In my previous post, the first workshop I attended brought up our call to holiness, which came up again in the second workshop I went to talking about how we are all called, loved and sent.
• Our universal call to holiness is rooted in baptism and is a mission that can never be accomplished alone. We can only be a Christian in community, as we are called to support one another in our mission of living the Gospel.
• We are loved by God, and no one can be excluded from the mercy of God. There is the parable of a rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the commandments, and the young man says he’s kept them and asks, what else? Jesus then tells him to sell all of his belongings, and this man walks away, sad because he had so many possessions. This man learned what he needs to do to go to heaven, but his love for his possessions is more than his love for God. It is ourselves who choose to walk away from what is good and from God’s love.
• We are sent as missionary disciples to live the Gospel, to share a message that attracts, a community that attracts, and a teaching that attracts – this is what brought people to Jesus.
The third workshop focused on virtue and talked about how when you build on one virtue, you are building on others too. You’ve probably heard the Bible verse, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), but the full verse is, “A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” The thief steals your virtues – your joy, your hope – but knowing this, would you still let the thief steal them? It is written in the Gospel of Matthew: “Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into” (24:43). Don’t be robbed of your virtues!
My favorite part of this workshop was when the speaker said, everyone you fell in love with, you fell in love with their virtue. Just think about your best friend, and what exactly you love about them – is it their virtues?
The last workshop I went to was Seeking Healing Through Forgiveness. It was very interesting and applicable to everyday life (probably my favorite talk) and had two engaging speakers: Rev. John Burns and Sr. Miriam Heidland. There are many people in this world that have hurt you before, leaving you angry and upset at them. How can you let that go?
A Talk on Forgiveness
Rev. John and Sr. Miriam started off with a quote from C.S. Lewis: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” I actually found this quote to be pretty funny, because it’s so true. People would always say to you, just forgive them! Don’t make such a big deal out of it. It’s such a small thing that they did – but it’s not! What they did to you was so hurtful, how can you ever forgive them? If you forgive them so easily, they’ll just do it again. Maybe from a bystander’s perspective it’s not a big deal because they have different standards and expectations of how everyone should be treated and don’t understand the situation from your perspective, but when they are put in a similar situation, they will probably have a hard time forgiving the other person too.
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
C.S. Lewis
Why You Feel The Way You Do
Your emotions are an obstacle to forgiveness. They are caused by something. When you are left out, you feel sorrow. When you are are scared to fail, you feel fear. When you spend time with good friends, you feel joy. Your emotions are a way for your heart to tell you something – it could be something that’s been bothering you or something that’s making you feel happy. Take some time to listen to what your emotions and your heart is trying to telling you.
You can have both reasonable and unreasonable emotions. It’s okay to feel sad and angry sometimes, but if your anger builds up inside of you, there will be a point when you explode over something that usually only bothers you just a tiny bit. Think of your anger as the air that you blow inside a balloon. If you keep blowing air into your balloon, there will be a point when just one more small breath of air will pop the balloon. When the balloon pops, you fall apart. You can’t control your emotions anymore, and everything that comes out of your mouth is made up of the intense anger that you’ve been keeping inside of you. To prevent this from happening, you need to deflate your balloon by resolving that anger.
Another quote I really liked from this workshop was, “Suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.” If you’re not feeling happy, the people around you can see it and feel it. Your emotions affect the way you behave around others, and sometimes it will make others unhappy too. You need to address your emotions and figure out what is causing you to feel this way.
How Does Hurt Happen?
Rev. John and Sr. Miriam explained hurt with what, who, and how:
The what is that you were hurt unjustly. It just wasn’t fair how you were treated, and you feel like you don’t deserve to be treated that way. I think this is also related to how strongly you feel about what was done to you. You probably won’t feel as hurt when someone promises to meet up for dinner but cancels last minute versus when someone promises to go to an event with you and then ends up canceling after being invited to another event happening on the same day. A dinner can easily be rescheduled to another day – you can just get takeout instead. An event though, is more of a one time thing that you can’t reschedule, plus, let’s not forget there’s all these plans you’ve already made since registering for the event, including transportation, what to eat there, and even what to do after the event – you’ve cleared out your entire day for this event. You feel that what was done to you was wrong, unfair, and unjust. You are hurt. How can you be treated this way?
