World Council of Churches

International Seminar of the Ecumenical Institute Bossey

16-22 August, 2009

“Healing of Memories and Reconciling Communities”

Presentation by Father Michael Lapsley,SSM

Director

Institute for Healing of Memories

Cape Town

South Africa

Thank you, thank you for the wisdom that is in the room and maybe that we sit in a circle listening to one another also tells us something about healing of memories and particularly that we are healers of one another.
We are healers of each other but I was a bit unnerved by Dr Manoj suggesting that I was an expert. “We got a world expert.” I think when you get an introduction like that it is all downhill after that. You are elevated up there. The further you are elevated, the further you have to fall to end up flat on your back at the end.

I would like to share with you something of my life journey as a way in to reflecting on what I want to say about healing of memories and also to be sharing something of what I have been taught by the peoples of the world in particular, through my journey in the last few years, of listening to the pain of the human family. I had the privilege of listening to the pain of a number of the contexts in which we come from. So I listened to the Sami people and heard their stories. I have listened to the people of Rwanda, I have listened to the people of Burundi. I have listened to the people of Uganda, I have listened to the people of Germany, and those are all places from which you have come here to this seminar and as well of course South Africa where we have sought to contribute to the journey of healing of memories.
Like Tara, I come originally from the most beautiful country on the earth which happens to be Aotearoa New Zealand. We would say in South Africa that means she is my “home girl”. She is still going to decide if I am her “home boy”. So that is the country that I was born and brought up in. I trained to a priest of the Anglican Church in Australia. I joined a religious order of the Anglican Church, the Society of the Sacred Mission. My religious congregation asked me what I would like to do next and I said I would like to go and work in Japan so they sent me to South Africa I think that we called that the vow of obedience. I lived in Southern Africa, the countries of Southern Africa since 1973.

I often say that the day I arrived in South Africa, I stopped being a human being and became a white man. For me the journey of many years was the journey to seek to recover my own humanity - to journey from the discovery of being an a oppressor simply because of the colour of my skin to seek to be fully human once more.

I read a lot about South Africa before I went there but at the same time I was very naïve. When I went there I thought that I was going to find three groups of people: the oppressed and the oppressors and another group called the human race that I would belong to, I am an Anglican so I thought I would find a fence to sit on. My church tradition loves to sit on fences providing that the fence is a little bit on the rich side. We are a bit happier to be in that particular middle. The first slap in the face was the realization that your colour decided what side you were on. You might be against the system but you were going to be against it either from the side of those who were benefiting from it or those who were suffering from it.

I was expelled from South Africa in 1976 - at the time of the Soweto uprising - a turning point in our history in South Africa - when many school children were shot in the streets of the country and I went to live in Lesotho.
Now a number of you are from Africa so at least you know where Lesotho is. My Lesotho friends often complain when they travel the world that they come from a country that nobody has heard of which is a bit unnerving for anybody. Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa. We used to stay that we lived in the belly of the monster.

When I left South Africa I had a faith problem - a theological problem. My problem was this: that scripture says “we must love God with our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. But my experience was that I could not be a neighbour to a black person. I was locked into this oppressed - oppressor relationship.
But the other thing I realized was that whilst I had a faith problem it took the form of a political system which itself claimed to be Christian. Even the very last constitution of the white state of South Africa had written in its preface - “guided by God from generation to generation”. So it claimed divine guidance for something that was the very opposite of Christianity.
Like generations of black people before me I realized that if I was going to solve my faith problem, I was going to need to act politically and so for me that meant joining the liberation movement. It meant joining a liberation struggle. In my years in South Africa I was an unusual Anglican in that I was a committed pacifist. We Anglicans bless wars. If you doubt that, you just need to travel around a few Anglican churches and see how many military flags you can see in them.

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But I read my Luther Martin King, I read my Jesus of Nazareth. I was convinced that you could always get justice in every situation by non violent means. But for me, the killing of school children was a moral and theological crisis. I become a conventional Anglican once more and believed that sometimes, as a last resort, Christians could indeed pick up arms to defend themselves.
I joined the African National Congress of South Africa which is now the ruling party in South Africa - then the oldest liberation movement on the continent of Africa. I was to spend 16 years outside South African as a chaplain, a priest, a pastor within the liberation movement, first in Lesotho and subsequently in Zimbabwe.

During those years I lived in Southern Africa, but traveled the world as part of the struggle against apartheid. My message was a very simple one: that apartheid was an option or a choice for death carried out in the name of the gospel of life

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One of the things about South Africa is that God was very kind to us. .Particularly in the 1980’s, apartheid became in some ways the cause of all humanity. You could go to any country in the world: north, south, east, and west and you would find an anti apartheid movement - People who somehow saw that there own humanity was tied to ending apartheid. There were fundamental decisions made by the World Council of Churches that shook it to its very core when it adopted the Programme to Combat Racism. Not surprisingly, the churches in countries which were the most racist were the most upset by those choices and decisions.

