Healing Power of Forgiveness

The relationship I experienced with my father is one of deep sorrow and resentment that I struggled through most of my life. This relationship was challenging for me to share and express, even in the context of talk therapy. I could not trust that the words which come out of my mouth will honor him. I was taught to obey and respect my parents. Respect was something I could not give him while obedience was beaten into me. This strained relationship caused anger and resentment in my spirit for most of my life. I decided to stay silent instead of telling my story.

I once told my therapist that I would not be sad if my father died. I would probably enjoy his death and dance on his grave. Any mention of this part of my narrative would betray me showing the disdain and loathing for the man that gave me life. Years of emotional and physical abuse at his hands shook me to the core of my being. I knew that’s not the person I want to be and knew that’s not how God taught us to love. The tsunami of my emotion will betray me and cause destruction and death wherever I go. I was unwilling to open that part of my psyche. It would be unfair to me, unfair to him, and unjust to the world. 

My breakthrough last July gave me God’s love through the Holy Spirit. That love came after I called on Jesus to have MERCY on me. That call from the core of my being cleansed me with the blood of the Lamb of God. I experienced love and forgiveness. As God forgave my sins, I can forgive others. That gift of love included with it some wisdom to discern my brokenness. As God extends grace to me, I can pass that on to others. One of those people being my father.

My father’s brokenness created the person that he is. His father was emotionally and physically abusive to him. After middle school, he went into the military academy then to war. War at home was all he knew, and when he grew into a teenager, he went to war in the jungle. He met his beloved, my mother, and married her. 

They had hopes and dreams of building a life together. He became a father, and when he held this daughter for the first time, he probably promised that he would be a better father to her than his father was to him. He probably promised to protect her forever. When the war ended, all his dreams and promises crumbled with the fall of Saigon. He entered a re-education camp that taught him a new perspective and loyalty to his new country and the communist party. 

I can’t fathom the evil he saw in that place, and only through the grace of God he survived it. After five years of detainment, the government released him and came home to a young wife and two little girls. He was assigned the job of a farmer with no land to cultivate. How does a man earn a living and protect his wife and children? He only knew war, and now even though the war ended, the battle continued. 

The destruction of his country, shame of his existence, and fear of uncertainty would bring about mixed emotions that became unmanageable and caused destruction almost daily. His insufficiencies perpetuated the episodes of PTSD, causing many stormy days for his four girls and his wife. The young man she married years before was not the man that came home. He destroyed our household, our emotions, and our psyche.

His mind and body could not differentiate between war and no war, so it stays in constant fight. He taught me how to survive in combat, how to fight, and how to survive. The war ended seven years before my birth. Peace did not follow, because there was no peace, not for us. Only suffering remained.

My experience of Christ’s forgiveness last July healed this part of my psyche along with everything else. My own broken life was washed clean from Christ’s blood and forgiveness cleansed every aspect of me. My messy divorce and my loathing of my father both went away. The love of God created love from the ashes of my burnt-up life. Only when I recognized my own tsunami of emotion and my potential for destruction can I empathize with my father’s emotional devastation. Through God’s help, I can command my emotional storm like how Christ calmed the sea.

“He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’ Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.” Mark 4:39.

I forgave my father for his inability to manage his emotions. Focusing on his failures prevented me from seeing how he was able to love his children in other ways. He expressed love to us through service. He borrowed money from friends and his mother in law, who reminded him every day how much he owed her, to buy a piece of land and built a hut. He used his own hands to make the four walls from straw and clay. He raised chickens for eggs, rabbits for meat, ducks, a pig, and a few goats for milk. My sister is convinced that I’m the tallest because he gave me all the goat milk. He would wake up early and ride his bike 15 kilometers to the harbor to buy fresh fish for us and be home before sunrise. The noise of his sins clouded my perspective of him and his love for me. The washing of my sins also washed his sins towards me. Clarity of choice is powerful in the midst of destruction. 

Christ suffered not to remove our suffering, but He suffered to forgive sins. He was pierced with a spear (John19:24), so we don’t have to pierce our neighbor. Christ would want us to cut Him instead but because I love Christ with all my being. I choose not to cut Him, whom I love. Extend that love to my breveren. The spread of sin died with forgiveness and through the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. My experience of God’s love enabled me to love. Beloved become lovers.

Image: Berthe Morisot, Julie and Eugene Manet, 1883.