International Military Chief of Chaplains Conference

International Military Chief of Chaplains Conference 1-4 February, 2008
Cape Town
South Africa

Fr Michael Lapsley,SSM
Director of the Institute for Healing of Memories


A Community Based Reconciliation and Healing Model

Dear Friends

May I add my own small voice to those of my leaders who have all welcomed you here to our mother city at the tip of the mother continent of the human family.

I would like to honour you for the front line work that you do as chaplains and stress its importance for creating a peaceful world.

It is not everyday, that a former chaplain to a liberation movement, gets to speak to a world conference of military chaplains. Or for that matter someone who for years was a committed pacificist who eventually became a victim of state terrorism. Today I speak to you as someone with a profound commitment to healing wounds and transforming memories.

As I thought about what I might say to you, I couldn't help wondering what are the concerns you have as military chaplains and what are the concerns brought to you by the chaplains who are accountable to you. I wonder how you deal with the complex relationship between your identity as religious leaders who are part of worldwide faith communities, and your identity as disciplined members of military formations of a particular nation state. How do you live with what some would say is the moral ambiguity implicit in the notion of a military chaplain? Especially if we don't believe in tribal gods.

Please allow me to share a little of my own journey to illustrate what I would like to say to you today.

One way I like to think of my own journey is from being a freedom fighter to becoming a healer.

I was a member of the African National Congress and one of its chaplains for many years during the time of the armed struggle.

Our battle in this country was also a theological battle. The apartheid state claimed divine guidance The world said apartheid was a crime against humanity whilst the international Christian community said it was a heresy. Officially the churches only provided chaplains to those supporting apartheid and never to the forces for liberation. My own view was that apartheid was an option or a choice for death carried out in the name of the gospel of life. For a number of years during the time of apartheid I was on a South African Government hit list,

Three months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, in April of 1990, I received from the South African government, a letter bomb, hidden inside the pages of two religious magazines. Among other injuries, I was left with no hands and one eye. For me it is always important to say that I had a sense that God was with me – that the great promise of the Christian scriptures had been kept – “Lo I am with you always even to the end of the age.”

What enabled me to heal? To travel towards wholeness. Excellent medical treatment both in Zimbabwe and in Australia, Yes.
But also I received messages of prayer, love and support from across the globe.

My own story was listened to, acknowledged, reverenced, recognised and given a moral content.
Every person has a story to tell. Every story needs a listener.

I would like to emphasize the difference between knowledge and acknowledgment and its importance for healing individuals, communities and nations. Families can have guilty secrets. There is abuse in a family. Everybody knows. There is knowledge but no acknowledgment, perhaps even denial. What is true of individuals and families is also true of nations.

Where torture has taken place, the torturer will tell the tortured that no mark will be left so no-one will believe that they have been tortured. Finally healing begins, when it is publically acknowledged that yes, you were tortured, and it was wrong. Torture inverts the moral order. Acknowledgment helps to recreate the moral order.

I have spent some time with the Sami people in the northern part of Sweden. There the church has acknowledged its role in oppression. However the wider community has not been educated about the history of the oppression. So knowledge and acknowledgment are both important on the journey to healing.

When I received a letter bomb, I became a victim. I physically survived so I was a survivor. I realized that if I was filled with hatred, self pity, bitterness and desire for revenge, then I would be a victim for ever.

One of South Africa's great leaders, Chief Albert Lutuli, once said, “those who think of themselves
as victims eventually become the victimizers of others.” This is as much true of what happens in intimate space as within nations and between nations. We don't have to look very far to find dramatic examples. People give themselves permission to do terrible things to others because of what was done to them. Of course sometimes there is competition for victimhood.

There is also the relationship between political violence, legitimized or not, and what happens in the privacy of the bedroom. Armed conflict comes to an end for the society or the individual but does not necessarily end in the home where there maybe self harm or harm to others in the form of domestic or sexual violence.