I was living in Zimbabwe. I was on a South African government hit list - a death list of the apartheid state, somebody which they were seeking to kill. I always remember the day when I was informed by the government of Zimbabwe that I was on this list. What I remember was the loneliness of the moment, because they were not saying to me that your group is on this list. They are saying you, your name individually is there. So I had to say to myself, what is it that I am living for if this government seeks to kill me for it.

I also remember my own experiences of fear. You wake up in the night and you think, is this an attack. What is happening? I think the people who don’t experience fear are not totally human. I think fear is part being human but my own prayer for myself was: let me make my decisions based on what I believe not on my fear. Now because of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, because of the sacrifices of people inside the country and the sacrifices of the peoples of the region, eventually the pressures became too much and finally you had a white racist who said, “we will talk”.

Part of the tragedy is that the demand to talk began in 1912 and it took from 1912 – 1990. to agree to sit at the table. The most famous prisoner in history, Nelson Mandela, walked from prison and they said OK we will begin to talk. But when they said that they will talk, they didn’t say that they will stop killing and in fact the period of negotiation was the bloodiest, when thousands of people lost their lives.

Just after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, I was invited by the Canadian churches to come and talk about what does the release of Nelson Mandela mean. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? What is really happening?

I came back from Canada. I had been working for the Lutheran World Federation for several years and was about to become a parish priest again in Bulawayo, the second city of Zimbabwe Waiting for me were two religious magazines, one in English and one in Afrikaans. I opened the one that was in English. It exploded because a bomb had been placed inside. Then I lost my hands, one eye, eardrums were shattered and many other injuries.
I never succeeded in forgetting, so I remember the moment, I remember that incident. For me, the important part of the remembering is not for me to remember the pain but to remember the sense of God, that God was with me. For me the great promise of scripture has been kept, not a promise that we will not suffer, which of course is not promised, but that promise: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.. God promised to accompany us. I somehow felt that Mary who watched her Son being crucified understood what it was I was going through. and understood my moment of pain and suffering, of crucifixion.
I spent a month in hospital in Zimbabwe and seven months in two Australian hospitals. For the first four months I was as helpless as a newborn baby and couldn’t do anything for myself. A little bit of the time, a small amount of the time, I thought perhaps it would be better to be dead. I didn’t have any role models. Actually I knew another priest who also had a bomb who lost one hand. But I watched him, and he did everything with the other hand. Some how, losing two hands is not twice as bad as losing one, it was two hundred times worse. I couldn’t imagine, would life be life in any meaningful sense.
But as I said earlier, for 16 years I traveled the world as part of the struggle against apartheid. It was like everybody I had ever met in the previous 14 years, sent me messages of prayer, love, support: people of faith, people of hope, people of goodwill across the globe - the little people of the world as well as people who were national leaders, the faith community and those involved in politics.
My own story was “acknowledged”. I want to pause there because this is a key point in healing memories. I am interested in how we say these words in the different languages that we speak as our home languages - The difference between “knowledge” and “acknowledgement”. I want so move in between the individual, the family, the community and nation.
In a family there can be abuse happening. So everybody in the family knows there is abuse so there is “knowledge” but there is no “acknowledgement”. Families, individuals, communities, nations have guilty secrets. Everybody knows but nobody speaks about it, there are forms of denial.
One of the first times I met the Sami people, there was something very significant that they said to me. They said in Sweden, the churches have acknowledged, they have said sorry for their part in past oppression of the Sami people, but for the main stream of the society there is no knowledge of what has been acknowledged.

Another example from the land of my birth. A few years ago the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark went to Samoa. There had been forms of oppression that New Zealand had been responsible for in Samoa and it was things that happened around 1918. The Prime Minister went to Samoa and she said on their independence day, as the Prime Minister, “ I am sorry for what happened”.
I was a child in New Zealand and went to school in New Zealand. I knew nothing I had no knowledge about what had happened but every Samoan, those who were the victims, all knew and they said that the whole stadium was in tears. Finally, finally, finally there was this acknowledgement by this representative leader.

So both knowledge and acknowledgement. Of course in the South African context a key part of our Truth and Reconciliation Cmmission, was the nation getting the knowledge of what has done in darkness as well as the acknowledgement. “Yes it happenend and it was wrong”

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So to come back to my story, my story was acknowledged, reverenced, it was given respect, it was recognized and it was given moral content. People said what happened to me was wrong.

