In an earlier article I wrote, ‘Sometimes recalling and reflecting on the past can bring great pain.’ This is often our experience when we recall our relationships with our families, particularly with our parents.
I will never forget the reactions of students at seminars when we began to deal with the issue of relationships with parents. Some students tried to escape dealing with this topic by playing sports and singing; others strongly resisted dealing with the topic at all. If the wounds of our hearts have not been healed, or if those wounds are still raw, this is a normal reaction.
Our journey in life begins when we are born to our parents, and our birth is firmly entwined with our father and mother’s marriage, and also with their life journeys up until the time they married.
The early years of our lives are deeply influenced by the interpersonal relationships of the people in the home in which we were born, particularly our relationships with our father and our mother as well as our parent’s relationship to each other. Therefore, when we reflect on our own life journey from its inception, it will naturally include reflection on our father and mother and on their relationship as a couple. As we do that, we will come face to face with our wounds, and we may waver in our task.
As I was reflecting on my life journey, I had the following experience as I was meditating on my relationship with my parents. At the time, I had my own home and was a parent myself, and so I was more able to see my father and mother as human beings and as a married couple. I was also in a frame of mind to be able to examine the life journeys of my aging parents to the extent that I knew about them.
First, I took unhurried time to remember things about my father, things that as a child I was thankful for, things that I liked about him, and I wrote them down. Then I recalled the things I disliked, the things that I had not been able to forgive. I wrote down the same number that I had written as positive things. In the process, I discovered that there were significantly more positive things about my father than I had expected.
Next, I repeated the same exercise regarding my mother. I had thought that there would be many positive things that I felt thankful for and that it would be difficult to find things that I disliked or that were hard to forgive. However, contrary to my expectations, I became aware of deep hurts and anger toward my mother of which I had not been conscious.
I found a place where I could be alone, and I read what I had written about my father and my mother. I gave thanks to God from my heart for each joy and each positive thing, with genuine feelings of thankfulness toward my father and mother.
And I lifted up each hurt, each disappointment, each wound, to the Lord, and I declared forgiveness for my father and my mother through the prayer for forgiveness uttered by the Lord Jesus on the cross.
I was astonished at the extent of the wounds that I had found in my heart and at how overwhelmed by these wounds I felt. After I prayed, an amazing sense of release flowed through me. It was not so much that I forgave them as it was that a forgiveness was born within me, a forgiveness coming from Jesus’ prayer. ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34).
Looking back on that experience, I realized that there were friends near me with whom I shared a spiritual companionship, people who were able to receive my wounds. They, too, were doing the same exercise. If I had been all alone, I may not have been able to reflect on these memories that were accompanied by such deep wounds. I believe that it was possible for me to tackle this exercise only because it occurred in the context of daily meditation on the word of God through which I felt the gentleness of Christ.
Some time after this experience, I was given an opportunity to talk with my parents, just the three of us alone. This was the first time in a long while, or maybe it was the very first time since I had become an adult. I just happened to have at hand the list that I had written and I decided to have them listen to me read it to them.
Since I had in the Lord’s presence already dealt with the things that needed to be forgiven, I just read the list of things for which I was thankful and that had given me pleasure. I read them one by one to my father and to my mother. They were both astonished at these unexpected words of appreciation and while being bewildered as to how to respond, they seemed pleased.
When I contemplate that a short time later my father’s dementia progressed, and that I only saw my mother two or three more times before she died suddenly of a cardiac arrest, I can’t help thinking that the time we had together as a result of that exercise was a wonderful, special gift from God.