Forgiveness and Freedom: Sexual Abuse (Main Forum)

by PaulW, Saturday, April 10, 2010, 17:29 (1135 days ago) @ Dawn Elaine

Dawn Elaine

Thanks for sharing your journey.

With all the recent developments I decided a few days ago that it would be a useful time to re-read some of Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's writings.

Back in the late 90s he wrote an article "Spiritual Harm and Spiritual Healing in Cases of Sexual Abuse ".(This was susequently reworked and developed and appears as Chapter 11 in his 2007 book "Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church ".)In it he discusses forgiveness

I'll quote briefly from the original article:

" The origin of words can tell us much about their meaning.The Greek word in the gospels translated 'to forgive' has the more basic meaning of 'to leave behind ,to let be '.In relation to sexual abuse this does not mean to deny the abuse or the debt it created.It does not mean to forego attempts to have just debts paid.It does not mean to repress the memory or to prevent it rising to the conscious mind whenever this happens naturally.It means to come to the point where one is prepared to begin to leave the matter behind ,to let it be,to do nothing to deliberately raise the memories and the feelings they evoke"

He goes on to quote from a book 'Further Along the Road Less Travelled ' by M Scott Peck

"The process of forgiveness -indeed the chief reason for forgiveness -is selfish.The reason to forgive others is not for their sake .. The reason to forgive is for our own sake.For our own health.Because beyond that point needed for healing if we hold onto our anger ,we stop growing and our souls begin to shrivel "

In the Meditation at the end of ch 11 of his 2007 book Robinson writes:
"Sexual Abuse is a bulldozer gouging a road through the fragile ecosystem of love and meaning that a person has been painfully constructing...

In sexual abuse there is always spiritual harm , for the abuse always harms the person's sense of wholeness and connectedness ,and hence the person's sense of meaning and identity....

Spiritual healing means helping a person to be whole agin and to find a new world of meaning, a new set of satisfying answers to the basic questions of life , and this means a new set of persons ,objects ,activities and ideas that can be loved."

PaulW