In situations of oppression the moral order gets inverted. So when people are tortured they are told you are tortured because you are a bad person. Men who abuse women – I’m abusing you because you are a bad woman and the terrible thing is that people sometimes begin to believe that indeed, I am inferior, I deserved what has been done to me. So part of healing is the restoration of the moral order.
For example, in our truth commission we said no matter what side you were in the conflict, if you were tortured, the torture was wrong, whether you were tortured by those who were committing the crime against humanity or whether you were tortured by those who were fighting for freedom. It was still wrong, so the moral order began to be restored.
My story was acknowledged, reverenced, recognized and given a moral content. Physically I had good medical treatment, my body has been taken care of but also people were praying for me, loving me, supporting me, listening to my story.

If you like, there was a “safe space” where the story could be told. In healing of memories the concept of safe space is of fundamental importance. In my work I hear peoples stories across the world and people say to me or I say to them: “You told the story - I guess you told it many times before and people often say, “No, it is the first time. I have held on to this story for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years... maybe once I put my toe in the water and people said, 'well you are a bad woman anyway. What do you expect?' Then I kept quiet for another 20 years.

People wait for this safe space where they will be believed, where they wont be judged or dismissed.
These words, acknowledgement, reverenced, recognised and moral content... these are important fundamental concepts in healing of memories

May I reflect a little more on my story. I would say: my own journey has been a journey from victim to survivor to victor. Again this concepts in your own languages is interesting to think about what they mean - in your home language, in your mother tongue.

If I am a victim, something has been done to me - if you like, an object.of history - I have been abused. I am a victim of war, I have been tortured, all these things. Whether it is in private space or whether in terms of national conflicts. You shared your experiences of families behind enemy lines, you were the victims at that point. You physically survived, so you are survivors, the whole family survived. But often in healing journeys it stops there.

If we could think for a moment of life being like a river; the river flows - something terrible happens and our lives becomes like whirl pools. We are are physically alive but we are living life in terms of that incident. We become prisoners of moments in history.

A woman I met in Rwanda said “many of us are dead alive”. - widows of genocide and she said, “we get up in the morning, we have our breakfast, we walk and we do our thing but inside we are dead.” She talked about the journey to becoming “alive alive” from being “dead alive”. So victim, survivor, victor. Victor is when you become an agent. One is using the word “agent” That is when we take back agency, when you become subjects of history once more. When we are able to begin to live our lives in terms of what we believe in.
My sister shared this terrible story of how her husband disappeared. I guess she took back agency when she got involved in the organisation that she is now involved in. You know, she is not just at home saying, Oh my God which she could do for the rest of her life because of the pain. But she’s involved in an organisation doing something about this so you move away from being an object of history to becoming a subject of history once more.
I want to now emphasise something else that is fundamental in healing of memories. and that is the issue which is in some ways can be the problem in this kind of seminar. We could get brilliant masters theses and learn nothing about healing of memories. if we had purely had a head process.

Now I want to suggest to you that what is fundamental in healing of memories is not what we “think” about what happened so much as what we “feel” about what happened..
In Romania Manoj talked about three categories of: ancient wounds, older wounds and recent or fresh wounds. We went to a monastery ……..and a holy monk told us a story about what happened, and when he told the story, the story was full of ethnic hatred. The story was full of ethnic hatred and so many centuries later there had been no healing at all.
So the healing, if we are going to deal with healing of memories we have to get to the poisonous feelings connected to the memory. This I want to suggests is fundamental to healing of memories. Several people have talked about this transformation. This is why I used the term “positive vomiting”, and “positive vomiting” doesn’t happen with a purely head exercise. We have to deal with the poison that is connected to the memories.
Some of us come from countries where there memories go back through the centuries. Grandparents have told grandchildren stories and connected to the story is poison.

God helped me and I think again for me, the safe space was prayer, love and support that gave me the room to, if you like spiritually manoevure because I realised if I was full of hatred, bitterness, self pity, desire for revenge that I would be a victim forever. They would have failed to kill the body, but they would have killed the soul and I would be permanently their prisoner.

One of the great leaders of South Africa Chief Albert Lutuli who was a Nobel prize winner he once said “Those of who think of themselves as victims eventually become the victimisers of others”. And that is true of individuals, and its true of communities, and its true of nations .
When I listen to my sisters and brothers of Rwanda, for me the single most important question is: How do we prevent the genocide of tomorrow? When you go to the Balkans and you say , this is where the first world war began and how far have we travelled in dealing with these ancient wounds. So what I’m suggesting is that fundamental to healing of memories is: how do we break the chain that turns victims into victimisers?

How do we break the chain that turns victims into victimisers?

What I’m suggesting is that if terrible things happen to us, there is likely to be one of two journeys. One journey is victim victimiser, victim, victimiser which crosses generations. Or it is victim survivor, victor. So one is the journey that keeps conflict going because the poison is connected because there has been no “positive vomiting”. there has been no deep detoxification.

