Rev. Lyndon Harris and Dr. Fred Luskin on "Forgiveness" (transcript, part 1)
Lyndon Harris and Fred Luskin | Video Transcript |Not yet ratedThis transcript is from the IONS Conversations from the Edge series in 2006.
In this segment Dr. Marilyn Schlitz introduces Rev. Lyndon Harris and Dr. Fred Luskin and they each give their initial presentations.
Subsequent transcripts will include their discussion as they define forgiveness, describe experiments and provide insights into learned skills.
Marilyn Schlitz
Tonight we’re going to talk about cultivating the future in post 9/11 world through the power of forgiveness. I don’t know how many of you have seen either one of these guys in the various outlets of media communication, everything from ABC World News to The New York Times to The LA Times to O Magazine. They both have been featured prominently and consistently.
So we have our two people who are really virtuosos in helping us to understand the nature of forgiveness and the kind of tools and technologies that are necessary to create the shifts in ourselves that are important for this. So, Rev. Lyndon Harris is going to start, right?
He was the priest in charge of the relief ministries at ground zero offered through St. Paul’s chapel after 9/11. I saw something, I think it was on 60 Minutes perhaps about the enormous outreach that happened after this national crisis. And how people really rallied to the occasion and how much …your ministry…and how much support was provided by people. They converted a chapel into a multi-faith relief center for workers, families…all within the territory of the world trade center. He’s traveled the country speaking to churches, academic centers…all about the transformative experiences of St. Paul’s chapel and the wider community’s response. He’s also working with Fred, Dr. Fred Luskin, on the Forgiveness Garden at ground zero. We’ll be looking forward to hearing more about some of the stories.
I’ll go ahead and introduce Fred too. Dr. Fred Luskin is the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness project and Fred’s somebody who’s been a friend of the Institute of Noetic Sciences for a long time. And we’ve done a number of programs together looking at how to begin to document together and understand better the essential capacities of transformation. He’s completed nine successful research projects on the training and measurement of forgiveness therapy. So his research is actually able to help demonstrate that learning forgiveness leads to increased physical vitality, hope, greater self efficacy, enhanced optimism and conflict resolution skills. His research shows that forgiveness lessens the physical and emotional toil of stress and decreases hurt, anger, depression and blood pressure. I think that there’s no question that there are advantages to embracing these kinds of skills and capacities.
Again, as I said, his work has been treated widely in a variety of different media form and he has a wonderful book called Forgive For Good; A Proven Prescription for Happiness. Did you bring any books? You have one in progress. We’ll have some books afterward, if people are interested in that. So what we’re going to do, is we’ll take about 15 minutes and hear from both of them about their work and create a context for starting a conversation that will include the three of use. And then we’ll open it up, and with a small group we’ll be able to engage in an intimate dialogue. So this is really a wonderful opportunity for everyone. So thank you for coming. And I turn the floor over to you.
Rev. Lyndon Harris
Thank you so much, it’s good to be with you. Always wonderful to come to this beautiful city and to be with here with Fred, it’s always a joy. To get to know you all at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is a delight. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for coming out to hear us.
I want to tell you a little bit about my story and my own path toward forgiveness. I’d been preaching about forgiveness as the pastor in the Episcopal church for about 15 years but never really practiced it. Or at least, I never really thought very deeply about it, until I had to forgive somebody. That’s when it really takes on meaning for you is when you have to wrestle with it yourself. And ground zero and 9/11 gave me the opportunity to do that. So tonight we’re going to talk about creating the future through the power of forgiveness Jürgen Moltmann, a German theologian once said, "For the first time in human history we find ourselves at a place where we could render the future obsolete."
We have enough nuclear weaponry and other weapons to render the future obsolete. So, therefore, if we are going to have a future it is because we are going to be intentional to create it. We want to create the future through the power of forgiveness.
My own journey into the path of forgiveness, of course has many different aspects. But the most recent and the most prominent one happened on 9/11. I was in my office on that day and my office is 3 blocks away from the South tower of the World Trade Center. I heard the noise of the first plane colliding with the tower. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention because I didn’t hear it that well. I heard the sirens, but we have sirens all the time in New York City, so I didn’t really notice it. But when I saw papers floating by the windows sideways, I knew something was up. Someone remarked that it looked like a ticker-tape parade, because we have those on occasion in New York, when the Yankees pull it out and win a series. But this particular ticker-tape parade had burned edges on the paper. It was a different setting, it was a different situation. It wasn’t a parade at all but a tragedy in progress. So I ran from my office up the street to see if I could help out, thinking it was an accident. I got just about to the South Tower when the second plane hit and at that point, the rest is history, I had to run for my life, literally dodging debris. I was able to make it through that time, to make it through the day. And I got home later that evening and I was fortunate to be safe and okay. The story I want to tell you a little more about though, is not 9/11 because 9/11 was covered by every media outlet in the world. But the equally important story, is the story of 9/12, and that’s the next day. When we decided to get up and get out of bed and respond to those acts of violence with hearts of compassion, hearts of hope and courage. 9/12 was the beginning of a moment, a day that changed my life and changed the lives of many people working at ground zero in New York.
