Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu

[Anonymous]

I have been reading “The Book of Forgiving” by Desmond Tutu.

He and his daughter have lived and studied deep forgiveness while living front and center in Apartheid worn South Africa. The book is a step by step lesson for anyone who wants to forgive or knows they need to forgive but find it hard.

Their path list is:

Telling Your Story

Naming the Hurt

Granting Forgiveness

Renewing or Releasing the Relationship

If you are interested but don’t have time to read the have a free website with a 7 day challenge to help you get started or try out their approach. http://www.thehumanjourney.com

I am going to try it online now that I have read the book.

[Anonymous]

Here’s the right link to the website: http://www.humanjourney.com/forgiveness/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.humanjourney.com/forgiveness/

Some of the quotes I liked were

Quote:

“Renewing a relationship is a creative act. We make a new relationship. It is possible to build a new relationship regardless of the realities of the old relationship.”

It’s not about recreating the old relationship, it’s about making a new one. The new relationship might look very different from the old one.

Quote:

“We are always at our best when compassion enables us to recognize the unique pressures and singular stories of the people on the other side of our conflicts.”

Quote:

“The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.”

Properly understanding their point of view is necessary to forgive.

This is why it’s easier for me to forgive the homophobic attitudes of those I interact with regularly. I understand where it comes from and why they act that way. But the homophobia from those a generation or three up looks very different from that of millennials, and it’s hard to not cast them as villains when I can’t understand how anyone could view me as cursed or willfully rebelling.

[Anonymous]

He has other books that look interesting too:

– The Book of Joy

– Made for Goodness

– No Future Without Forgiveness

– God is Not a Christian

Very interesting. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I’m going to read this. Very timely for me…thanks all for posting these!!

[Anonymous]

I’m going to bump this back to the top. I’m about a third of the way through this book. I highlyrecommend it.

This is few of the quotes I’m at now: Quoting from Marshall Duke, a psychologist for Emory University

Quote:

It turned out that the more children knew the stories of their families history-the good, the bad, and the ugly-the more resilient the children turned out to be. Knowing their families stories turned out to be “the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.” It also turned out to be out that in following up on these children after September 11, 2001, terrorist act in New York City, the children who scored high on the scale, who best knew their families history-successes and failures-were most resilient in times of trauma or stress. These children were connected to a larger story about their lives, to a bigger picture and context of who they were.

Quote:

When we know our stories and make sense of what has happened, we get connected to the larger story of our lives and its meaning. We become more resilient, we are able to handle stress, and heal.

He quotes Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel:

Quote:

the best predictor of how well a child will be attached to his or her parent – have positive, loving relationships – is whether the parents have a clear and coherent story about their lives and the traumas they have experienced. In other words, if you are able to talk about your life and the joys and sorrows you have experienced – if you know your story – you are much more likely to be a skillful parent. Your unhealed, unforgiven traumas will not rear their ugly heads, as our disowned experiences so often do. If we cannot seek forgiveness and healing for our own benefit, perhaps we can seek it for the sake of our children.

Maybe this has some application on how we try to deal with our FC’s too. It could be another reason to do Family History?

[Anonymous]

Quote:

Maybe this has some application on how we try to deal with our FC’s too. It could be another reason to do Family History?

I agree on both accounts. The hardest part on the FC is being able to discuss it. A person on either side can have super sharp edges. It’s one of the reasons I wish the church would be more forth coming on essays and so on. It could so help those relationship conversations. It’s also why I try to “push” the essays any way I can. The essays don’t fix everything but they can help.

Family History – especially the stories can do so much to heal, especially in a FC. When we can hear and see families working together under abnormal circumstances it allows us room to breathe and let our story work itself out. I love learning about the outliers in my Family History.

[Author]

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