Tagged: “Love”

The Transformative Power of Storytelling

A new and innovative online training course is now available through The Forgiveness Project, a London (UK)-based organization that collects and shares stories of forgiveness in order to build hope, empathy and understanding.

“Working with stories of lived experience – the transformative power of storytelling,” draws on The Forgiveness Project’s 16-years of experience to explore approaches and perspectives relating to forgiveness, restorative narratives, shame, and resilience. The course also offers tools and techniques to build participants’ knowledge of and the use of storytelling in their work.

An introductory forum kicks off the course and is followed by five 3-hour sessions starting in July. Participants are expected to devote an estimated 3-4 hours of their own time between the sessions exploring and trying out different creative approaches. Because of the difficult subject matter being covered, all potential participants will be interviewed prior to final acceptance into the course and enrollment will be capped at 18 participants.

Marina Cantacuzino, MBE, The Forgiveness Project founder, and Sandra Barefoot, the organization’s Programme Development Lead, will facilitate the course. Cantacuzino is an award-winning journalist who embarked on a personal project in 2003 collecting stories of people who had lived through trauma and injustice, and who sought forgiveness rather than revenge.  Barefoot, among her various responsibilities, is the manager of the organization’s prison program, RESTORE, and the lead facilitator of that work for the past eleven years. Course participants will be offered one-to-one mentoring time with each of the two facilitators.

Learning objectives and detailed course information is available on The Forgiveness Project’s “Working with stories of lived experience” website page. Cost of the course is £950 GBP (~ $1,350 USD) for individuals and £1350 GBP (~ $1,900 USD) for organizations.

“The Forgiveness Project shares stories of forgiveness in order to build hope, empathy and understanding.”

As the title of this innovative course suggests, storytelling can indeed embody the power to transform lives. That power is exhibited in the hundreds of personal stories shared on The Forgiveness Project website from both victims/survivors and perpetrators of crime and conflict who have rebuilt their lives following hurt and trauma.

That reliance on storytelling is also a crucial component of the strategy employed by the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI). Co-founder Dr. Robert Enright has incorporated storytelling (through the use of childrens’ literature) into most of the 17 Forgiveness Education Curriculum Guides developed by the IFI. Additionally, many of the same individuals featured on The Forgiveness Project website have been featured on the IFI website including:

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his opposition to SouthAfrica’s brutal apartheid regime, forgave those who tortured him and established a nonviolent path to liberation for his country. Archbishop Tutu is a “Founding Patron” of The Forgiveness Project and an Honorary Member of the IFI Board of Directors.
• Eva Mozes Kor, the Holocaust survivor who forgave her Auschwitz persecutors and who partnered with Dr. Enright on various media and personal projects before her death on July 4, 2019.
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• Anne Gallagher, a Belfast, Northern Ireland nurse who: 1) tended to victims of bombs and bullets on both sides of the sectarian divide; 2) founded Seeds of Hope, an organization that facilitates storytelling based on The Troubles; and, 3) helped the IFI establish Forgiveness Education Programs in Belfast schools more than 19-years ago—programs that are still operating today.
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• Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger—Elva was a 16-year-old student in Iceland when she was raped by 18-year-old Stranger (an exchange student from Australia). She later forgave her attacker and the two have since appeared together in countless presentations and co-authored a book South of Forgiveness.

Stories like those and the many others featured on the websites of The Forgiveness Project and the International Forgiveness Institute demonstrate that forgiveness is first and foremost a personal journey with no set rules or time limits. True forgiveness is also a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and an alternative to the cycles of conflict, violence, crime and injustice so prevalent around the world.

Can you comment on giving a gift to someone whom you choose to not have any further contact with?

There seem to be two questions here: 1) Should I consider giving a gift to someone with whom I choose not to have any further contact; and, 2) How can I give such a gift?  Here is my answer to the “should” question: Forgiveness is about giving, even to those with whom you are angry and estranged. This is part of the paradox of forgiving: As you reach out in goodness to those who were not good to you, then you experience psychological healing. Therefore, it is morally appropriate and psychologically prudent to consider giving a gift, if you choose to forgive. The second question, regarding how it is even possible to give a gift to someone whom you will not see again is this: You can contribute to a charity in the person’s name. You can pray for the person if you have a religious belief.  You even can say a kind word about the person to someone else.

How are forgiveness, mercy, and love related?

All three are moral virtues.  Agape is the over-arching virtue out of which forgiveness emerges.  Mercy does not necessarily emerge out of agape because mercy does not always require serving others through one’s own pain, as occurs in agape.  The judge who shows mercy to a defendant by reducing a deserved sentence is not necessarily suffering in love for that defendant.  Thus, not all aspects of mercy flow from agape.  Forgiveness includes a number of virtues such as patience, kindness, and having mercy on others who behave badly.  So, forgiveness is a specific part of agape.  Forgiveness includes mercy, but mercy is not an over-arching virtue out of which forgiveness emerges.  That distinction belongs to agape.

How is forgiveness related to love?

Forgiveness is being good to those who are not good to you.  Love, particularly the most difficult form of love, what the Greeks call agape, is to be good to those who are in need of your services, even when it is difficult to offer this love.  Forgiveness is one expression of agape.  Forgiveness is a specific form of agape in that forgiving takes place specifically in the context of another person being unjust, even cruel, to the forgiver.

There are other examples of agape that do not include forgiveness.  For example, a mother who is up all night with a sick child is showing agape because this is difficult and necessary and she does so out of goodness for her child.  Forgiveness can occur exclusively in the human heart as the forgiver sees the hurtful other as possessing inherent worth and commits to the betterment of the other.  In agape, there is the action within the human heart and mind, but in addition, there is the action of deliberately assisting people in need.

How is forgiveness related to mercy?

Forgiveness is being good to those who are not good to you.  Mercy is refraining from punishing a person who deserves that punishment because of unjust behavior.  Both are moral virtues and so hold that in common.  When people forgive, they exercise mercy in that as they forgive they do not give an eye-for-an-eye to the one who hurt you.  Instead, the forgiver offers a hand up to the person to come and join you as a person of worth.  Mercy as part of forgiveness is a specific expression of mercy in that this mercy is occurring in the context of being treated unjustly by another or others.

There are other examples of mercy that do not include forgiveness.  For example, legal pardon is a form of mercy in that a judge may reduce a deserved sentence within a court of law.  The judge offering legal pardon never is the one who was treated unjustly by the defendant.  Forgiveness, as a personal decision, occurs within the human heart, not in a court of law.  Thus, forgiveness includes mercy, but mercy can occur in entirely different contexts than forgiveness.  Further, forgiveness does not involve only exercising the moral virtue of mercy.  Forgiveness also is an expression of love, particularly agape or the kind of love that is challenging and even costly to the forgiver.