What Will We Do With the Hurt?
Updated: 36 minutes ago
“It’s about healing your own soul first, so that you don’t become the evil you abhor.” — Bishop Gretchen Rehberg
Yesterday I sat with perhaps two hundred or more others at the 9/11 Spirit of America Memorial here in Cashmere, Washington. Twenty-five years have passed since September 11, 2001.
Some of us can remember exactly where we were when we first heard the news. (One of our sons was in New York; we were horrified.) Others at the service had not even been born yet.
Three people who had responded at Ground Zero were there to tell their stories. I was moved by all of them, but I found myself continuing to think about something Bishop Gretchen Rehberg said.
She talked about forgiveness, and perhaps her words stayed with me because unforgiveness is one of the great challenges to living a good life. Most of us will never experience anything remotely like 9/11, but almost all of us will be hurt. Someone may betray us, disappoint us, lie to us, reject us, mistreat someone we love or do something that simply cannot be undone. The question then becomes: What will we do with the hurt?
The Bishop’s Story
On September 11, 2001, Gretchen Rehberg was a seminary student in New York City. Before entering ministry, she had been a firefighter and EMT and had training in hazardous materials (she has a Ph.D. in chemistry which she did not talk about, but I found out later when doing a little research).
When the planes struck the World Trade Center, she went to help. Her skills were quickly put to use helping with decontamination and care for people coming from the disaster, and she later worked at Ground Zero.
She saw firefighters who had lost friends and entire crews. She saw the smoke and rubble and the photographs posted by desperate families searching for people who would never come home. And she was angry.
She has spoken openly about wanting the people responsible to be caught and about experiencing fear and the desire for revenge.
Those feelings are understandable. Anger can even be useful. It tells us that something precious has been violated, and it can give us the energy to protect people and pursue justice.
But eventually Gretchen confronted another question: What was all that anger doing to her?
She came to understand forgiveness not primarily as something we do for the person who hurt us, but as something we do to heal ourselves. “It’s about healing your own soul first,” she said, “so that you don’t become the evil you abhor.”
Forgiveness Is Not Letting Someone Off the Hook
This is where forgiveness gets complicated. “Just forgive” can be terrible advice if it means pretending something wasn't wrong, excusing harmful behavior, trusting someone who has proved untrustworthy or allowing ourselves to be hurt again. That isn't what Bishop Rehberg means by forgiveness.
She is clear that forgiveness does not eliminate accountability. We can seek justice and hold people responsible while refusing to dehumanize them. We can say, What you did was wrong. There should be consequences. I may need boundaries between us. I may never trust you in the same way again. At the same time, we can make another decision: I will not allow what you did to determine the person I become.
Forgiveness and reconciliation aren't the same thing either. Reconciliation usually requires two people. It requires honesty, accountability, changed behavior and the gradual rebuilding of trust. Forgiveness may happen without any of those things. The other person may never apologize, may never understand what they did or may no longer even be alive. Forgiveness is our gradual decision not to allow an old injury to keep occupying so much of our present life.
Think about what happens when we don't find some way to release a hurt. We replay the conversation, rehearse what we should have said, imagine the apology we deserve and tell the story again and again. We may be absolutely right about what happened and still be miserable. Anger can be an important visitor, but it makes a poor permanent residence.
Research on forgiveness generally finds that greater forgiveness is associated with better psychological well-being and lower levels of depression, anxiety, stress and hostility. Forgiveness doesn't magically erase trauma, and it shouldn't be rushed. But learning to loosen our grip on chronic resentment appears to be good for us. Maybe our bodies and minds simply aren't designed to remain on battle alert forever.
What Happened Later to the Bishop
There is another remarkable part of Bishop Rehberg's story. In the years following 9/11, she developed increasingly serious lung problems and eventually pulmonary fibrosis. Her exposure in New York is believed to have contributed to her illness. For years she lived with oxygen and struggled to breathe. Earlier this year, she received a double-lung transplant. And here's where we really need to pay attention to the Bishop's story.
