poetry reading and didn’t bother to correct the perception that I don’t care about you. I’m sorry I didn’t attend your concert, your wedding, your funeral. I’m sorry I talked too much at the dinner party. I’m sorry I was so quiet. I’m sorry I gave you a low grade on your midterm exam. I’m sorry I was a mother who put my relationships with men ahead of my children. I’m sorry I was the kind of mother who hovered like a blimp and smothered you. I’m sorry I interpreted your rejection as rejection, rather than as the cry for love that it really was.
I forgive you. I forgive you for dying young. I forgive you for drinking too much and acting like an asshole. I forgive you for talking about me behind my back. I forgive you for running over my neighbor and her daughter who were out for a walk. I forgive you for leaving your girlfriend when she told you she was pregnant. I forgive you for accusing me of being arrogant when I was just excited. I forgive you for not seeing me.
I forgive you for being blind to your own shadow, for your participation in institutionalized racism, misogyny, heteronormativity. I forgive you for your anti-Semitic jokes and your Islamophobic remarks. I forgive you for lobbying for ownership of assault weapons, amassing a nuclear arsenal, building a wall to keep out people of color and separate children from their parents. I forgive you for genocide against the indigenous peoples of this and every other continent. I forgive you for the Holocaust that exterminated my ancestors like bugs. I forgive you for the slave trade, for sex trafficking, for treating garbage collectors like garbage. I forgive you for putting profits ahead of people, technology ahead of clean air and water, head ahead of heart.
Forgiving you was the best thing I ever did. Forgiving you set the bird of my heart winging through the universe.
Quan Yin
She is the bodhisattva of compassion, the embodiment of loving-kindness, the personification of mercy. She Who Hears the Cries of the World; She Who Sees the Wounds of the World. She is the incarnation of the Buddha of compassion, who had the option of merging into the boundless ocean of Nirvana and chose instead to return to the wheel of samsara (births, deaths, rebirths) in feminine form, as Quan Yin, to comfort and awaken all beings until every being is free from suffering.
It is said that Quan Yin was born a woman, Miao Shan, and that, like so many legendary female saints, she flowered in the face of persecution. Her parents wanted a boy child, and they did their best to get rid of Miao Shan as soon as possible. In the meantime, they put her to work doing the most arduous household tasks. Not only did her labors fail to bring Miao Shan down, but she drew the attention of the forest creatures, who joined forces to help her. The mice threaded her needles, the rabbits swept the courtyard, the deer split kindling for the cook fire.
When it came time for her to be married off, Miao Shan informed her parents that she preferred to become a nun. They refused. She insisted. Finally her father sent her to a convent of his own choosing, but only after striking a deal with the abbess that Miao Shan be assigned the grungiest duties so she would be discouraged from monastic life.
Miao Shan was appointed to the convent hospice, where she was meant to tend infectious wounds, clean up all manner of bodily fluids, and prepare corpses for burial. This job, of course, was perfect for Miao Shan. She not only cared for her patients’ physical needs, she also loved them through their deepest suffering. She sang to them and sat with them in silence. And when they died, she accompanied them to the otherworld to make sure they were safe.
When her father found out that Miao Shan was thriving where he hoped she would capitulate, he ordered her execution. As the henchman raised his ax over her head, Miao Shan looked into his eyes and forgave him for what he was about to do. She assured him that he would not bear the karmic burden for this deed. Unable to carry out an act of violence upon such an angelic being, he threw down his ax, which shattered into a thousand pieces. Miao Shan was swept up in a pearly mist and transported to a nearby island, where she spent the rest of her life in meditation. When she died, she became Quan Yin, embodiment of selfless service and sweet mercy.
Do not be fooled. Miao Shan’s humility was not compliant; it was subversive! Quan Yin’s compassion is not indulgent; it is subversive! It invites us to lay down our weapons and open our hearts. The tender attributes of the feminine do not render her weak and ineffectual. They glorify her. Our vulnerability is our strength. Our capacity to forgive is our superpower.
Making Amends
Every wisdom tradition on the planet emphasizes that compassion is the quintessence of the holy. The Arabic word rahim, found in the opening lines of the Qur’an and repeated many times a day in the salat (daily prayers), means “compassion.” Rahim is also the word for “womb.” Forgiveness is the very face of the Divine Feminine. Each time we allow mercy to enter the shattered spaces of our hearts, we participate in the divine nature. To forgive ourselves is to forge a contract with the Divine Mother: I will mirror you in my own soul. Yet this is not so much a decision as an allowing. It is grace.
