I am honored to introduce today’s guest, Phil Cousineau. Phil is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, teacher, editor, travel leader, storyteller and TV host.

We will be discussing a range of topics, such as the meaning of forgiveness and atonement, the importance of presence, and our collective longing for wholeness.

Where Does Your Forgiveness End?

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

The following is a taste of my conversation with Phil.

Q: Where does forgiveness end? Where does compassion end?
Phil: (Quoting Dr. Jacob Needleman): You ask them three times for forgiveness. Now, the first time, they may still be angry at you. The second time, they may not have gotten over you. And then, the third time, they could forgive you or they have become so obtuse and so bitter that they still refuse, well, on, let’s say, on the grand scale of things, your karma is free. You have done what you need to do on the spiritual plane.

Q: How do you define atonement?
Phil: At-one-ment. It’s like many of the classic definitions of beauty, which is all forms of harmony and wholeness.

Q: How does atonement relate to forgiveness?
Phil: The act of forgiveness is kind of going halfway and then stopping. Doing something to make amends that is psychologically commensurate with the damage that was done, then the healing can begin.

Q: How does one get to forgiveness when there’s a complex blend of multiple layers of mutual wrongdoing, with each party blaming the other?
Phil: If we do not learn how to forgive in our relationships, in the workplace, and in our political activism, a kind of soul rust sets in.

When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Phil says, “People will risk themselves for others, and I once asked Joseph Campbell why this is so? And I can still hear the beautiful cadence in his voice when he gave me the answer on camera, “It’s because we know at the end of the day, we are one.”

About Phil:
Phil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, editor, independent scholar, documentary filmmaker, travel leader and storyteller. His life-long fascination with the art, literature and history of culture has taken him on many journeys around the world. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics–from mythology, film and writing, to beauty, travel, sports and creativity. He has published more than 35 nonfiction books and has over 20 scriptwriting credits to his name. He is the host and cowriter of the PBS and Link TV series, “Global Spirit.”

Find Phil on Social Media:
http://www.philcousineau.net/ (Website)
https://twitter.com/PhilCousineau (Twitter)
https://www.facebook.com/CousineauPhil/ (Facebook)
https://www.instagram.com/philcousineau/ (Instagram)

A Sampling of Phil’s Books:
Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement
Burning the Midnight Oil: Illuminating Words for the Long Night’s Journey into Day
The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

Book Mentioned in the Interview:
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.

Marlena: I’m very pleased to introduce today’s guest, Phil Cousineau. Phil is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, teacher, editor, travel leader, storyteller, TV host. I mean seriously, is there anything you haven’t done Phil?
Today, we’re going to talk about a book Phil edited, which is titled “Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement.” It’s a compilation of essays by 18 different authors, all suggesting that as indispensable as forgiveness is to the healing process, there’s another equally profound thing that’s needed for ultimate reconciliation, and that’s atonement. “Beyond Forgiveness” shows how acts of atonement such as making amends or providing restitution can relieve us of the pain of the past and give us more hope for the future.
And just to be clear, when I mention authors without a specific reference in this interview, I’m referring to chapter authors of Phil’s book “Beyond Forgiveness.” So, the title of this podcast is “Becoming Who You Truly Are,” and this season we’re talking about forgiveness and reconciliation as paths to healing and finding our true selves. Over and over and in different ways, my guests are addressing the question, what does it really mean to forgive? Phil is uniquely qualified to explore this question, along with other issues related to forgiveness and reconciliation. Phil, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
Phil: Thank you, Marlena. Thank you for the invitation. I’m thrilled to be discussing and exploring this topic again.
Marlena: As a way of introducing the book, “Beyond Forgiveness,” would you tell us a bit about two things? First of all, what inspired you to produce the book? And number two, why did you pull together this particular set of authors to write about forgiveness, atonement, and reconciliation?
