Victim-turned-healer illuminates a path to healing hatred
New Zealand-born Michael Lapsley is a member of an Anglican religious order. Upon ordination in 1973, he was sent to South Africa. Despite the unease that it caused some of his religious brothers and many leaders of his church, he joined the African National Congress and came to see himself as a militant freedom fighter.
The nationalist government expelled him from South Africa and he lived for many years elsewhere on the African continent.
One April day in 1990, three months after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, Father Lapsley opened a letter that turned out to be a bomb. It blew off both his hands and one of his eyes.
After many difficult months in hospitals, he recovered sufficiently to lead, with constant help, an active and purposeful life. He wrote in his memoir that “though they had taken my hands and my eye and shattered my skull, they left my tongue intact.” He called the book Redeeming the Past and gave it the telling subtitle, My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer. His hands may have been the tools of a militant, but his tongue is that of a healer.
The book is a remarkable account of how to heal hatred: “If I were consumed by hatred, bitterness and a desire for revenge, I would be a victim forever. The oppressors would have failed to kill my body but they certainly would have killed my soul.” Schooled in introspection and selfcriticism, he tells readers that “I can be more of an example to others with my many human weaknesses than as a plaster saint who has overcome it all, free of distortions and contradictions.”
He may not be a saint, but he’s a very engaging human being. I met him in July at a conference in Jerusalem called “Healing Hatred: Spiritual Challenges in a Context of Political Conflict.”
As the founder of the Institute of Healing of Memories that emerged in tandem with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Lapsley has become a resource person for peacemaking in many countries.
His mission brought him to guide and inspire countless individuals and groups, including Palestinians and Israelis. His travels have also convinced him, as he writes in his book, that the future of humanity isn’t a Christian future but an interfaith future. We’re in this together — Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and all others.
What makes his work special is that he doesn’t hide his human weaknesses but implies that they help him to appreciate and respond to the weaknesses in others, even when these seem to point to aggression.
Equally important is his testimony as a victim. Instead of seeking vengeance, he’s transforming the impulse to hurt into a quest to heal. He does it out of self-interest to come to terms with the past no less than out of goodness of heart. By healing others, he’s healing himself.
His method is to seek “the justice of restoration, not the justice of punishment,” albeit with “material restitution in the instances where this is possible.” The assumption is that all peoples affected by conflicts really desire such restoration, as seems to have been the case in South Africa. It’s by no means yet clear that it also applies to the Middle East. South Africa had a Mandela and a De Klerk. Their counterparts haven’t yet been identified in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
However, that in no way diminishes the contribution of Michael Lapsley and his associates, also in the Middle East, on the tacit assumption that before people can make peace they must learn to think peace. Father Michael Lapsley helps to do precisely that.
What makes his work special is that he doesn’t hide human weaknesses but implies they help him respond to the weaknesses in others