The life giving alternative to victims becoming victimisers is that victims should become victors, not in a militaristic sense Rather those who have become objects of history, become subjects of history once more. The key as to whether victims becomes victimisers or victors often lies with whether or not there has been acknowledgment.

Here in South Africa, we did have a considerable amount of acknowledgment in terms of the role of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which you have just heard about.

My question was what about those who did not qualify to come to the Commission. What happened to their stories? When horrible things happen to human beings, it is normal to harbour feelings such as bitterness, hatred and desire for revenge. The problem is that those feelings destroy us. For our own sake, we have to find the way of detoxifying, of vomiting out the poison.

It was in the context of reflections of my own journey and that of the nation that some of us developed an intervention, which we call a Healing of the Memories workshop. This particular intervention takes two and a half days. We promise people one step on the road to healing. However for some the step maybe life changing especially if a story is being told for the first time.

We know that in situations of conflict there will be those who need clinical interventions. Relatively speaking this is often a very small population. There is often a much larger group of people who are sub clinical, but still have unfinished business from the past. They need a safe space where events from the past can be addressed and where they can begin to let go of destructive feelings. Even in situations where many have suffered, people often feel very isolated as they don't know what others are feeling. A new sense of belonging emerges when I tell my story and there are multiple witnesses.

I have to tell you that I am pleased that those who engage in war are affected by it, that they get PTSD, have nightmares. Wouldn't it be terrible if we could do terrible things to other human beings and remain unaffected. As a human family we are not hard wired for war We were created for peace.

Personally I am also very encouraged when I see military forces, not engaged in fighting wars, but in conflict prevention, peace keeping and peace makers.

In preparing soldiers for such a role chaplains have a major role to play. Not least when it comes to
attitudes to local populations. In this regard as well, one cannot stress enough the importance of troops, having knowledge and respect, even reverence for other peoples cultures and religious beliefs. Fundamentalist attitudes, be they Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, cultural or secular, can help foment conflict rather than prevent it. It will help the soldiers if they also know the history of present and past conflicts especially if the military of their own country may have played a role in the past.

Chaplains are people who have a concern for the spiritual and moral welfare of the armed forces. Chaplains have an important role in helping prevent human rights violations such as torture and sexual violence. Even in war it is the chaplain who must insist that the enemy is a human being.

Precisely because of their concern for their own troops the chaplains should be the first ones to object against any attempt to dilute or circumvent international treaties and laws such as the Geneva Convention, the overarching definitions of all people as either combatants, or civilians with no exceptions. Equally justifications of torture should never be entertained. Failure to do so is not only a moral betrayal but in the long term opens ones own troops to similar abuses without protection.

When a war has been popular, soldiers are regarded as heroes. When a war has been unpopular no-one wants to listen. But actually in neither case do people want to listen to the stories and give space for the feelings that soldiers carry inside them. I always remember a workshop with a young freedom fighter. He was regarded as a hero in his community for good reasons. He told us “That is not what I wish to speak about. I want to speak about that of which I am guilty and ashamed. Being just a hero did not give space for the fulness of his humanity.

Allow me to raise another issue. All of us know that chaplains, even perhaps some sitting in front of me today, as well as those who serve under our command, may carry within us enduring damage as a consequence of our own participation in conflict. We often say in our Institute, those who would be the healers of others must be on their own journey of healing. Permission and space is needed for chaplains to deal with their own stuff, and the impact of the lives we lead. Lest we too become victimizers rather than victors.

In conclusion may I just say that the Institute for Healing of Memories has worked in a variety of contexts across the globe, with combatants and civilians, in post and present conflict situations, in relation to HIV and AIDS, with refugees, prisoners, victims of war here in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, Uganda, the US, Northern Ireland, Fiji, Ausralia, Germany and the UK.

Every context is unique with its own particular history and circumstances. But at the deepest level, we are one human family, capable of beautiful and horrible deeds, sharing the same destructive and lifegiving emotions and feelings.

ends