Dealing with our past hurts…

Dear friends,

It is difficult for most of us to appreciate the level of anger that some people must have to deal with when their entire life is screwed up. For a number of years I worked closely with the journalist Avon Lovell who was assisting the Mickelberg Brothers in their long fight to right the injustice that had been inflicted on them by corrupt police officers in Western Australia. It has taken them decades to gain some sort of justice but, in a sense, nothing can replace what was taken away from them.

On our discussion forum yesterday we read of the joy experienced by Ann Thompson who was severely abused and raped in a Catholic orphanage to the extent that it more than probably affected her education and social development. Those of us who have followed Ann's story over the years have shared with her various "moments of joy", as well as a string of setbacks, as she has slowly pursued her case and endeavoured to find out the truth of what happened. In recent weeks she was able to make contact with a family she stayed briefly with many decades ago and who were able to provide important corraborating evidence for her case.

Today's lead commentary from John McKinnon is all about dealing with past hurts. Saying sorry is important — and more so the greater the injustice. I honestly don't know if anything could replace what was ripped out of Ann's life. The reality though is that even after the gravest injustices we also owe it to ourselves to regain a sense of personal equilibrium simply for our own sanity. John McKinnon has valuable advice to offer today and hopefully this will lead to further discussion in our forum. One of the issues that perplexes me is that in many instances that occur in life there is literally "no one to blame". The parents of the girls killed by the Claremont serial killer in Western Australia come to mind. The killer has not yet been identified or brought to justice. In other cases the perpetrator of some abuse dies — for example in the spate of gun slayings in US universities and schools — and again there is no one to "blame" or "say sorry". How do the people who's lives are crippled by those sort of events return to a state of personal spiritual equilibrium? If you have thoughts on these difficult matters I have no doubt othersin our community would value reading them. <Read Fr John's commentary>

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world,

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher