The 2002 annual Spirituality & Healing in Medicine conference convened in Boston in December. Two new sponsors—The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and The George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health—joined with Harvard Medical School and the Mind/Body Medical Institute to support this year's event.
When Honor Hill told how a young woman was healed of deafness through the power of forgiveness, one could hear a pin drop. A Christian Science healer, Ms. Hill's riveting eyewitness account of this event, before a packed audience of more than 500, put an exclamation point on this year's Spirituality & Healing in Medicine conference. The conference theme was "The Importance of Forgiveness."
One thing came through loud and clear: Forgiveness heals.
Another thing was this: Forgiveness isn't always easy. In fact, it can sometimes seem like an impossible step to take. Whether a grudge is directed at others, oneself, circumstances, or God, letting it go is emotionally charged and might feel unfair. Forgiveness takes courage. It may also take empathy—or a leap of faith. Even practice. For some, it involves deep trust in a divine restorative power or a merciful life-adjusting principle.
The conference also brought out that there's disagreement about what forgiveness is, exactly. Is it refusal to get even? Forgetting deep hurt? Absence of malice? Compassionate response to admitted wrongdoing? Unconditional love-your-enemy love?
What's more, opinions varied about where forgiveness comes from: Is it something personal, drummed up by reason or will-power from a mysterious place deep inside? A divine spark that results from prayer, a heaven-sent grace or gift? A natural resource flowing from a bottomless well of universal spirituality that anyone can dip into?
However hard it may be to access, whatever its precise definition, and wherever it comes from—whatever the complexities and tensions it involves relative to other ideals, such as justice—the religious leaders, healthcare professionals, and social scientists at the conference agreed: Forgiveness is a good thing, in more ways than one. It helps hearts, minds, and bodies. It improves lives. It even has the potential to empower groups as well as individuals. Forgiveness works.
Conference co-director Dr. Herbert Benson asserted at the start that "spirituality in society is increasing," and conference presenters and attendees supported his comments through firsthand experiences in which they've seen and felt the power of forgiveness. They told how it helps the forgiver overcome hurt and depression, regain peace, recapture clarity and equilibrium. And many are finding, including both spiritual healers and physical scientists engaged in the new scholarly field of forgiveness studies, that something else accompanies the healing of emotional pain. "Forgiveness brings on physical change," said Dr. Benson, founding president of the Mind/ Body Medical Institute and an associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School. "Inability to forgive blocks hope," he said, "and therefore has profound impact on our health."
Some participants suggested that giving up a grudge doesn't just help the one who's been hurt. It helps everyone. It paves the way to reconciliation and peace, perhaps justice. Removing the dagger of condemnation, resentment, bitterness, and hate is a good thing to do—as John Marks Templeton puts it, in a conference flier for the Campaign for Forgiveness Research (www.forgiving.org/campaign/research.asp)—"Because forgiveness benefits both the giver and the receiver."
Some went even further. They suggested that forgiveness is a spiritual force that ripples out into the community. A single act of forgiveness goes out into the world and shifts, ever so slightly but significantly, the world's deepest mental structures. It affects everyone. Though as yet virtually untapped, they say that forgiveness's potential to heal individuals and groups—even nations—is limitless.
Forgiveness-intervention—"practice, practice, practice"
"Forgiveness sets the stage for being able to love, and I think that's ultimately where healing is," said conference co-director Christina M. Puchalski, founder and director of The George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (www.gwish.org). Her research shows that spirituality and forgiveness-intervention are "integral to whole patient care" and result in "better health outcomes." Health is restoration to wholeness, not just a technical cure, said Dr. Puchalski. She emphasized that sensitivity to the power of forgiveness helps caregivers "partner" with their patients, making them not merely technicians but healers.
"Practice, practice, practice. Practice forgiveness," said scientist Frederic Luskin, director and cofounder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project.
Author of Forgive for Good (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2002), Dr. Luskin and his colleagues have been studying ways that forgiveness can be taught and learned. "Forgiveness is a normal thing," he said, "a quality of the heart and mind that we can access when the going gets rough." It's not "esoteric or otherworldly," but "a language that reaches everybody." His scientific findings show that forgiveness reduces stress, hurt, and anger. And it reverses physiological effects associated with these negatives. "The real power of forgiveness is day to day," he said. "Start with the home. End with the home. Practice it with the people you love. Go home and act loving. Don't remind them again of something they didn't do for you. Thank them for something. Be kind. Because it has benefits."