For a long time, she resented what had happened to her and wondered whether her work at Ground Zero had accomplished anything at all. Eventually she came to see the experience differently. She doesn't say 9/11 was good; she wishes it had never happened. But she believes the experience deepened her understanding of forgiveness, suffering and peace. She has expressed something I find particularly wise: she wishes the experience had never happened, but she likes the person she has become.
There is a profound Good Life lesson in that. We do not have to call terrible things good in order for something good to grow from them. We don't always get to choose what happens to us, but we have some choice about what happens within us afterward.
Things We Can Practice
First, separate forgiveness from excusing. Forgiving does not require saying, “It wasn't that bad.” Tell the truth about what happened.
Second, allow yourself to feel the anger. Healthy forgiveness doesn't bypass grief, fear or outrage; we usually have to acknowledge those feelings before we can release them.
Third, hold people accountable without dehumanizing them. Justice and hatred are not the same thing.
Fourth, use boundaries when you need them. You can forgive someone and still decide that person should no longer have the same access to your life.
Finally, ask yourself one of the most important questions in this whole process: Who do I want to become because of this?
P.S. — Another Response to 9/11
There is one more story I want to tell again because it brings this very close to home.
On Sunday, September 20th, at Cashmere Community Church, Randy Smith, my husband John, and others who recently returned from Kyrgyzstan will talk about their experiences there. Their presentation is called “Kyrgyzstan: Connecting With and Understanding Our Muslim Neighbors from Across the World.”
The roots of this exchange reach back more than twenty years to September 11. Randy was in Washington, D.C., when the attacks occurred, and he was terrified. But instead of allowing fear of terrorism to grow into fear or hatred of an entire group of people, he eventually chose a radically different response: Get to know them. Connect around something in common, agriculture perhaps.
That impulse helped lead to what became the Kyrgyz-Washington Sister Region relationship. People from our part of Washington traveled to predominantly Muslim Kyrgyzstan, and people from Kyrgyzstan came here. They sat at tables, visited homes, talked about agriculture, education, government and family life, shared meals, asked questions and laughed together. They became friends. Certainly that goes for Randy.
Suddenly “Muslims” weren't an abstract group anymore. They were people with names, children, worries, dreams and communities they loved. They were people who welcomed strangers into their homes. Differences didn't disappear, but something important happened: strangers became neighbors.
Two Responses to Fear and Hurt
That is why I find Bishop Gretchen's and Randy's stories so compelling together. Gretchen's story asks, What do we do with our anger after we have been hurt? Randy's story asks, What do we do with our fear before it becomes hatred? One answer is forgiveness. The other is relationship.
Both require us to resist one of the easiest things human beings do: dividing the world into us and them. There were people responsible for the atrocities of September 11, and holding people accountable for terrible acts matters. But an entire religion and its nearly two billion followers did not commit those acts. That distinction seems obvious when written on a page. In frightened times, however, it can become surprisingly difficult to remember.
Perhaps that is why crossing boundaries and actually knowing one another matters so much. It is much harder to hate a category of people once that category has become Fatima who welcomed you into her home, Murat who made you laugh, or a family who wants the same basic things for their children that you want for yours.
Twenty-five years after September 11, the question isn't only whether we remember what happened. Of course we should remember. Perhaps another way of honoring those who died is to ask what kind of people we want to become because we remember.
Bishop Gretchen's story and Randy's story offer us two possibilities: forgive when we have been hurt, and build relationships where fear might otherwise grow. Neither is easy.
Forgiveness without accountability can become denial, while accountability without compassion can become vengeance. And reaching across boundaries requires courage, curiosity and a willingness to discover that some of our assumptions may have been wrong.
But perhaps this is part of what living a good life asks of us: not that we never feel anger or fear, but that we become wise about what we do with them.
How might we use our wisdom to consider if there is a person or group we have allowed hurt or fear to define—and what might happen if, without abandoning wisdom or accountability, became curious enough to see them differently? Is there someone that if we could forgave them, our lives would be drastically better?
If you check back here in a couple of days, I will share a few more of the Kyrgyzstan pics.
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