Women have a tendency to overapologize. Not all women, of course. But many of us have been conditioned to avoid taking up space in this world, expressing our opinions, asking for what we want. We are compelled to beg forgiveness for being and may use this compulsion as a kind of preemptive technique, accusing ourselves before we can be accused and thereby escaping condemnation. While we may find this habit of apologizing for every little thing annoying in others, it’s harder to catch our own self-deprecating behaviors. We would never speak to a beloved child the way we talk to ourselves sometimes in the middle of the night when we can’t help rewinding the tape of our lives and blaming ourselves for a thousand missteps. We wouldn’t even treat a stranger so harshly. What would happen if we cultivated tenderness toward our own broken being? What revolution would unfold if we embraced the teachings of the mystics and practiced cherishing ourselves?
Of course, making amends is almost always a vital spiritual practice. Every tradition has rituals for taking a moral inventory, asking for and receiving forgiveness. They all encourage us to engage in concrete action to rectify any damage caused by our shortcomings while acknowledging that we are likely to mess up again and offering techniques for growing our consciousness around the kinds of behaviors that caused us to miss the mark. The vulnerability such practices engender is in itself holy ground. We soften our grip on the separate self and leave the ego undefended, affirming our interdependence with all beings and finding our footing in the human condition.
Treasure Yourself
My friend Ondrea Levine is a prophet of self-forgiveness. Beloved partner of the late Stephen Levine, revered for his pioneering work with conscious dying, Ondrea is a powerful teacher in her own right. Her teaching is deceptively simple and cuts like a diamond through our calcified self-hatred: Treasure yourself.
There is often a sense of peace that descends on our hearts when we cultivate the courage to forgive. We are tangibly blessed even as we bless others with our mercy. Yet it can be easier to absolve someone who wronged you, Ondrea points out, than to forgive yourself. Most of us are way harder on ourselves than we are on others. We’d sooner pardon a violent criminal whose childhood, as it turns out, was riddled with parental neglect and abuse than give ourselves a break for waking up in a bad mood and snapping at our children.
The unfinished business with which most people die, Ondrea continues, is the work of forgiveness, mostly forgiveness of themselves. Ondrea told me how much she cherishes the private conversations she’s had with many people as they were dying, in which they entrusted her with their deepest secrets. They needed a loving person to bear witness to these soul burdens they carried so that they could lay them down before they died. Sharing their hearts with Ondrea helped them to forgive themselves. But the exchange was not one-way. These intimate moments with the dying bestowed gifts of love Ondrea says she will keep with her until the day she dies.
A few years ago, Ondrea launched something she calls “The Apology Page” on the Levine Talks website. This is a public space where people can post anonymously, confessing the transgressions that cloud their conscience and blight their relationships. “It seems to be a very good idea as a means for tilting the shared heart and letting it pour into the ocean of compassion,” Stephen and Ondrea wrote at the top of the web page. “If you were told you were completely forgiven for everything you have ever done, what is it in the heart that rejects that self-mercy? Treasure Yourselves.”
The apologies range from what may appear to be minor offences, such as envy, to significant betrayals, such as a spouse admitting to an affair. “I apologize to my mother for thinking daily about killing myself,” one person writes. Some, like this one, carry remorse about actions they committed years ago: “I am sorry that, as a teenager, around fifteen years old, when I was babysitting, I left the baby alone, asleep in the house to go to a dance for a few hours.” Some recognize the ways in which they have caused harm to their own dear selves: “I apologize to myself for repressing my femininity, my desires and my feelings. I apologize to myself for believing I was valuable only if I was strong, clever and showed no feelings. I apologize to myself for striving for spiritual perfection and disregarding my humanness.”
There is a soft, cool breeze flowing through “The Apology Page.” It feels like a safe grotto where we can rest. Glimpsing the ways other people flagellate themselves, just as we do, can generate a couple of healing outcomes. It helps us see our participation in the universal predicament—that we are neither terminally special nor uniquely flawed—and that we belong to the human family. And the simple act of naming the ways we have missed the mark helps recalibrate our hearts and line us back up with our most loving intentions.