Phil: Well, thank you for such a wonderful leading question. I’m a great proponent of mythology, as you and your listeners may know, worked with Joseph Campbell on “The Hero’s Journey” for many years. I have been reading Greek myths, all kinds of mythology since I was a kid. And one of the fundamental questions asked in all great wisdom stories, which is another way to talk about mythology, is where did it all begin? It’s a wonderful epigram in Robert Colloso’s [SP] book about Greek myth.
And I think we all have our stories, our family stories, our relationship stories, when and where we began work, that’s where it begins. And this is a particularly interesting story and powerful one for me because I had just begun hosting and co-writing a show on Link TV and then PBS called “Global Spirit” in which the conceit is that the producer, Stephen Olsen, and I select two or three guests from different corners of the world to explore one single topic for 57 minutes.
And the second show in, we’re talking about 10 years ago now, we had a show on forgiveness and healing, not just forgiveness, but forgiveness and healing and a long-lasting in healing. And we immediately came up with three marvelous guests. One was Azim Khamisa, an Iranian banker whose son had been murdered in a gangland initiation trial, actually. While his first night out delivering pizzas, he was shot and killed in an initiation of all things.
And then, the other two guests were Kate Dahlstedt and her husband, Edward Tick, who are psychologists who specialize in long-term trauma and dealt with guilt and shame from war. And this one single program of forgiveness and healing on our series PBS, PBS is “Global Spirit,” has been showing virtually ever since in all corners of the world. It’s shown in prisons, it’s shown in psychotherapy sessions. And eventually, a friend of Azim Khamisa named Richard Meyer in Southern California, contacted him that he had been profoundly moved by this show, and wondered if he could contact me. He did, and he asked me the great question that all authors love to hear, Marlena, “Do you think there’s a book here?” This is what we’re all living to hear, right? Force-feed the world some kind of new inspiration that we have. Do you think there’s a book? And immediately, I thought about it. I had and I have compiled a number of what are sometimes called companion books to movies, documentaries that I had worked on. And this was a terrific choice. And single-handedly, he helped finance the entire two-year-long project, and we got a wonderful book deal with John Wiley publishers.
And the trick then was to find out how could we fill the book out? Because what had come about in that one show and the initial conversations with Mr. Meyer, and with Ed, Kate and Azim is that forgiveness is only the first step. It’s a profound step, but it can also be an easy step. It does not go anywhere in terms of a deep, long-lasting reconciliation.
Husbands and wives can argue, people in a business environment can argue, nations can argue about a border dispute and temporarily solve the problem. But if there isn’t a second step, which is the phrase that Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi himself said, “If there isn’t the second step, then the peace that we have forged in our love life, at work, or in nation-building, will dissipate like the morning dew.”
Now, this was something I felt I could sink my teeth into because what an author is always asking, seriously, is does the world need one more book on such and such? And we do have a plethora of books about forgiveness, and that’s actually a good thing. It’s very difficult for people to truly, deeply, sincerely forgive, we know that. Well, the books are already out there, and there’s even an award-winning PBS series about the power of forgiveness based on the terrible massacre in the Amish world in Pennsylvania years ago.
This one was different for me. And so, I set about trying to find a number of other contributors to the book who would either offer essays, original essays, something that they have not written before, or people that I might interview. And so, I was very conscientious about a male-female balance, but also a balance of cultures. So, I have someone from the Mohawk nation, Douglas George, who represents indigenous peoples. I have a Buddhist, Reverend Heng Sure from Toledo, Ohio, of all places, and people from all the basic face and traditions in order for us to get what? To get a kind of 360-degree view on the two of these very long traditions, forgiveness coming together with some form of deep reconciliation. And that’s what I offer as the book. So, you’re not just getting from one point of view, you’re getting it from roughly 15 different points of view.
