This day is one of my favorite of the entire year - the last day of exams at my high school alma mater. Which means taking a nibbling to the Freshmen & Junior girls and a munchlette for the ENTIRE Boys School.
After delivering the wee small goodies to the appropriate places, I decided to go to chapel, sitting in the balcony with the soon-to-graduate seniors.
EVERYONE of every age should have heard Barry Halterman's simple chapel talk. He gave each student one final task to complete before Saturday's graduation. To let go of any of the hurt or anger they might feel toward classmates or teachers, the school or any related institutions, toward friends who disappointed. Let go. Don't hold on.
Barry talked about friends & classmates of his who, decades after leaving the school, still harbor resentments & ill feelings. Holding on harms the person clenching the hurt. He asked the students to recall the Lord's last words - Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.
What a good last task to "assign" - one that should be assigned to all of us, whatever our age. I see that holding onto hurts in so many older friends - it seems to give some people a perverse sense of comfort, holding onto ancient slights & perceived betrayals.
A dear older friend had a difficult early adulthood & is experiencing a lot of challenges in her here & now. As a young woman, the man she expected to marry was killed in World War II, as was her only brother, the sibling to whom she was closest. Today's realities include increasingly serious memory challenges; missing her husband, who died fairly suddenly over five years ago; living in a small apartment in a new town in the midst of people she had to get to know on her own, without her Beloved. AND who rarely has a negative word to say about anyone, who sees the bright sight of situations, who is famous throughout her senior residence for her beaming smile & always at-the-ready "Hello!" She personifies the person who lets go & moves forward.
Last week, three different people came up to tell me how much they appreciate my older friend. She has a certain something they admire & perhaps envy.
Too many older people dwell on their hurts, on their lacks, dredge up ancient slights & disappointments & perceived betrayals that could be a distant as before their own high school days. Listening to them grumbling about this & grousing about that, it feels like they get smaller & smaller with each small, petty word they drag up. If only, as Barry urged the high school students about to head out for the year, they could just let them go, could just forgive.
What Barry described is called woundology - self-inflicted wounds that leave less and all others unharmed. What Barry called the students - and all of us there - to do was to free ourselves from the experience of perceived pain. He didn't mention that that's all it turns out to be - perceived. The older you get, the more you learn how often you were wrong wrong wrong about how others perceived you or even what you thought they did.
It's a life talk I'd love to give those among my older friends who see all the downs, who hold onto all the negatives & distrust the positives.
Everyone, everywhere, should hear Barry's chapel talk this morning. I'm so glad I did & hope that the students take his words to heart, put them into action.
If only all of my friends, of every age, understood that holding hurts close to our heart, refusing to let them go, becoming fluent in woundology instead of - like my dear older friend - forgiveness & friendship, leads us nowhere.
We all, at every age, need to let go. We call it forgiveness, but it's really liberation - and the one who's freed is our self!
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