As it's Xmas I've been considering who are the most unforgivable people on Earth. We seem to have culturally all agreed that sex offenders, rapists and especially child-abusers are totally unforgivable and deserving of zero compassion, just condemnation. Jesus reached out to the lepers. This was the metaphor. I feel we are all trapped as a culture while we keep those groups locked in the eternal dungeon so I want to, inch by inch, gently consider how those abusers became like that. Hence I write the posts of recent days. I know it stirs people up and had anything ever happened to one of my own kids I would also probably find it impossible to react in any other way.
But I'm exploring this for a sincere reason. We are trapped in the dark ages while we can't as a culture open this unforgivable, taboo conversation. Those who are so stirred up that they need to condemn me publicly or call me mean, shaming names, while I understand that you're too triggered to do anything else, for my own self-care, I choose to erase you from the threads.
I believe that people who've been abused will fall into two camps - those who afterwards were lucky enough to be exposed to ideas, people, luck/destiny that gave them the chance to make healthier, non-abusive choices and there are those who just got more violence and rape and abuse and punishment and shame and outcaste-ness and alienation, who became too damaged in the complexity of their experiences to make a healthy choice and often became 'abusers' - those people are mentally ill in my opinion and need high security hospitals not self-righteous people telling them "I made the right choice after MY abuse, therefore you should have too and I'm therefore superior/better than you". That's my truth. Everyone is innocent from that perspective.
Letting this in is is REALLY what Xmas is about. We are all uniquely wounded - most of us got lucky that our violence never expressed it's way too destructively for ourselves or others. That doesn't make us superior, only lucky to have been exposed to different love and ideas.
Take the baby day by day 'til it becomes the abuser, orchestrating the abuse, slowly watch it's life literally day by day, all the complex things that happened to it, 4 years old abused...6 years old abused...9 years old now very twisted and lost....13 years old with no exposure to anything but hatred and ignorance...16 years old getting into real violence.... 'til it becomes a full-on abuser, and choose which day you stop your compassion, if you want to be free, try this exercise.
Who's on YOUR unforgivable list this year?