ALL WILL BE WELL AND ALL WILL BE WELL
The medieval English anchoress Julian of Norwich bequeathed us a radically optimistic theology. She had no problem admitting that human beings have a tendency to go astray. We rupture relationships, dishonor the Divine, make unfortunate choices, and try to hide our faults. And yet, Julian insists, “All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.”
Take that in.
This assertion is meant to penetrate the fog of our despair and wake us up. She does not simply state, “Everything’s going to be okay.” Like God calling the biblical prophets by name, Julian repeats her declaration three times—most emphatically the third: All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well. She does not ask us to engage in a spiritual bypass by relegating everything that unfolds to the will of God, calling it perfect against all evidence to the contrary. She squarely faces the inevitability that we will miss the mark and that there is wickedness in this world. Even so, she is convinced that the nature of the Divine is loving-kindness, and she wants us to absorb this into every fiber of our being.
In her mystical masterwork The Showings, Julian shares that she used to obsess about sin. She couldn’t figure out why God, who is all-powerful, wouldn’t have eliminated our negative proclivities when he made the world. “If he had left sin out of creation, it seemed to me, all would be well.” But what God-the-Mother showed Julian in a near-death vision was that all shall be well anyway. Not in spite of our transgressions but because of them.
Julian unpacks this for us. In doing so she dispenses with the whole concept of sin and replaces it with love. “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian writes, “not a particle of being.” While sin itself has no existential value, it has impact. It causes pain. It is the pain that has substance.
But mercy is swiftly forthcoming. It is immediately available. Inexorable! It is frankly rude of us to doubt that all will be well (and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well). “When he said these gentle words,” Julian writes, speaking of God-the-Mother, “he showed me that he does not have one iota of blame for me, or for any other person. So, wouldn’t it be unkind of me to blame God for my transgressions since he does not blame me?” The merciful nature of God renders the whole blame game obsolete. Besides, in her visions, Julian saw that we are perfectly protected. We’re bound to do things we regret, whether or not we intend to, but we each carry a spark of the Holy One inside us, and this can never be extinguished. In fact, it is when we stumble that the Divine looks most tenderly upon us. Our vulnerability is beautiful to God-the-Mother.
Suffering is a purifying fire, a blessing in itself. Julian predicts that when this life is over we will understand that there is no punishment, only grace. We have already paid for our transgressions through the pain we endured as a consequence of our negative actions. In fact, we will be rewarded in direct proportion to the severity of our errors. This may seem counterintuitive, but why would a loving God, Julian asks, hold us accountable for that which we have already offered to the flames of remorse? Not only would God never allow our souls to suffer for the actions we have already accounted for in this life, but each soul is so precious to God that when she brings us home to herself she offers us the seat of honor at her own table.
For those of us who do not subscribe to a belief in some perfect afterworld but, rather, are focused on making things better right here on Earth, this teaching may feel disconnected. But what Julian is saying, with heartbreaking compassion, is that we cannot know this now, from our limited, pain-drenched perspective. Yet eventually we will awaken to the truth that we are unconditionally adored by God, so that in the end, “We will clearly see in God all the secrets that are hidden from us now. Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, ‘Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well.’ Instead, we shall proclaim in one voice, ‘Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: all is well.’”
Our task is to embody these “heavenly realms” here and now, in our relationships, in our communities, in our bedraggled and beautiful hearts.
Restorative Justice
It is no surprise that many indigenous wisdom practices echo feminine values. Native cultures are generally earth-based, and the Earth is honored as our Mother. When there is violence or discord within the collective sphere, certain tribes in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (and undoubtedly in many other regions less documented) will gather in a circle, and the members will take turns speaking from the heart about how the incident touched them and what they think might be done to mend the torn fabric of community.
There are so many things about this that feel feminine to me: gathering in a circle, giving space for each voice to be heard and valued, emphasizing healing over punishing. It’s about rebuilding relationships.
As a result of the measurable benefits of restorative justice circles among indigenous communities, some nonindigenous groups have taken up this native wisdom teaching. In the classroom and the courtroom, restorative justice methods are being applied to a range of violations, from petty theft to rape, from able-bodied people parking in spots designated for the disabled (so they won’t be late to football practice or some such reason) to fatal collisions caused by drunk drivers.
