Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World - Softcover

Feldman Bettencourt, Megan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039918483X ISBN 13: 9780399184833

Publisher: Avery, 2016

Synopsis

2016 Books For A Better Life Award winner

Drawing on the latest research and remarkable tales of forgiveness from around the world, journalist Megan Feldman explores how forgiveness, when practiced in the right ways, can save lives, make us happier and healthier, and lead to a better world.
 
Veteran journalist Megan Feldman was still smarting over a bitter breakup when she began working on a feature article about a father named Azim who had truly forgiven the man who killed his son. She had found herself totally and completely unable to forgive her ex-boyfriend, and yet Azim had managed to forgive his own son’s murderer. Forgiveness has long been touted by religious leaders as a moral imperative. But Megan wanted to know exactly what it means from a scientific perspective, and why forgiving those who have wronged you is one of the best things you can do for yourself. In Triumph of the Heart, Feldman embarks on a quest to understand this complex idea, drawing on the latest research showing that forgiveness can provide a range of health benefits, from relieving depression to decreasing high blood pressure.
           
The journey takes her from New Zealand and the Maori who practice their own form of restorative justice, to a principal in Baltimore who uses forgiveness techniques to eradicate violence in her school, and to recovered addicts who restarted their lives by seeking and receiving forgiveness. She travels to Rwanda to learn about forgiveness in the face of unthinkable atrocities. This book is a guide for how the practice of forgiveness can help us all in our search for a satisfying, fulfilling, good life.

About this title

About the Author:

Megan Feldman Bettencourt is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in magazines such as Glamour, Details, and Southwest: The Magazine, and in newspapers including Newsday and the Dallas Observer.  

She began her career as a Central America-based freelancer and holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She lives in Denver with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

INTRODUCTION

How I Reluctantly Discovered Forgiveness and Why I Set Out to Explore It

In early 2012, I found myself writing a magazine story about a remarkable man. Seventeen years earlier, Azim Khamisa was working as an international investment banker based in San Diego when his only son, a college student working a pizza delivery job, was shot to death by an aspiring teenaged gang member. Azim’s response shocked everyone, from the prosecutor in the murder case to local crime reporters: He forgave the killer. He reached out to the killer’s family. He befriended the killer’s grandfather. And then, together, these two unlikely friends launched an organization that teaches nonviolence in public middle schools. I learned about Azim through a mutual friend who had attended one of his speaking engagements, and my interest was piqued.

I wanted to know why he forgave. I wanted to know how. And I wanted to know what it meant—for him, for me, for all of us. I was intrigued, if more than a little unsettled, for reasons I couldn’t quite identify.

Forgiveness had never been my forte, nor my aspiration. If I thought of forgiveness at all, I did so with disdain, as something weak and almost pathetic. When I was two, my mother took me to the neighborhood pool. As she grabbed one of my chubby arms and led me toward the water, a middle-aged woman stopped us. “She is so cute!” the woman said to my mother, bending toward me with a smile. Before anyone could say or do anything, I kicked the unsuspecting stranger hard in the shin. The woman recoiled and rubbed her leg. My mother, horrified, apologized and ushered me away. When she demanded an explanation, I narrowed my eyes and stuck out my chin. “I’m not cute,” I said. “I hate cute.” Cute was for babies and docile animals. I wanted to be fierce. I wanted to be strong and smart, someone to be taken seriously. As I grew older, the idea of being forgiving seemed just as embarrassing to me as being cute did on the day I rewarded a stranger’s compliment with a merciless kick.

Growing up, the more I learned about the world’s injustices, the angrier I became. I was angry about the Holocaust (one of my favorite books was I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a compilation of art and poems by Jewish children interned at Terezin), I was angry about the U.S. genocide against the Native Americans, and I was angry that some people were reduced to sleeping on the streets and scrounging for food in dumpsters. My outrage over these injustices was linked to the fact that I seemed to feel everything—particularly the suffering I saw around me—so deeply. I remember learning about the gas chambers at Auschwitz in a middle school class. I was so devastated after the documentary we watched that I could barely speak at recess, and I was horrified—and yes, angry—to see my friends playing tag and telling stories, as if nothing had happened. I felt like I’d just discovered that the world was actually hell, and my friends were carrying on as if no one let them in on the secret. My mother, meanwhile, was a psychologist specializing in treating trauma, and I gleaned tidbits about her patients’ lives. They’d been beaten by mothers, raped by fathers, stalked and nearly killed by strangers or colleagues. At one point, on the eve of middle school, misfortune struck even closer to home.

One afternoon, my best friend’s father was late to pick her up from school. The next morning, my mother sat on my bed to wake me. A knockout who was normally perfectly put together, Mom’s eyes were red and nearly hidden by great, swollen folds of skin. Through tears, she told me that my friend’s father had killed himself, and her mother found his body. We jumped in our car and drove to their house. All I remember is the five of us—my mother and me, and my best friend, her older sister, and their mother— holding each other under a big elm in their backyard. Their family moved away that summer. I began sixth grade alone at a new school that my bestie and I had planned to attend together. At night, I filled my pink, heart-covered diary with sad, lonely entries.

When my English teacher assigned a personal essay, I wrote about what happened. I was amazed at how cathartic it was, how I felt I’d somehow made sense of something senseless, and in the process, purged some of the haunting feelings that kept me awake at night. My teacher read that essay aloud to every single one of his English classes. Peers I’d never even met approached me in the halls to say how the piece moved them. Some confided that they, too, had experienced puzzling tragedies in their young lives, and that they related to what I’d written. Unwittingly, I had stumbled upon something that helped me understand—or at least express my feelings about—pain and suffering, something that could perhaps also help others.

It was my outrage over injustice and pain, as well as my fascination with the ways in which people overcame tragedy, that led me to journalism. I focused on stories about suffering and triumph: addicts finding unique ways to recover, fathers fighting unjust paternity laws, war widows launching support groups for other grieving loved ones, and Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence to ride freight trains fifteen hundred miles to the U.S. border. In my twenties, I spent almost two years living in Guatemala and reporting on the ways people were trying to remake their lives after a thirty-six-year civil war.

By the time I met Azim, my penchant for indignant anger and even blame hadn’t faded. In fact, I was more pissed off than ever.

At thirty-three, I was trying to earn a living as a freelancer in Denver, Colorado. While my friends were buying houses and getting married, I was receiving rejections from editors and stocking my cupboards with beans and canned tuna fish. I’d arrived in Denver after working for several years for a newspaper in Dallas. While I enjoyed the job, I grew up in the Mountain West, a devotee of forests and ski trails and alpine streams, and I felt like a dying aspen tree amid Dallas’s concrete and shopping malls. By 2010, most journalism jobs had dried up, which fueled my general bitterness. Unable to imagine staying in Texas any longer, I made the impulsive decision to move back to Colorado and try my luck freelancing. I published some well-received magazine feature articles, moonlighted as a part-time professor, and launched a new Web site with a professional head shot and a respectable portfolio. But I was also accruing credit card debt and borrowing money from my parents, which I considered a blazing sign of failure, and most of my story ideas were rejected with notes like, This sounds like a powerful story, Megan, but we’re going to pass. If you want to find out just how angry and disillusioned you can get, try a career like acting or writing that has you squaring off against rejection at every turn. You’ll quickly plumb the depths of your capacity for discomfort.

In the winter of 2011, after months of rejection notes, I was finally assigned a profile of an outdoorsy software engineer who created skiing apps, but the assignment evaporated when a larger company bought the engineer’s firm and said they didn’t want to be featured in a publication alongside ads for local head shops. Probably because it was a near-success after traversing what felt like a desert of failure, it undid me. I broke down on the floor of my apartment, sobbing into the carpet next to my bed.

I felt ridiculous. My father, a physician, and my mother, a psychologist, had worked their entire lives, doing what they loved and providing me and my sister with a comfortable life and myriad opportunities. They’d given me everything, and here I was, floundering. The shame. I blamed myself for choosing so fickle a profession and for not being great enough at it to make more money. I blamed editors for not assigning stories or for failing to hire me. I even blamed my parents, for “letting” me pursue such an unstable profession. Even as I told myself to get up and get over it, I became immobilized by the racked sobs of a hyperventilating toddler throwing a tantrum. I spotted a stack of magazines nearby and snatched one. Without thinking, I ripped it up. I did the same with the rest, tearing them up one by one. I found the methodical ripping somewhat comforting. When they were gone, I lay, quiet and spent, in the sea of shredded paper.

Since such moments always seem to come in twos or threes, my relationship with the man I was dating soon unraveled in spectacular—and dramatically public—fashion. Instead of the private fight that heralds most breakups, this death knell tolled in the form of an improv show called Blind Date.

We were there with two other couples. There was my longtime friend Lara, a tall strawberry blond attorney whose sunny disposition makes her seem an unlikely prosecutor; my friend Rachael, a pilot and former model; and their boyfriends. When we walked into the bar outside the theater, the improv star was working the crowd. She would choose a man from the audience to play her date onstage—for a whopping ninety minutes. Lara and Rachael’s boyfriends defined their strategies quickly: They would be quiet and nonresponsive, rude even, to avoid getting picked. My boyfriend didn’t take that route. No, when the actress turned to him, he continued to be his friendly, warm social self.

Her character name was Mimi, and her buxom figure was clothed in a tight red dress that emphasized her cleavage in a classic, decidedly non-trashy way. Speaking with a French accent, she introduced herself. Then she asked how long we’d been dating (ten months) and how we’d met (mutual friends). Mike returned her smile and shook her hand, and as the bar announced last call, the three of us chatted amiably. As we made our way into the darkened theater, Mimi asked if I would be okay with her choosing Mike as her date. “Sure,” I said. Sure, as if she were asking me if I take sugar with my tea. If it was a strange situation in which to find myself, I didn’t let on. I just flashed a steely smile and acted like it was the most normal thing in the world—just more amusing—for a sexy, flirtatious actress with a tight dress and a French accent to yank my boyfriend away for the evening.

Later, I would look back and wonder what the hell I had been thinking. Of course, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was reacting. And when it came to foreign or threatening situations, for as long as I could remember my reaction was to cling at all costs to the role of the Cool Girl, rolling with the punches, going with the flow, acting as if I could take it all in stride. Growing up skiing in the mountains of New Mexico and Colorado, I knew that the moment you got scared and hesitated, you were liable to lose your balance and cartwheel into the air to land in a heap of wrecked bones and equipment. The way to traverse the rough patches was to grin and flex your muscles, to soldier through without letting on that that steep pitch was really freaking you out.

Of course, if I’d considered the analogy, I would have conceded that at a certain point, fear and the action it precipitates—say, roaring to a halt at the edge of a cliff—are lifesaving. But I didn’t. I responded to discomfort with a stiff smile, a laugh, or the occasional sarcastic zinger. Lascivious comments hurled by men twice my age received a half smile that said, “I heard you but I’m in no way affected by your idiocy.” The time my best friend and I rolled a car going eighty miles per hour and miraculously emerged with minor scrapes, I transformed into a congenial, plastic-faced talk show host on fast-forward, chirpily questioning the EMTs about their jobs and kids and hometowns as if I spent all of my days chatting with strangers while strapped to a gurney in the back of a speeding ambulance.

So on that clear October night in 2011, as I took my seat in the theater and waited for my boyfriend to walk onstage with another woman in front of several hundred people, I stared straight ahead as my friends, on either side of me, cast questioning glances my way. I laughed. It’s fine. Life’s nothing if not an adventure, right?

The set was simple: a red-cloth-covered table set for two with a chandelier overhead. Mimi, in her formfitting scarlet dress and bright red lipstick, sat waiting. Mike stepped onto the stage. He mumbled an introduction, shook her hand, and sat down. Normally pale, he was now the color of a fluorescent glow-in-the-dark skeleton. Gone was his usual gregarious personality, his smiles and jokes. When vivacious Mimi asked him a series of get-to-know-you questions, he nearly whispered the answers. A pained silence settled over the crowd.

And then she asked the question.

“So, do you want kids?”

I felt an involuntary intake of breath, as if a ghost had jabbed me hard below the sternum. This was a point of contention. I’d always thought I wanted children, but as I advanced into my thirties and a decade of being single or in long-term relationships that didn’t stick stretched into fifteen years, I wondered if it was wise to want something that seemed so out of my control. Maybe I was mistaking the fear of running out of time for actual desire. And yet, his resistance deeply troubled me.

“I don’t think so,” he replied, still stiff and uneasy.

Every muscle in my body was suddenly on alert, coiled, tense. My jaw clamped as I gripped the sides of my chair.

Mimi looked surprised. “But how do you know for sure?” she asked.

“I don’t, but I’m leaning toward no.”

A tux-clad waiter appeared and took Mike’s order: whiskey on the rocks. He gulped it down and ordered another. This time the waiter returned with an entire bottle of Jack Daniels. As Mike drank, that wooden board of a man none of those in our group recognized loosened up and morphed back into the jovial guy we thought we knew. He even scored a few jokes. You could almost feel the audience breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Mimi invited him to her “flat,” and they mimed hopping into her car and driving across Paris, bouncing along in an imaginary vehicle rolling over imaginary cobblestones. Once they arrived—Mike taking large swigs from the bottle of liquor while seated in the imaginary car—they opened the pretend doors, climbed out, and sat down on an all-too-real velvet sofa on the edge of the stage. Mimi managed to extract from him the fact that he was a musician, and with the snap of the fingers she summoned her assistant. The actor who had played the waiter reappeared moments later, as if by magic, with a guitar. “Will you play me a song?” Mimi asked Mike, batting her eyelashes at him like a cartoon Bambi. He obliged, and as soon as he strummed the first few chords, my stomach churned. The guitar was badly out of tune, but I could hear well enough to identify the song as one he’d written after a breakup. Perfect. Now there were three people up there—him, a sultry French vamp, and an ex-girlfriend.

“Wow, you wrote that about a girl?” Mimi breathed, sidling closer to him on the sofa. Was it just me, or was the entire audience tense but pretending this was mildly entertaining? I could no longer tell where I ended and the rest of the crowd began. It felt like I was floating above the room, detached ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Avery
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 039918483X
• ISBN 13: 9780399184833
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288