And I’m happy to say that there’s a study guide that goes with the book. And people in churches and universities have been using the study guide, partly because, and I know we’re just slightly getting ahead of ourselves. But one of the things that I announced in my preface in the book was that…also the book is probably 10-years old now, is that we are in the beginning, the exciting vanguard, if you will, of what is called in several communities, restorative justice.
Marlena: Yeah.
Phil: It’s happening in indigenous communities virtually all around the world, and they have been practicing this for 40,000 or 50,000 years if you count the aborigine culture in the way they deal with justice and injustice. And I do count them in there, but also, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Some American court systems want to move beyond just punishment and retribution, and I am thrilled, Marlena, that our book has made a small dent in that.
Marlena: Yeah, yeah. So, I want to talk a bit more about restorative justice down the road a bit. But let me first ask you, were there any surprises as these chapters came together? Anything new that.. unexpected that you learned from the process of editing the book?
Phil: Excuse me. Yes, that’s a great question. A couple come to mind. One is that when I approached several different indigenous people to participate in the book one way or the other, based on a number of films I have written and/or directed five different documentaries on American-Indian issues, and so, I’ve had a bit of a glimmer inside of that world. But I’ve also filmed virtually all around the world. And what I’ve discovered is that virtually all indigenous tribes, especially the smaller they get, have some form of restorative justice involved, partly because of the mere size of the people.
If you have a community of a few hundred people, you can’t just exile somebody or put them in a small jail, a hut, a nipa [SP] of some kind, but you have to deal with it right then and there. And I found that’s a marvelous metaphor for what we’ve done as an entire society.
Your listeners probably know full well that America now has more people incarcerated than any nation on the planet. And that means most people know someone who either is or has been imprisoned. That is a blight on the cultural soul as far as I’m concerned. And what it means is we have had a system for a while of punish and put away. Punish and get them out of my sight, rather than what I have found to my delight, although the circumstances have often been extremely cruel, as in Rwanda, for example, an example we can talk about, a way of dealing with justice and injustice is as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
The second surprise was when I interviewed Dr. Jacob Needleman, who I feel is one of our great contemporary American philosophers. And we’re talking about the issue of forgiveness and atonement. And after about two hours, it came to, because he is of a Russian-Jewish background, it came to a kind of penultimate question, can we forgive everybody, right? Or do we have a kind of graded system? We can forgive the neighbor for putting up a fence blocking our light, but can we forgive, at least on some profound level, predators?
Marlena: Yes.
Phil: Tyrants? And if not, why not? I remember when I worked with Joseph Campbell, the great scholar mythology, and he would say, “Where does your forgiveness end? Where does your compassion end?” It’s quite a metaphysical question.
Anyway, with Dr. Needleman, something happened that has never happened to me. I’ve been interviewing people since I was 16 years old working for a hometown newspaper outside of Detroit, Michigan. So, thousands of people have come under my microphone, so to speak. And Jerry, as I’d like to call him, he said, “Phil, this is such an important and profound question. I would actually like to suspend our interview for a moment right now and ask you to come back in the morning, because I feel I need to think about this for a few minutes, and then I need to call my mother.” Oh, my God. As it turned out was his mother had lived through, survived the siege of Stalingrad. If your listeners know, roughly 250,000 people died because of the siege near the end of World War Two. And Mr. Needleman, being a thorough thinker and philosopher, didn’t want to just go theoretical, if you will. He wanted to call her and ask somebody who would remind him of what, let’s say, the long Jewish lineage would say about this but also from personal experience.
You want to know what his mother said? She said, “Jerry, in our tradition, the Russian-Jewish tradition, if you have hurt somebody, you ask them three times for forgiveness. Now, the first time, they may still be angry at you. The second time, they may not have gotten over you. And then, the third time, they could forgive you or they have become so obtuse and so bitter that they still refuse, well, on, let’s say, on the grand scale of things, your karma is free. You have done what you need to do on the spiritual plane.