Here’s how it works. When a crime has been committed, everyone impacted by the incident comes together in a circle. Each person affected has the opportunity to speak directly to the person responsible for the violation, sharing how they were hurt by the offender’s action. The person who committed the crime also has a chance to speak. They can apologize, express their own pain and sorrow for what they did, and may begin developing a concrete plan to restore wholeness to the community. Unlike the punitive model practiced in most Western courts, restorative justice is about repairing harm. It speaks to the whole person; it addresses and heals the soul. The philosophy underlying this process is that when someone violates the rights of an individual, they are damaging the fabric of the entire circle.
One of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had—in a lifetime overflowing with powerful experiences—was sitting in a restorative justice circle. I was there in the capacity of grief counselor to a woman whose sixteen-year-old daughter had been run over by her boyfriend following a fight. They were in the parking lot of a motel where they had been partying.
When the young man entered the room where the session was to take place, his hands cuffed and his feet shackled, he did not make eye contact with anyone gathered there, including his own parents. Even after he was seated, he did not look up. Each person spoke of the ways they were impacted by the event, and at first his face was like stone. But little by little, I saw his body language begin to register what was happening around him. As the girl’s basketball buddies spoke and cried, he flinched. His girlfriend’s sister, who was pregnant, wept when she expressed that her dead sister would never get to be an auntie or a mom herself. Her stepfather spoke of his helplessness in the face of his wife’s grief.
When the mother spoke, she did not cry. She did not hurl hateful accusations. She quietly shared the texture of her days, sleepless nights, tortured dreams, waking to remember all over again that her beautiful, feisty daughter was gone. Then, to the amazement of everyone present, she shifted her focus from her own pain to her daughter’s boyfriend. She acknowledged that not only had she lost a child, but that he had lost his girlfriend. She told him that she holds him in prayer and that she might even like to visit him in prison to see how he’s doing. She hoped this tragedy would inspire him to return to his community and teach boys about nonviolence. As this mighty mama shared her heart, I watched the young man’s eyes fill with tears. Soon he was openly weeping. And then we were all crying: her family, his family, the district attorney, and the assistant DA. Me.
When it was my turn to speak, I encouraged the young man to use his prison sentence as a monastic opportunity—to pray and meditate, to read spiritual literature and keep his communication with fellow inmates as respectful and as kind as possible. I offered to send him books that I felt would facilitate a kind of vision quest within the desert of his incarceration: Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, Finding Freedom by Jarvis Jay Masters, When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön.
After everyone had a chance to share how this incident had affected them, a blanket of collective exhaustion laced with tranquility fell over our group and rendered us momentarily mute. The facilitator skillfully allowed us to sit in this scared hush for a few minutes before closing the circle. And then the girl’s mom asked if she could hug her daughter’s boyfriend. The guards consented. As if in the presence of the Madonna herself, we all made way for her as she crossed the room to where stood the person responsible for her child’s death, who was suddenly looking very much like a little boy.
She took him into her arms and began whispering in his ear while stroking his shaved head. His shoulders were trembling, heaving. They stayed that way, pressed together, for a long time. Then he was led away, back to jail. His sentencing followed later that week, taking into account the transformational fruits of our restorative justice process. The fabric of community had been carefully and collectively rewoven. Not a single one of us would ever be the same.
RECONCILIATION — PERSONAL AND COMMUNAL
While we may comprehend that holding onto resentments is like ingesting spiritual cyanide, it is not easy to let go of the story line of our own wounds. Nor must we. The feminine way is to allow ourselves to feel what we feel, softening and yielding to the reality of the pain, breathing through it like a woman being ripped open by the contractions of labor, and allowing ourselves to birth ourselves anew (again and again). Each time we show up for what is true, our hearts expand and strengthen, increasing our capacity to forgive and be forgiven.
What is true is often nuanced. We are all perpetrators of unconscious bias, and we each get a turn transmuting the poison of victimhood into the medicine of reconciliation. I’ve lived a life of relative privilege, but I am determined to stand with those on the margins. I have had small tastes of bigotry. Born into a Jewish family only a generation after the Holocaust, I was raised with the visceral reality of the danger of my membership in a particular ethnic minority. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe in God or not,” my mother used to say (she didn’t, FYI). “I would still go into the ovens.” The ovens. The gas chambers. This was the symbol of the insanity of a world where people die simply because they are Jewish—or black or brown or gay.
