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| Some of my Sunday dinner family |
Most people
think that wellness starts with the mind, but I have come to know that it
begins in your heart.
Last week,
most of us were saddened and angered by the shootings at the church just up the
road from me in Charleston, South Carolina. Then the survivors and family members
spoke of forgiveness and I was corrected.
I don’t know
if I could have said, “I forgive you,” to that young man. I’m having a hard
enough time giving forgiveness to the folks I know who say things that are racist.
I’ve grown
tired of being angry, but I won't be indifferent and I am only now
stepping up to the plate of forgiveness.
Many of my
friends don’t fully understand the burden of racism in America and they surely cannot
comprehend what it’s doing to them.
Until those
beautiful words of forgiveness, I hadn’t looked at what I had been holding.
I’ve often
said that forgiveness is not about letting someone else off of the hook, it’s
about getting off the one they put you on.
Forgiving
someone is about letting go of the pain and suffering that comes as a result of
the injury.
For my own wellness,
I will move my focus from the terrorist over to the beautiful folks who could
forgive.
You can
probably read through my lines to see that I’m not yet up to the task of
forgiving that murderer. It’s probably because I see the act of terrorism in a
much larger context.
We should be talking about this.
We should be sitting down at dinner tables with the folks you mean when you say, "Some of my best friends are," and you should be discussing how this and other acts of terrorism make you all feel.
We should all be holding our hearts in pain from the indifference we have to our nations indifference.
We should be feeling something.
If your
heart is not aching, truly aching, well, I forgive you.
Be you, be well, be forgiven.
Bertice Berry, PhD
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