And then, likewise, if someone in your community, your tribe, your nation, speaking of world wars, right? Has done something so horrible that it stretches your spiritual capacity, you must try thoroughly and genuinely at least three times to forgive somebody. And then, if you can’t, she said, and I think I got this in the book. It’s been a little while, but I think it’s in there. She says, “And in the end, if you are still having trouble with forgiveness on either end of this debate, try to learn to hate,” and this is a very strong word, of course, “hate the action, but not the person.”
Marlena: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: And Jerry Needleman, one of our greatest living philosophers said, “Phil, Mr. Cousineau, that helped me to hear that from my mother,” who was in her late 90s, by the way, when they had this little dialogue, because that’s what she had to live with after losing so many people in Stalingrad.
Marlena: Yeah. Phil, let’s go back a bit to the meaning of atonement. Powell writes that atonement is a state of mind, we’re at one at peace. Some of your other authors also define it as at onement. Would you say more about atonement, meaning we are at one?
Phil: Yes, I’d be happy to. So, again, some of your listeners may know that I’m a bit of a wordsmith which simply means I’ve been using words but also looking them up, dictionary diving to coin a phrase since I was a kid. We actually read books out loud together, and if came across a word we didn’t know as kids, my father insisted that we open up a dictionary. So, with every book, every film I’ve ever made, I go into the words. With this one, there’s, of course, an interesting etymology. The word itself dates back to the 14th century to describe being in accord with.
Originally, it wasn’t theological or spiritual. You could be atoned with your land or your neighbors which I find interesting. But it was a couple of hundred years later, when William Tyndale, an English reformation philosopher and linguist, became the first to translate the English Bible. And he was wrestling with a word that would describe what it meant to truly be reconciled with God, so this gets kind of heavy, and he couldn’t find one. There wasn’t one that really translated from the old, from the Hebrew or the Greek to later Greek. So, he’s the one who changed just to be in accord with as in harmony, the notion with being at one with somebody, something. It could be God, it could be your wife, it could be your pets. You are separated, you’re in disagreement, which means you’re at two, you’re not one.
So, at onement, is like the many of the classic definitions of beauty, which is all forms of harmony and wholeness. If your community is split because of a bitter political fight, everybody who will be at a kind of war until there was some attempt, some attempt to reconcile the conflicting views. So, that at one is something that runs through all of the interviews here. We are fractured as individuals, we are splintered as societies see. Often, these are violent words we use to describe what happens when we get split asunder.
My definition in the book, I’ll read it because I worked on this awhile. Atonement is an act that writes a wrong, makes amends, repairs harm, offers restitution, attempts compensation, clears the conscience of the offender, relieves anger for the victim, or serves justice that is somehow, and here is the operative word here, is somehow commensurate with the harm that was done. So, for example, when I had Ed and Kate on the “Global Spirit” show about forgiveness and healing, and leaders can go to globalspirit.com to see the entire show, it’s still one of the favorite things I’ve ever done, they described taking seven Vietnam veterans back to Vietnam every year on a kind of pilgrimage of atonement. And why? Because so many of those veterans have never spoken about what happened.
Marlena: Yeah.
Phil: It’s too painful. There’s too much guilt, there’s too much shame. So, the notion is if you go back to the original point of trauma, have a kind of catharsis, which would be tearful, some kind of ritual. We film one GI who hasn’t been back to Vietnam since the late 1960s. A small grave is dug. He rips off his dog tags and then buries the dog tags in the earth. Well, that’s a kind of catharsis right out of a Greek play. But here now is to me the magic, and it’s partly why I also wrote the book. Each one of these seven veterans that we interviewed in this one particular program, realized that they now had to do something.
You see, the act of forgiveness is kind of going halfway and then stopping. So, all of them had different projects. One told a horrific story about napalming a village. And he had been so ashamed of this for years. He had not even told his wife what he had done. So, they go back together, the wife comes with him on the trip, goes back and he announces he’s going to build a school. So, the building of something, it may not bring back the lives that were lost. But, let’s say, if you build a school, you are doing something that is on a, again, this is kind of amorphous, but, let’s say, psychologically commensurate with the damage that was done, then, as the great Van Morrison says, then the healing can begin.