The Stanford Forgiveness Project shows, Dr. Luskin reported, that forgiveness contributes significantly to emotional competence in financial services advisors. Even more profoundly, it contributes to the emotional rescue of families victimized by violent crime. He described rigorous forgiveness-training steps by which he and his team members have helped Protestant and Catholic mothers from Northern Ireland whose children were murdered. (Dr. Luskin's website www.learningtoforgive.com includes descriptions of, and data for, both projects.)
Professor Everett L. Worthington Jr., professor of psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, described his decade-long "research on a method to forgive." He said that "empathy, sympathy, compassion, unselfish love ... are the positive-oriented emotions" that contribute to "decisional and motivational" forgiveness. They spark a change of head and heart. They're the antidote to unforgiveness, which he defined as "a complex combination of negative emotions (resentment, bitterness, hostility, hate, anger, and fear) in response to a transgressor." Professor Worthington, editor of Dimensions of Forgiveness (Templeton Foundation Press, 1998), said he was forced to call on the practicality of his own research when his family was struck by tragedy. (The February 3, 2003, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel gives the full story of Professor Worthington's remarkable journey from anger and rage to forgiveness, which he describes as "a gift from God.")
Forgiveness as a way of life
One conference attendee, a doctor, said that forgiveness is what enables him to ward off the fear of malpractice suits from his patients and work unselfishly to help them. It's why he's able to "love every patient who comes through the door." He shared this insight at an evening "Creative Dialogue" session, chaired by Jean Jolly. One of the main messages was: if health care professionals want their patients to forgive, then forgiveness has to be a way of life for them, too. As one woman put it, people need to "model forgiveness."
Dr. Jolly threw out the question, what exactly is forgiveness? Some of the answers were: "letting go of personal bitterness," "a loss of hostility," "a change of heart," "finding peace and clarity to promote growth." One man said he thought of forgiveness as "a gift" you give someone, including yourself. One woman's insight seemed to really hit home: "Forgiveness is a quality of character."
Practical religion
The conference ended on a high note through a panel discussion called "Clinical and Spiritual Perspectives on Forgiveness with Case Histories." It turned the focus from a secular perspective to how forgiveness is viewed from a religious perspective.
Imam Yusuf Hassan, staff chaplain of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, described how forgiveness is a normal part of life in the theology of Islam. It's so important, he said, that Muslims dedicate the last ten days of Ramadan to prayers for forgiveness. Rabbi Simkha Y. Weintraub, Rabbinic director, New York Jewish Healing Center, New York City, drove home a counter-view: Forgiveness involves a quid pro quo—in Judaism forgiveness is a result of repentance and remorse. There's no forgiveness "until the wrong done is put right," he said. The Reverend Joseph J. Driscoll, president and chief executive officer, National Association of Catholic Chaplains, St. Francis, Wisconsin, discussed forgiveness in the context of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to pointing out the church's emphasis on confession, he reminded everyone that "forgiveness is at the heart of Christianity" in other ways, and central to the healing stories of Jesus. His comments on the grief and despair that is currently wracking his church led to further dialogue on the boundaries of forgiveness.
It was at this point that Honor Hill, a Christian Science practitioner from Dallas, Texas, delivered a powerful example of how forgiveness will literally heal physical disabilities. Her eyewitness account of how deafness was overcome through forgiveness by the young woman who would eventually become her daughter-in-law was an example, she said, of "a very tight cause-and-effect relationship" between spirituality and physical healing that harks back to Jesus' healing works. (For the patient's own account of her healing, please see below.)
Hill explained that the young woman's trust in God—often thought of as divine Spirit or Love itself—wiped away the anguish, unfairness, and frustration she felt as a member of the Boston deaf community. And it enabled her to uncover and let go of a deep-seated grudge against her father that had been engendered by her parents' divorce. She was able to "hear" God's good message, said Hill, about her father's and her own pure spiritual worth, integrity, and perfection. It brought forgiveness. And forgiveness sparked physical healing.
"Each of us is the image of God," said Hill. And therefore "at our core reality everyone is loving and lovable, forgiving and forgivable."
As the panel's moderator, The Reverend Natalia Vonnegut Beck, rector, Grace Episcopal Church, summed up, "Love is the operative word."