We opened St. Paul’s chapel as a relief center, right across the street from the World Trade Center. It was very humble in its beginnings, just serving cold drinks, hamburgers, and sandwiches, cookies or hot dogs or salads. And over the course of time, however, it escalated into a full scale relief operation with massage therapy, chiropractic care, grief counselors, podiatrists working around the clock, food service professionals and we also had musicians, some of the finest in New York City playing concerts 3 and 4 times a day for the rescue workers. It was absolutely amazing. And we had good food too. We were known as a four star accommodation at ground zero. The Waldorf was doing our dinners. David Boule, the famous chef, was doing breakfasts for us for awhile. It was amazing. It was this amazing spirit of love. It was a glimpse of the kingdom of God, in which all of God’s children worked together, regardless of religious or ethnic persuasion or perspective, came together in an outpouring of love to make a difference. That moment changed my life. Every day as we ran this relief center, however, I walked through the site and I did last rites on body bags and prayers and blessings on body parts. And every day as I walked through that site and I was able to see the faces of the men and women doing the digging, to smell the smells, to see the sites, to hear the sounds, the question that haunted me every day was, 'How in God’s name, literally, how in God’s name do we stop this endless cycle of violence, and retribution and revenge?’
Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye leaves both eyes blind." And there's way too much blindness in the world. At the same time I happened to be reading Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness in which he began to teach me about the power of forgiveness and that led me to Dr. Luskin's work, which helped change my life. Tutu talked a lot about ubuntu it's a South African concept, a Zulu word for which there is no exact translation into English. It means, roughly, "I am because you are." Ubuntu. Forgiveness is ubuntu. I am because you are. I tell my couples in pre-marital counseling the only conflict-free existence is death and even that may be up for debate. So if there's conflict, it's not a matter of not having, it's what you do with it. How do you balance it? How do you negotiate it? How do you work creatively through it and around it it? You work through it and around it with the power of forgiveness.
I will never forget the day Michael Lapsley spent with us in St. Paul's chapel. He was the first white priest to stand against the apartheid government in South Africa. And they sent him a mail bomb, to thank him for that, which blew off both of his arms and blew out one of his eyes. So now he travels around with a prosthetic device attached to his torso and has hooks for hands. I'll never forget standing at the altar with him the day he celebrated the mass and he elevated the host with those hooks and he broke it with those hooks. And it was especially powerful to stand beside him as I thought about his sermon that day, which was about moving from being a victim to living victoriously through the power of forgiveness.
So taking all this in, it came to me through Fred's work and the work of Alexandra Asseily who is the godmother of the garden of forgiveness movement in Beirut Lebanon, to think about a similar movement for the states or for ground zero especially and to think about a garden of forgiveness at ground zero. It's run into some opposition, you won't be surprised to hear. It has not been easy, so we're following the energy and holding out hope and working hard for a garden of forgiveness at ground zero. But at the same time, we're planting gardens of forgiveness in local communities. We want to create a global "Gardens of Forgiveness Network" that will help us heal the past and create the future one garden of forgiveness at a time. We have an organization now based on Dr. Luskin's methodology, based on our experience in the community, the 9/12 community at ground zero.
We're bringing that together and we want to challenge you, and we want to invite you, to think about planting a garden of forgiveness here in this city or in your local communities. A place where people can come and reflect on all the horrors that can happen to us as human beings, the list could go on and on and on. Either as individuals or as communities, to reflect on the horrors that can happen to us, but then to decide to make the world a better place and not to reciprocate violence with violence. That's what we're about, that's what we're hoping to do. We're creating various curricula for communities based on forgiveness, based on community organizing around a community of forgiveness. We have a website, it's www.gofnyc.org. We're developing a wiki for the website, so that you can upload information about your garden of forgiveness and your stories of healing through forgiveness onto the website. We can start a decentralized revolution that will make a change in the world through the power of forgiveness. Nelson Mandela said "Not to forgive is like drinking a glass of poison and waiting for your enemies to die." Dr. Luskin says that "Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past and then with courage creating the future. We want to invite you to join us partner with us in this movement to change the world through the power of forgiveness, one garden of forgiveness at a time. Thank you
Dr. Fred Luskin
That's a tough talk to follow. I teach forgiveness and in the same way that Lyndon feels, unfortunately, in order to teach it or advocate it, you have to learn how to do it. And that's tough. And I'm struck by often how much resistance there is to people taking that challenge personally, really personally. And doing what they can to make their little piece of this planet like a hate free zone. And you would be surprised at how rare that is and it's a little shocking to me how hard that is for people to grasp. That forgiveness means, that opening my heart means I can't hate George Bush. Or forgiveness means and opening my heart means I can't condemn my mother for twelve years because she failed as my parent. And I can't condemn my lover because they didn't love me right. It means the most basic and simple renunciation of hostility here (hand to heart) and here (hand to mouth) It almost doesn't matter what we believe in and it has no meaning how we get there. You can call yourself a Christian, or you can call yourself a Jewish person or you can call yourself anything. For each of us our contribution to this world is our presence and the way we comport ourselves and the thing that trips most of us up on this planet is how painful this planet is and how easy it is to want to strike back at the people who caused us pain. And how that's a very, very central choice for what our legacy is. You know, how did you respond to the unkindness that was sent your way?