Marlena: Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi writes that forgiveness and atonement are two sides of the same coin. And he says, “One without the other doesn’t mean much.” But if we define atonement as you just said, as being as one, is this even possible without forgiveness?
Phil: Oh, no. It has to be both. In the interview that I did with Mr. Gandhi, which was a series of phone calls and long emails and manuscripts going back and forth, and I just urged him to keep going deeper into what he learned from his grandfather, he ultimately came up with an image that was not in the first manuscript that he sent to me, which said… The brief setup is funny and very moving. Roughly 12 years old, he’s a bit of a juvenile delinquent in India, and his parents say, “We are either going to send you to military school or send you to live with your grandfather for two years. What’s it going to be?” So, in order to straighten out his young life, he chooses to live with his grandfather for two years, the Mahatma Gandhi, right?
Marlena: Yeah.
Phil: So, he goes and lives. And he remembers a conversation in which Gandhi described deep, long-lasting soul or even culture healing reconciliation as being like two pillars holding up a roof. If you’ve only got the one, let’s say, just forgiveness, now it may hold up a roof for a while, right, depending on where you had placed it, but eventually, it’s going to teeter and collapse. You need the second pillar to hold up the roof. That’s a great physical image to describe that. And the second part of that was that…Can you read me his definition again? Could you do that?
Marlena: He says that the forgiveness and atonement are two sides of the same coin. One without the other doesn’t mean much. My thinking in asking you this question is that I think you have articulated really well why… And in the book, your contributors have done a wonderful job explaining why forgiveness without atonement doesn’t mean much. My question was, is atonement even possible without forgiveness? They are not equal so much because you must have forgiveness to get to atonement. Is that correct?
Phil: Yes, of course.
Marlena: Okay.
Phil: That’s the first step. I should have mentioned that to begin with. It does make me ponder, thank you. If someone tries to leap all the way to some kind of restitution but never says sorry…
Marlena: Yes, yes, yes, that exactly.
Phil: …yes, this is very rich territory. We don’t need to name any names, but we do know there have been some terrible sexual scandals in the world of sports, in the world of celebrity, movies, politics, all of those, enormous public arenas in which…And it tends to be men with a lot of power and money will leap all the way forward and say, “Well, I’ll set up a fund for destitute mothers,” something like that.
Marlena: And that is not atonement the way you’re talking about it.
Phil: Yeah, no, it’s not. It’s more about portfolios.
Marlena: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the conflicts…
Phil: What victims are always waiting for is that phrase, “I am sorry…
Marlena: I’m sorry.
Phil: …or I regret what I’ve done,” some kind of… Often, what I got in some of their interviews I did was often you want to be in the presence of someone who hurt you and you want to feel the gaze, the gaze of remorse. So, to go right over and say I’m going to build a hospital to replace what I’ve done, but there’s no sense of sorriness or forgiveness, you’re right, that feels empty. It can feel empty both ways. So, thank you for pointing that out.
Marlena: Yeah. The conflicts you described in the preface are examples of fairly clear one-way transgressions, most notably, apartheid. But it seems to me that many conflicts are a more complex blend of multiple layers of mutual wrongdoing and each party blaming the other. I’m wondering, how does that complicate the process of forgiveness, atonement, and reconciliation?