This morning on BBC television there was talk about the relationship between China and Japan and how the wounds are not being healed partly because Japan has been unable to say we are sorry - end of sentence. - and the whole issue so called Korean comfort women as well and the wounds in Asia have continued to be there. This issue of knowledge and acknowledgementm- you can think of many contexts in the world where there is poison that continues to fuel the turning of victims into victimisers.
Some people in our country would say that maybe if there had been full acknowledgement of the torture camps after the South African war, the Anglo Boer war, perhaps the Afrikaaner would not have done what they did to African people. If there had to been a full acknowledgement. You don’t have to talk to an Afrikaaner very long in South Africa before they start talking about their period of victimhood. They don’t want to talk about when they were victimisers.

I hope I’m also illustrating the point that this stuff is not about black and white or Asians. This is about the human family and what we are capable of. But I am also trying to give you many examples. .
What we need to see is that the healing of memories is relevant to the human family,

in our national formations in as much as it is true individual formations. I’m also suggesting that often the key to whether we continue the cycle of victim victimiser victim or victim survivor victor is whether what has happened to us has been fully acknowledged. A full acknowledgement often can be this turning point.

I moved back to South Africa having been away for 16 years in 1992 and the thing that struck me first, or most, if you like, was that we were a damaged nation. That we were damaged in our humanity, we were damaged by what we have done, we have been damaged by what has been done to us, we were damaged too by what we have failed to do. And we all had stories to tell about what happened. I realised that for many South Africans, all we had was our victim hood. There had been no acknowledgement. Stories had not been acknowledge and reverenced and recognised. All, people had to hold on to was the terrible thing of what had been done to them.

Now most of you would have heard that one of the ways as we as a nation sought to deal with our past was through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was led by Archbishop Tutu. So that was the acknowledgement, the reverencing, and recognising.

To our commission, 23 000 people came to tell there stories of what had happened to them. But we are a nation of 43 million, so what about the rest of the stories. Now at the time I was chaplain to a Trauma Centre, For Victims of Violence and Torture. I spent 5 years there.

One of the wonderful things about being a chaplain to a trauma centre is that nobody knows what you are suppose to do as a chaplain to a trauma centre. So you do your thing and you say this is what chaplains of trauma centres do!
But in that 5 years, I learned some important things. One of the important things was to say that yes, everybody had a story to tell, everybody was affected by apartheid. Every bodys got stuff inside us , whether we were the victims the perpetrators or thought we were the bystanders or a mixture all those things together. But not everybody is pathological. What do I mean by that ? If something happened in this room at this moment, the ceiling fell in. What will happen?. Lets say for a moment the ceiling falls in. All of us would be affected.. All of us will go back to our homes with a story to tell. There might be two or three of us who in three years time that are still seeing a therapist because it so affected us. It affected our working lives, our sex lives, our friendships - that we were unable to function and we needed to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist to help us. In other words we need an expert intervention. The rest of us would be affected but we would continue to lead functioning lives. But we will still have possibly “unfinished business” which we needed to talk about - the effect, the impact of what had happened to us.
The other conclusion that I came up with after the 5 years as a chaplain is that we had, if there is such a word, over “expertised” the response to human pain. I am not making a point about devaluing the role of the expert. Because there are people who need expert intervention but we have undervalued the wisdom of the ages. We have undervalued the wisdom of our cultures, our traditions. We have undervalued the great faith traditions of the world.

It seems to me that we have to find a way of mining the gold that exists about healing, about healing the past from our faith tradition but also from our cultures.
In our context in South Africa, let me just give you one example of the point I’m making 23 thousand people came to tell stories of what we called gross human rights violations. By which we meant, murder, attempted murder, torture and what we called severe maltreatment. Only 7700 came asking for amnesty. Of those 7700 only 10% got amnesty. These were some of the worst violations that happened in our country. For thousands of people there is no question of reconciliation. This is not even necessarily a question of forgiveness because there is no one to reconcile with and in many cases there is no one to forgive. But there is still poison in the people.

Sometimes reconciliation can happen. Sometimes there can be forgiveness. But always, always, always healing of memories is on the table. Because always, always and always is the question of me dealing with my stuff, me dealing with what I have in me because of the journey that I have travelled.
Consequently, in South Africa what some of us did was is to create methodologies, safe spaces where healing of memories can happen. Sometimes our westernness makes us think that healing of memories should be like the way I went to get medication at the pharmacy last night. Do you have the healing of memories tablet that I could take the tablet and tomorrow I will be ok. Wouldn’t it be wonderful but healing is not like that.
We need to think about the journey of healing of memories. Now there can be life changing turning points but it is not instant coffee. It is not quick fix and sometimes in the faith community we do a disservice to ourselves because we say at 4 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon I was healed. But now there is a problem the following week I see the person who did it - hatred all comes back, now what do I do because I got healed last Thursday. Often that leads people to keep talking nice religious talk with the poison buried deep within us.