Workshop Offers Lessons In Forgiveness

Stanford University researcher Fredric Luskin has presented workshops on forgiveness to hundreds of survivors of bad relationships, broken homes and businesses gone sour.

But until recently, he had never met anyone like the woman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who sat across the table from him and said, “My name is Margaret McKinney, and I’m here because I had a son murdered by the IRA and his body hid for 21 years. I had such bitterness in my heart those years that I wanted to kill those who caused it.”

In the plainest, blow-by-blow English, the proud 69-year-old woman described how her 22-year-old son, Brian, whose body was finally found last June, had been kidnapped on his way to work one day in May 1978, “walked to a shallow grave with his hands tied behind his back and shot in the head. … From a happy home, full of singing and such laughter,” she explained, “you plunge into the deepest hell, is the only way I can describe it.”

The remarkable thing is that by the time McKinney made these comments in March, the gloom and anger were lifting. Something extraordinary had come into her heart, she said.

McKinney is one of four mothers of murdered sons from Northern Ireland who went to Stanford for Luskin’s workshops.

Two are Roman Catholic, and two are Protestant. All acknowledged a new willingness to forgo bitterness - and credited the change to their six days at Stanford with Luskin and his colleague, Presbyterian minister Byron Bland.

Bland is associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, a man with contacts in Northern Ireland’s ecumenical peace movement. Now he has joined Luskin, who directs the Stanford Forgiveness Project, a $200,000 study begun in 1998.

It moves the age-old religious conflict into an academic setting, attempting to study how forgiveness works and how it can be taught in order to enhance physical health and emotional well-being.

Last year, a report on Luskin’s initial research, involving 60 Stanford students, concluded that learning to forgive significantly reduces anger and stress and can improve relationships.

Luskin and Bland wondered, however, if the research would help survivors of political and religious violence.

Would the four mothers and two peace activists accompanying them even care that the process of forgiveness unfolds in four distinct phases, as Luskin believes? Would it matter to them that forgiving an enemy is a personal choice, as is feeling resentment? Would they have the patience to participate in Luskin’s visualizations and deep-breathing exercises?

Well, yes. Every member of the group said the sessions, almost miraculously, had given them a new way to approach the rest of their lives.

They had learned to “forgive ourselves and laugh again, without feeling guilty, and it is a wonderful feeling,” McKinney said.

By week’s end, they were quite a sight, this group, as members laughed and clasped hands, breaking into song, even as they told their sad stories and exchanged old photographs of little boys wearing shorts and vests. The four mothers witnessed to their lifelong Christian faith one moment, then practiced visualizations and breathing exercises the next.

They called one another “dear” and prayed together.

It was on a trip to the Bay Area in the early 1990s that McConville met the Bland, who took an interest in the Northern Ireland situation and began traveling to Belfast and surrounding towns. Ten months ago, after learning about Luskin’s work, Bland suggested a collaboration, and the week’s experiment was born.

A sixth member of the visiting group - W. Sydney Callaghan, a Methodist minister from Belfast who helped found Northern Ireland’s hospice movement - suggested that the women could be part of a vanguard upon their return home. He said they might “teach a therapy of tears” to the many Irish men “who know how to fight but don’t know how to cry.”

Luskin said his forgiveness workshops, fine-tuned for several years now, are able to address “the universality of hurt.

“The bar may be lifted higher here,” he said, “because of the devastation felt by these women. But there is a central experience of being human that has `loss’ all over it.

“There is so much possibility for us to be hurt, whether it’s in relationships, in business. It’s everywhere, and it’s inevitable, and it’s painful.

“It’s not, `Will it happen?’ It’s, `How will you handle it when it happens?”’ The researcher said his goal is “to make forgiveness practical.

So many people go to church, and they are told to forgive. But they’re not given the steps to do it.”

Before the session ended, Bland stood in front of a flip chart and tried to explain the dynamics of violence in Northern Ireland. He told the group that the death of a son was a personal event for each of them, but a political event for others.

He suggested that when the women return home, they might bridge those two viewpoints and the communities that adhere to them.

Afterward, Pearl Marshall, 57, said, “I have peace of mind.

“I never would want to lose the memory of my son. But I don’t think too often of the people who murdered him.”

“It’s very hard knowing you’ll live the rest of your life and never see your son again,” Pat Campbell, 64, continued. “But we must move on with the memory of our sons in our hearts. And we must move on, knowing that our sons are waiting on us up in heaven. And we’re just a few steps behind them.”

“And they all know each other in heaven,” McKinney added.

Campbell nodded.

“And now when we go home, we need to leave all the guilt,” she said. “We’ve got the therapy from Fred to live our lives and smile again.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: TO CALL

For information on the Stanford Forgiveness Project, call (650) 723-6460.