Phil: Oh, it’s a difficult question, which means a difficult answer. One example would be what an activist had said about…Zainab Salbi was her name in a rocky American, political activist and writer for the Women for Women International Movement. And what she’s describing is often, I don’t want to reduce it but tit for tat violence, which we have seen in Israel Palestine, in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, even today as we speak, these endless cycles of violence in which there’s blood letting out of things like national pride. Someone somewhere has to stop and say, “We were wrong, you were wrong.” This will never end until someone says, “I’m going to put the gun down.” Someone says, “We have to rebuild, regain the world.” And it is possible. I’m just beginning to think this out, but it’s possible, that it can be the difference between female and male sensibilities. For example, men have been trying to wage peace, if that is even a phrase, in Northern Ireland. Why don’t we use that right? For centuries. But men can often be vengeful. I would guess 90% of our movies, and a high percentage of novels are based on retribution and revenge. It’s built, right? It’s in love stories, it’s in political stories, you name it, it’s there.
But it wasn’t until four women sat together actually with Bill Clinton and a couple of other American leaders. No Irishmen were involved in the final peace process for Northern Ireland. And virtually, all of these women who ended up winning the Nobel Prize had to say, “Someone has to say enough. Someone has to say there is no future.” What is that? Desmond Tutu’s famous phrase, there is no future without forgiveness. And that is not a sappy phrase. It’s not sentimental. It’s bedrock. It’s a bedrock sensibility, and probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, because who doesn’t have a resentment? Right? Who doesn’t feel like they have been stepped on and taken advantage of? But then you kind of, you deep-breathe and you breathe deeply, and you say, “I can’t wake up tomorrow morning feeling like this.”
I came up with a phrase of one of the talks, where I think if one doesn’t, and there’s no should or would or could here. We’re talking about personal capacity, sensibility. However, if we do not learn how to do this in our relationships, in the workplace, and in our political activism, a kind of soul rust sets in.
Marlena: I like that.
Phil: A rust from the inside begins to rust out. And what happens? We become cynical, sarcastic. Snarky is the modern word to describe this, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Marlena: Yeah, I like that, soul rust. This podcast season about forgiveness and reconciliation was motivated in part by my new book, “Love is Complicated” which traces my own journey toward reconciliation with my father and with his Mennonite Church. And we forgave and we reconciled, but we never sat down to talk about the pain or the abuse. Our journey toward reconciliation was more organic, maybe born from gradually realizing that we were both broken and imperfect. And Phil, you quote Huston Smith as saying, “The power of the act of forgiveness is the recognition of the flaw in all of us.” So here’s my question, is that recognition of the brokenness of all of us sufficient for reconciliation sometimes to emerge organically without even verbalizing the acts that need to be forgiven?
Phil: That is so beautifully put. I wish I’d quoted you when I was working on the book.
Marlena: Oh, thank you.
Phil: It’s quite something because what it evokes is…what I believe is the notion of presence, as in P-R-E-S-E-N-C-E. I once spent time with the great humanist psychologist, Rollo May. And he told me that after doing psychotherapy for 55 years, he had begun thinking people wanted to be fixed, like taking your car into the mechanic’s garage. But in the end, what he realized, and he said this so humbly, Marlena. He said, “I realized people wanted to be with someone in their presence that they trusted for 55 minutes.” And this is what many of us felt with the great Huston Smith, one of the great comparative philosophers and theologians, metaphysicians of our time. What he’s saying there is just some sometimes just simply sit with someone and absorb maybe what they can’t say. Let’s say some of these, the war veterans that I was just describing just a few minutes ago, who were desperate to reach across the table and take their wife’s hand and say, “Would you forgive me for being so angry? What happened there was so horrific”.
Sometimes, it’s just to sit and be quiet and to be in someone’s presence. That is a kind of act all in of itself. Maybe that’s what you needed or someone needed to do with your father, to be in the presence. It’s hard to do that in an email. It’s hard to do this in a text.
Marlena: Yes.
Phil: I’m hearing…now my son is in his 20s. And he tells me a lot of people get together and they also break up by texts. And that just feels so deadening, so deadening to me. Here’s an example of this. I’ll try to be brief about it. I found this in a marvelous, deep but disturbing essay in “The New Yorker” magazine about how, after the Rwanda war, a young man only 40 years old, was elected President of Rwanda. And he wanted to break the cycle of violence that we briefly alluded to. How do you do that? Doesn’t that seem a titanic mission? How can you break a…. which millions of people had died, how do you break that cycle?
