How forgiveness has changed me

How forgiveness has change me

(As shared as a personal reflection on the Febuary 14th service at the first Unitarian Church of Victoria)

I have never hidden the fact that I grew up in less than ideal circumstances, and that I’ve had a lot of baggage and interpersonal relationship problems that I’ve had to work though, …am still working though, because of that experience. Part of my healing process was to extricated  myself from blame.  Blaming oneself is common to those who have suffered abuse, so I had to start with the work of recognizing where the responsibility for my childhood experiences lay to begin with. Without going into details, the end result was that I didn’t speak with my father for a very long time, and I thought that I would never speak to him again.

In March, 2013, I got a phone call from my brother, telling me that our father was in the hospital, that a neighbour had found him lying unconscious next to his car, surrounded by the groceries he had just brought home, …and that he had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. 

Have you ever been convinced that you'd never forgive someone, and then when you did, you found  it was just the thing you needed to do?  ...It was a difficult decision to make, but I finally decided to phone my father. …The first words I remember him saying were: "When are you coming home?"

At first I thought he was confused, and I explained to him that I was home, here, in Victoria, but then I realized what he was asking me, and I knew then that everything had changed between us. He was old and sick, and he was the one who was vulnerable now. He was asking me to come home to see him before he died, and at that very moment I forgave him. 

I flew out east and went to see him in the hospital in Halifax - spent two weeks there. At first it all seemed so anti-climatic after the revelation I had while speaking to him on the phone.  There was no moment of reconciliation or apology, no outpouring of regret; only one small statement that he had offered two or three times, seemingly out of the blue; “as long as you are happy” he said, which I later realized was his way of telling me that he accepted my queer lifestyle.

 

This was an incredible gift in itself, as I never expected anything like that from him … but the best gift of all didn’t appear until after he had died. I began to  remember the times that he and I had gone fishing, and berry picking together,  ...how he had taught me how to bait a hook, how to light a campfire, and where to find Mayflowers in the spring. 

These are precious memories for me, and I believe my love of nature began there.  ... Not everything was bad while I was growing up, but the bad had covered up what good there was, and made it inaccessible. 

In forgiving my father I got those good memories back along with the realization of how significant they were in my life. Until then, I thought forgiveness was just something that you gave to someone else.  Little did I know how personally transforming and healing it could be.  I hope he got something from it, as well. 

Where has forgiveness taken you?