Later, as a hippie kid in the back-to-the-land counterculture, I felt the judgmental stares of the locals when my barefooted family would schlep our dirty clothes to the Laundromat. I would burn with shame perceiving the consternation on the faces of the retired doctors and their wives when we would visit our grandparents in their fancy Miami Beach high-rise. We didn’t look normal, prosperous, predictable. We didn’t belong.
Nevertheless, I have come to realize as an adult that my Caucasian skin bequeaths me a pass most people of color will never have, at least not in the dominantly white Western world. I thought I was onto this. I adopted two biracial children, my stepdaughter married a guy from Mexico who has Aztec roots, and my grandchildren are bilingual. I speak fluent Spanish myself, and my connection with Latin culture is so deep that I feel it has shaped my soul. When I glance at the police blotter in our local paper, I often catch myself praying that the perpetrators of the various crimes are Anglo, rather than Hispanic or Native, which would reinforce the bias of my racist neighbors (and then I swiftly apologize to God for wishing harm on anyone ever).
Still, when I look around me, I see my own skin color reflected in film and literature and advertising, in public office and in the university, in yoga classes and meditation groups. The entertainment I enjoy is mostly delivered by white people to white people. The environmental and social activism circles I convene or participate in are largely comprised of white people testifying to white people. White is the default, and brown or black is “other.” As much as I may crane my neck to see my own shadow, it drifts behind me, conveniently out of view. As willing as I am to pay attention to hidden racist impulses, they are in the air I breathe.
I unconsciously accept whiteness as the norm, the standard by which all people are judged, and it’s a false construct. “Fake,” my friend Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, an African American Zen priest and activist known for coining the term “Radical Dharma,” calls it. White supremacy is a collective illusion that exists only to secure and maintain power and privilege. And it robs us all of our birthright of belonging to one another, which is the quintessence of feminine wisdom.
Rev. angel has helped me begin the task of recognizing, unpacking, and dismantling my white privilege. Not because my whiteness makes me a bad person, but because white supremacy, even if unintended, makes me less human, and what Rev. angel wants for all people is the full flowering of our humanity. Protesting that I’m the least racist person on the planet or apologizing my head off for accidentally perpetuating institutionalized racism neither contributes to my own awakening nor does people of color any good.
In fact, altruism is a bit of a red herring that can throw us off the track of what matters most: human connection. When good-hearted, politically progressive, spiritually oriented white folks like myself rush in to “fix” the problem of racism and thereby restore justice to those poor, disadvantaged people of color, we are often unconsciously reifying our privilege and further alienating the people we are hoping to “save.” This stuff is subtle, it’s insidious, and to wake up to it is to defy our cultural conditioning. There is this implicit, irrational threat that if we go against the tide of white privilege we will lose our privilege.
From the corporate boardrooms to the dharma centers of America, we who have white skin collapse into whiteness and forfeit our wholeness. And yet, if we breathe through our defensiveness and become present, taking a clear look at the chains that bind us to what the antiracism scholar Peggy McIntosh calls the “invisible package of unearned assets” that we haul around, we can sever those chains. When we engage in this process in a safe space, as painful as our awakening may initially be, we can, as Rev. angel assures me, “burst into freedom.” Thanks to wise women like Rev. angel giving me a loving kick in the ass, my journey of liberation has begun.
Fighting Empire with Love
Christena Cleveland is a renowned millennial social scientist and theologian. She navigates a razor’s edge of privilege and marginalization. As an African American woman in a world dominated by white men, Christena challenges those of us who benefit from the structures that give rise to inequality, inviting us to make an effort to recognize and study our privilege, talk about it with other privileged people, and use our power to create space for those who have historically been oppressed to flourish.
Christena also identifies as privileged. Growing up in a highly educated, upwardly mobile African American family, there was little doubt that Christena would graduate from a prestigious college and be successful at whatever she chose to do. Indeed, Christena surpassed expectations, attaining scholarly acclaim from a young age and becoming a professor at a well-regarded university. She has not taken her success for granted—not for a minute. She has planted herself in low-income neighborhoods, living among people who could scarcely imagine a path out of poverty. She has convened groups of girls and given them a place to explore their experiences and dream about other possibilities.