What he did was so intuitive and so psychologically astute, and it has to do with presence. He set up a series of courts in villages all around Rwanda. And he brought in, not lawyers, not academics. He asked for the local villages’ oldest women, their elders, to sit at simple wooden tables, and just sit there day after day after day, until someone who maybe had taken a machete or a hatchet or a gun into a village and did something terribly brutal, wait for them to come up and say, “Mama, [inaudible 00:33:52], whatever the name might be, this is what I did. Can you please forgive me?”
And then, after the act of forgiveness, it was left up to the elder women to say, “All right, okay, I forgive you. But now this is what you need to do. You need to go across the river to that village in which you perpetrated these crimes. And now you have to raise the children of that man you killed as your own or you need to send them to college.” And this has been going on for a number of years now. It’s a simple process, but it’s a form of restorative justice that is being eked out really all around the world.
A humorous example of this was when the poet Robert Frost’s home in New Hampshire was nearly completely destroyed by half a dozen…no, 9 or 10 drunken college guys on a drunken spree, who broke into the house, did not know who lived there, destroyed it. They were picked up, because they were drunk, and taken to court. And the judge says, “So, either you’re going to go to prison for a year for destroying the homes of one of our greatest poets, or you are going to study the life of Robert Frost in a local college class.” Nine of them decided to go in and do a little bit of repair on the house. One of them said, “I ain’t studying no poetry,” and he actually went to prison instead. So, I think it’s important for us to laugh about this once in a while, because you see, a story like that can illustrate one of the great divides, and the great divide is retribution versus healing.
Marlena: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: Forgiveness for retaliation.
Marlena: Yeah. So, yeah…
Phil: [inaudible 00:35:57] deep impulses, yes.
Marlena: Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but I was going to pick up on what you just said. Michael Nagler writes that in our society closure in the criminal justice system is the satisfaction of seeing perpetrators suffer. And he says, “This reflects a serious misunderstanding of what we want and who we are as humans.” And so, let me ask you, what form of closure do we seek fundamentally as human beings?
Phil: Wholeness. That’s why the word itself is so profound. I have a line just coming back to me now, what revenge does. It’s an easy, instinctual, reflexive movement, and it’s universal. Everybody has felt this one way or the other. But if we do enact the retaliation or the revenge, we’re buried in bitterness. Even after the retaliation, there is still some of that soul rust inside of us. Hate just immerses us in ever more anger. With the state, the floodgates are open with capital punishment in a country like this. We have more capital punishment here than any place in the world other than I believe China, and maybe one other place. And yet, it’s a kind of frontier mentality.
This is one way I try to find some kind of how can you say, forgiveness for my own culture. This really was a wild west. It was a very, very dangerous place to settle. There is a tremendous amount of death when the pilgrims arrived. Some estimates are between 50 million and 100 million people died when this country was settled. So the land itself is soaked in blood, and I suspect that it percolates in the ground and in the air. So, it takes a conscientious and probably a spiritual effort to try to get over that. And why? Because if we’re not whole, we lash out, and we will hurt our children, we will hurt our neighbors. Usually, men will turn around and hurt their girlfriends or their wives because the anger cannot stay inside. People lash out. So this isn’t an abstract. This is not an abstract discussion.
The business about what to do in the face of justice has really been wrestled with since the early Greeks. All of those beautiful, all those powerful plays, the poetry, the myths, the folklore, have to do with justice versus injustice. How do we do it?
Marlena: Yeah, and how do we deal with the shame and the guilt that we carry? So many of my guests on this podcast, whether it’s in the context of family estrangement, racial injustice, rape, have said that when we’re focused on our own shame, we get stuck in the wound, and it’s not going to heal, which reminds me of what Kate Dahlstedt in your book talked about. She provided really a very concrete way of moving beyond shame, and says…I don’t have it in front of me, but it was something like, it asks us to connect to something outside of ourselves. And for her, ritual was the conduit for this. Do you remember how she used ritual to do this? It’s been a while, I know, since you put the book together, but she has a wonderful use of ritual to help move beyond, when working with veterans, in moving beyond shame and guilt.