I mean, I meet people at all ages who are still defending their malevolence, or their lack of grace, or their inability to keep their heart open. I meet people who tell me ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years later that it still makes sense to them to say nasty things about other human beings. And I'm truly astonished by that, I'm astonished by that in the sense that most of us fail to deeply embrace our mortality, so we think we have forever to spew this stuff out. Either there's no accounting, or there's not this profound, temporal, like power. That no matter what has happened to us, no matter when it's happened to us, we're done soon. You know, we don't have an infinite amount of time and space to pollute our environment no matter what was behind us.
And the other thing that I see that is so remarkable here in this country and in the bay area, is that we are so rich and we have so much and we're not that generous. I mean, I am constantly amazed, I'm constantly amazed at myself through all these years, the simplest, the briefest definition now that I use is upper middle class insanity, which is the bay area. Is to walk into Whole Foods and be tense because there's people in line, or because you don't get served immediately at the deli counter. And if you have even just a taste of that, if you have, like I have, even a shred of impatience or a shred of entitlement, you know, that the world's got to be there for me. We've all missed the mark so completely. That in a world full of starvation and horror and murder and abuse, we live in this beautiful spot, we can walk into a place like Whole Foods any time we want and buy anything. And if we're not just leading the charge for almost unconditional goodness and we don't.
Remarkably enough, Silicon Valley has the lowest charitable rate in the United States. And Santa Clara County has the smallest number of intact families in the United States. That's quite a profound legacy in an environment with so much, so much. And so I look at this and I listen to my friends who are all well-intentioned people and who mean well for the world, yet will vitriolicly criticize the president of the United States with a sneer and a contempt. And I think to myself, what is that. What is that? Even that simple test, most of us fail. That simple test of humanity. Which is, can you disagree with policy? In the richest, strongest, safest country in the history of the world. And we who have so much fail that.
And I think so where in the world is this going to take hold? Where? In Afghanistan where they have nothing? In Biafra or in Southern Africa? Where is it going to take hold, where they have nothing? And this is not new. A friend of mine, George Leonard, been a friend of mine for awhile, wrote a book in 1970 called The Transformation and he talks about the simple moment of driving through upper middle class Marin County and driving up and down the street because he was wanting to just look. And people coming out to stare at him 'what are you doing in our neighborhood?' And making sure he wasn't a thief or somebody who wasn't welcome there and he was thinking to himself 'wow, so much and yet so little.' Abraham Maslow, in 1970 gave a talk about the United States when he was talking about self actualization, he gave a talk saying, 'How is it, with everything we have that we are not gracious all the time?' We're not bursting at the heart? What will it take?
And for me, and I know my time is running out, I keep on coming back to the fact, we don't forgive. That even with so much, we focus on what we don't have. Even with so much, we focus on those people who didn't love us, or parent us, or be kind to us, or give us what we wanted. And we focus on the lines at Whole Foods, and we focus on the traffic on [Highway] 101, or we focus on the rude sales people and all that's true. But if we don't have enough and can't hold those totally minor inconsideration with graciousness, that's the state of our planet and we are co-conspirators in it. And there's no way that you can tell yourself that you are contributing to good unless that happens on a very regular, day-to-day, basis. It's not who you identify with and what you send money to. We create the vibe on this planet all day long.
And I have to believe this is the essential spiritual question: "Can you take the crap that life relentlessly throws at us and have a space in your heart where you don't get lost in it?" I mean, that's forgiveness. It's not gonna be easy, and it's not like life is going to all of a sudden reward us for being such nice people and not give us grief. And so from my work of teaching this every where and Marilyn was talking about media. Tomorrow morning at four o'clock in the morning I have to go show up because I'm going to be on the CBS morning show to talk about the Amish and how they can forgive. You know, it's like this is what I do, I tell people to do this. And Lyndon brings his testimony. Just to wrap this up, we're aligned is to try to make forgiveness normal. We want, we don't want it to be just big stories and horror. We want communities to have this as part of what they do, you know, you forgive each other. And interesting enough, and this will be the last thing I comment on, the Amish, personally the way I teach this, they might have rushed to forgive the horror and the attack, because my understanding is that it takes a while to process. But the kindness that they showed to the family of the man who went berserk, we should all be doing. That has nothing to do with being a small Christian sect. That should be us all. You know, if we're violently wounded and violently hurt, that takes some time. But we can all reduce some of our judgment and just be a little nicer. Thank you.
Great Shift Dialogues