Christena says that a major part of her spiritual path has been “the holiness of perpetual repentance” and that this kind of soul accounting must be a sacred practice for all privileged people. For marginalized people, it is vital to engage in spiritual practices that generate hope and joy—not by numbing their pain or accumulating credentials, but by integrating their suffering with love.
Christena told me about a situation in which her intention to cultivate love yielded startling results. Early in her career, she landed a teaching job at a small, highly conservative Christian college. A small group of young white guys seemed to take boundless pleasure in challenging Christena in the classroom. Genuinely believing that women did not have a divine right to teach men, as their fundamentalist faith had taught them, they asked Christena questions designed to undermine her authority. “I’m smart. I have a PhD in this subject. All of society would have supported me in using my power to lay the smack down,” Christena admitted. “But I know you can’t fight empire with empire. I decided to try another way.” So, alone at home, Christena practiced a meditation based on the Hindu teaching of namaste: “The light in me honors the light in you.” She translated the Sanskrit phrase into a Judeo-Christian framework she could more easily relate to, visualized her tormentors, and repeated, “The image of God in me greets the image of God in you.”
Back in class, whenever one of the boys would raise his hand, Christena would pause, “shoot an imaginary Nerf arrow of love at him,” and silently say her prayer before responding: The image of God in me greets the image of God in you. In the small space between their rude remarks and Christena’s verbal response, the atmosphere relaxed a little. Without any obvious cause, her self-appointed critics soon lost interest in their power game. In fact, toward the end of the semester, Christena invited all her students to a cookie-baking party at her home, and the four guys showed up and, innocent as small children helping their grandmother in the kitchen, appointed themselves her faithful assistants. They helped gather the necessary implements, mix the dough, tend the outdoor fire, and serve up the warm treats. The boys were the last to leave at the end of the evening. Everything shifted after that.
“It’s a testament to the power of love,” Christena told me. “The point is not to change people’s minds or even their behavior. It’s not about convincing them that you deserve their respect. When people are sucking the energy out of community they need to feel loved and accepted.” One of the young men wrote his final paper on women in ministry and planned to open a conversation about gender reconciliation in his own church. Christena’s expression of spiritual generosity, fueled by the fire of her own inner struggle to place love over power, shifted the landscape of the boys’ inherited advantage to one of holy tenderness.
“We cannot effect justice without love,” Christena says.
Rev. angel Kyodo Williams sings a similar song. “Love and justice are not two,” Rev. angel says. “Without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters.”
Only by doing our inner work can we hope to be agents of change in the world. Yet working on ourselves is not enough. Love is the fire that burns down the structures that oppress people and degrade the planet. Justice is the phoenix that rises from those ashes.
HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE
My friend Lyla June Johnston discovered the connective tissue between self-forgiveness and generational healing. Lyla is a youth activist, performance poet, and musician. Part Diné (Navajo), part Cheyenne, and part European American, Lyla carries the possibility of reconciliation imprinted in her DNA. With a degree in environmental anthropology from Stanford University, Lyla uses her education to wake people up to issues of decolonization and help activate the healing of Mother Earth. She has been teaching herself to speak Diné, weaving this indigenous language into her poems, prayers, and songs. She dresses in her Native attire whenever she makes a presentation, claiming her ancestry by calling on her ancestors to be with her as she steps up to the call of these urgent times. Lyla steps up with love.
For most of her life Lyla has identified far more with her Native heritage than her white side. In fact, she often felt ashamed of her Caucasian blood. Until she had an experience while traveling in Europe—the land of the colonizers—that connected her to the spirits of her ancestors there. It was a time of great shattering in Lyla’s life. She had literally broken most of her bones jumping out of an upper-story window during an earthquake in Chile and had recently ended a relationship with someone she loved very much. She accepted an invitation to Switzerland to give her body more space to heal and to breathe some perspective back into her life.
One day, as Lyla sat on a rocky outcropping overlooking a valley, she began to sense the presence of her European grandmothers. She felt into their suffering. Tens of thousands of women on that continent had been burned alive as witches, Lyla realized, and maybe even more. These were healers, midwives, wise women. Her Native American community was not the only one to have been brutalized. And this led to another epiphany: genocide does not come out of the blue. It’s not like a group of people wake up one day and say, “Let’s go murder all the people who have been living on this land we covet and live there ourselves.” Something had to have happened to them. “Colonized people colonize people,” Lyla says.