The who is someone who should have been better to you. The closer you are to this person, the more it hurts. Your colleague who bails on you is not as painful as your best friend bailing on you. It basically comes down to how you have higher expectations of people who know you better. Your best friend knows you value people keeping their promises. Your best friend knows that you hate it when people bail. Your best friend knows that you will start planning for the day once a decision is made to attend the event. Your best friend knows how upset you will be when they bail, yet they still chose to hurt you – and that is what I think makes the “who” such a big factor. Someone who knows you so well and knows how hurt you will be made the decision to hurt you.
The how is love withheld or love withdrawn. Love is at the core of every emotion. We have a desire for love – we want to be loved by our friends, our family, and everyone else. When this love is taken away when you need it most, you are hurt.
The Anatomy of the Wound
When you are hurt, there are different emotions that form. Rev. John and Sr. Miriam broke it up into four parts:
1. Sorrow and Grief – When someone hurts you, it makes you feel sad. Tears roll down your cheeks as you feel this aching pain in your heart. You feel heartbroken, your heart is shattered into a million pieces, and even if you piece it back together, it’s not the same as before you were hurt. You feel betrayed by your friend. You are disappointed in your friend. Your friend has let you down.
2. Anger – You think about it some more, and you start to feel angry. Your anger is about something: an injustice. It wasn’t fair the way you were treated. How can your friend do this to you? What did you do to deserve this? After everything you’ve done for your friend, this is how she treats you? Your anger is healthy in the beginning, but if your wound is not taken care of, it will get worse.
3. Resentment – With your anger boiling within you, it grows into hatred. You hold grudges against your friend. You wait for the perfect opportunity to seek revenge so that your friend can feel how they’ve made you feel. You become passive aggressive, you avoid them, and you point out everything wrong with them. You, being the good friend you are, know exactly what will upset them, and you purposely do all of that to hurt them back.
4. Lies – Nothing gets resolved from your resentment, and now you’re at the point where you start telling yourself lies. Lies that you are unworthy. Lies that you are ugly. Lies that you don’t belong.
Your sorrow and grief have grown into anger, which turned into resentment, and now you are living off of lies. You have not forgiven your friend, your wound is not treated, and you are not healed – your wound is only digging deeper and turning into a scar. Your anger stems from wanting to restore justice, but revenge is not the solution. Revenge is not satisfying, and we will never be able to heal ourselves by hurting something else. Revenge will not fix anything, and it cannot restore justice.
When you are hurt, you want to treat your wound as soon as possible. You need to learn how to forgive, and resolve the issue before your anger turns into resentment.
Forgiveness Clarified
Forgiveness is not simply saying, “I forgive you.” It is not condoning bad behavior, nor is it letting someone off the hook. It is not minimizing the situation. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. If you break up the word “reconciliation”, “re-” means again, “con-” by itself means with, “concilia” means with the eyelashes of one person in front of another, and “-tion” is an action. To reconcile is to put back into relationship. You can forgive someone without reconciling with them – you don’t have to be friends with them again if you don’t want to. When you forgive someone, you are letting go of that intense emotion – all that anger you’ve been building up and holding on to.
There is no point in seeking revenge because nobody ever gets away from anything. When there is injustice, there is a debt that is owed by the offender, but not all debts can be paid back. A murderer cannot restore the life he took because the damage has already been done. Every injustice evokes a different emotion, and forgiveness is a matter of the heart and a letting go of each of the debts that the person owes you. It is an offering of an undeserved gift. When you forgive someone, you are handing over that debt to Jesus and inviting Jesus to take control of the situation, while also freeing yourself from the injustice of the offense.
There were two examples of forgiveness that were provided at the workshop: one was an act of forgiveness by the brother of Botham Jean who forgave his brother’s murderer, and the other was Saint Maria Goretti, who repeatedly forgave her murderer as she lay dying from the wounds.
Forgive and forget is not possible. Just because you have forgiven someone does not mean that you need to forget what they have done to you. Forgiveness is a long process. It is what the Holy Spirit is willing to do to you and Christ forgiving in us.
I found this workshop to be very meaningful because it is so common in everyday life where you feel someone did something wrong to you and you just start getting angry at them and can’t seem to forgive them. This workshop broke it up into smaller pieces, showing you why you feel the way you do and how you can approach it with forgiveness. At the end of the day, it’s not up to us to take back what is owed to us, so why not offer forgiveness and let yourself heal?