Speaker: Vince Klassen and Josh Symonds
I asked Josh, my co-speaker this week, if he’d ever hurt someone and he immediately told this story. “There is this lady I work with, she is a great lady and a good friend. One day we were all together with our friends and this lady was having a birthday. And someone asked, how old are you? And so she announced her age, ’42’.
And I said, ‘You’re only 42?!?’ The room went completely silent and the subtext hanging in the room was ‘you look way older than 42’. I remember her looking over at me, and her eyes met mine, and it was like I could see inside of her for a second and I saw the deep hurt my comment had caused…”
How do you fix that?? Really, how do we fix things when we have hurt someone? And how do we know when we have fixed it? I think our spiritual ancestors knew something about this and we are going to explore that this week.
Notes:
It is neurologically impossible for partners to set the record straight. The unrelenting attempt at reconstruction of a traumatizing event is itself retraumatizing. In addition, intense and repeated dyadic dysregulation is traumatizing and leads to threat-related psychobiological reorganization within and between partners (Charney, 2004). Memory undergoes a reconsolidation process, whereby visual and auditory reactivating cues associated with earlier dysregulated events become reintegrated “into an ongoing perceptual and emotional experience and become part of a new memory” that is contextualized around fear and connected with inhibitory avoidance mechanisms (Charney, 2004, p. 207). Thus couples cannot adequately regulate by trying to reconstruct past events. Attempts at repair must also fail as long as both partners believe that recall of such events is possible. The therapist should instead attend to the dysregulation occurring in the here and now. – Stan Tatkin (Wired for Love)
“The reparation offering seems at first glance to be restricted to offenses against the property of God, either his sancta or his name. It reflects, however, wider theological implications. The noun asam ‘reparation, reparation offering’ is related to the verb asam ‘feel guilt’, which predominates in this offering and in the purification offering as well. This fact bears ethical consequences. Expiation by sacrifice depends on two factors: the remorse of the worshiper (verb asam) and the reparation (noun asam) he brings both to man and God to rectify his wrong. This sacrifice, however, strikes even deeper ethical roots. If someone falsely denies under oath having defrauded his fellow, subsequently feels guilt and restores the embezzled property and pays a 20-percent fine, he is then eligible to request of his deity that his reparation offering serve to expiate his false oath. Here we see the Priestly legists in action, bending the sacrificial rules in order to foster the growth of individual conscience. They permit sacrificial expiation for a deliberate crime against God (knowingly taking a false oath) provided the person repents before he is apprehended. Thus they ordain that repentance converts an intentional sin into an unintentional one, thereby making it eligible for sacrificial expiation.
(Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, pg 50)