This experience of connection with her European ancestors and their story of oppression infused Lyla’s broken heart and shifted her perspective. She understood that her Native people had internalized the pain of colonization and needed to actively work on healing themselves so that they would not end up unconsciously perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Lyla initiated the process with her own life. She had grown up around drugs and alcohol, so it had felt natural for her to become a dealer to get through college. She had sold drugs to people she knew couldn’t handle them, including women who would be vulnerable to sexual abuse while they were high. Eventually, Lyla found that she had to face the reality of what she had done and open herself to unconditional love from the unseen forces she refers to as “angels,” whose presence filled her heart and mind when she surrendered to her own brokenness.
Lyla began to follow the tracks of her behavior back to the wounds of her chaotic childhood, in which substance abuse was rampant and sexual boundaries were sketchy. She realized that she must find forgiveness for herself before she could dedicate her life to the reconciliation of her communities. And so she showed up for the hard labor of inner work, leaning on the love of invisible advocates to give her the strength to face her own demons and opening her heart to everyone she encountered as if they were family. Which we are.
Lyla’s subsequent healing—which she attributes entirely to the gifts of the spirits from all of her ancestors—has made of her a powerful advocate for restorative justice.
ASK A MUSLIM
Mona Haydar is a Syrian American Muslim, a peacemaker, a poet, and a renowned rapper. The visibility of her hijab (head covering) and her commitment to speaking out on behalf of Muslim women make Mona a constant target for racism, which gives her the ongoing opportunity for forgiveness and reconciliation. She embraces that opportunity.
Mona happens to also be like a daughter to me. In conjunction with a Palestinian Sufi sheik, I (a Jew) coofficiated Mona’s marriage to Sebastian, a half-Jewish man, on a remote mountaintop in New Mexico. The marriage is a living symbol of the reconciliation between the children of Abraham (and Sarah and Hagar), of a Muslim and a Jew, of a woman of color and a white man. Sebastian converted to Islam, without ever rejecting his Jewish roots. When Mona was in labor with their first child, I stayed up all night stuffing grape leaves with her Syrian mother. As the sun rose the next morning, I sat quietly while Mona’s husband and his mother-in-law unrolled their prayer rugs and, kneeling together, greeted the day with salat (prayer).
I watched with awe (and a degree of pride, I cannot deny) as Mona rose to fame for her “Ask a Muslim” mission. Shortly after their son was born, Sebastian and Mona moved to the East Coast to be closer to their families. In the middle of a New England winter, the couple set up a table outside the Cambridge Public Library, offering donuts and coffee and inviting passersby to engage in conversation with actual Muslims, individuals who happen to represent a deeply misunderstood branch of the human family right now. People could ask anything from “Is your religion oppressive to women?” to “What do you think about the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series?” The couple addressed each question with patience, intelligence, and good cheer.
Then, in the midst of working on her graduate degree at Union Theological Seminary (a traditionally Christian institution), with a toddler at home and another baby on the way, Mona managed to write and produce an award-winning music video that celebrates a woman’s right to “wrap her hijab” as a symbol of her love for the One. She went on to produce a series of songs and videos that have garnered great acclaim and helped wake up the world to the poison of sexism and the beauty of Islam.
It is love that characterizes Mona’s activism. It is not fancy academic jargon. It is not jingoism. It isn’t even self-righteous diatribes against Islamophobia. It is rahman (mercy) and rahim (compassion). It is a resounding eloquence, a sweet tenderness, and a mischievous sense of humor. Mona is habitually other focused, yet she speaks fearlessly about institutionalized misogyny, calling on men to treat women as the doorway to the Divine. “Paradise,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “lies at the feet of the Mother.” Mona is first and foremost a Muslim. Her love for all beings overflows from the vessel of her relationship with Allah.
deepening
Write a letter of forgiveness to someone who has hurt you or given you cause to despair for the future of the planet and all who dwell here. You do not (necessarily) need to send it. Share it with someone you trust, asking them to bear loving witness without giving you advice. You may also choose to burn it in a ritual fire or cast it into a moving body of water. Consider the possibility that in the ritual act of forgiving you are cutting karmic ties that bind you, clearing the way for your own liberation and the liberation of all beings with whom you come into contact.