Phil: Her belief, and I’ve seen this borne out in the work that she does with her husband, Ed Tick, who specializes in the psychology of men at war, actually using books like “Homer’s Iliad,” to show a veteran, you are not alone, man, what you felt, what you did, what you have experienced since, has happened throughout human history. Brothers have been killing brothers for a long time. You know, they’re using the Iliad now in South Central LA to find a way to get the Crips and the Bloods to talk together. Sometimes it’s old books, ancient myths that bring us together. What they all have in common is that a tremendous amount of, let’s say, combustible energy, combustible energy comes up in these arenas of violence. And so, Kate’s philosophy, I hope I’m not putting words into her mouth, but from what I recall from my interview with her and then from the book, the essay she wrote for the book, is that the ritual creates a container.
Marlena: That’s exactly how she put it.
Phil: A container for the anger, and that finds a way to ritually step by step move us, move one from the anger into some form of release. So, I want to make a segue from that into, again, a personal story that helped me so much, and I hope it would help the listeners. I mentioned that I’ve done a number of films on American-Indian issues. And I did them with a dear friend, Gary Rhine, who was after the fifth or sixth film that we did, he was killed in a single-passenger plane crash, a terrible thing. And as a writer, I immediately wanted to write about this, but as probably, you know and listeners know, if you write too quickly about something, it can be just confessional and nobody else will really understand. So, I sat on it for a while, and I found myself in, of all places, Iceland working on a different film. And I was reading about the Vikings sagas, and I was absolutely startled to find the use of the word anger. A-N-G-R is the old Viking, the old Anglo Saxon word for the profound and the powerful emotion we should feel at the injustices of the world.
Marlena: Yes.
Phil: And that in contrast to rage. Rage which flails, has nowhere to go, often hurts the person who is enraged. But anger, it can be constructive. We should be angry about war and rape and the brutality of children or even verbal abuse, let’s say, in relationships, marriages, and so on. The atonement act as part of this equation, then, is a way to ritualize the anger, not deny it, let it go so that the world can begin again.
Marlena: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. And part of Kate’s ritual is storytelling. And she says that’s an essential part of the healing process. It reminds me really of another guest on this podcast, Doug Bradley, whose written books about how music has created a shared healing story specifically for Vietnam vets. What is it about storytelling that makes it such a powerful tool for healing?
Phil: Well, we tell stories in order to not feel alone. We find ourselves by reading other stories. I talk to teachers and parents frequently, who say they know within a minute or two when a child comes into a classroom, both from kindergarten all the way up to high school for goodness sakes. The way that they look at the books on the shelf, the way that they pick up a book, the way that they open a book because it reveals whether or not parents or grandparents, aunts and uncles have been reading to them, and making it not an elitist pursuit, but an exciting exploration where you read until you find someone whose experience mirrors yours.
And in something like guilt, shame, war, violence, what often happens is that we bury these emotions. And we begin. This is someone in the circle in this circle of violence, thinks that no one else has ever felt this before. No one else has ever perpetrated a crime like this. My friend Douglas George from the Mohawk tribe, when I interviewed him about this, who is Huston Smith’s first American Indian student, by the way, taught him a lot. He said, “For us, for the Mohawks, atonement means the removal of sorrow.”
There’s a whole PhD in that because you can forgive or be forgiven and guess what, there is still some sorrow that’s part of the detritus there. What would then we do with that? We need…A lot of American-Indian ceremonies are about this. Tell us what you did in the war. Tell us what you did in your marriage, talk it out, and then we’ll sing together and then we’ll dance together. It helps to get moving with some of these because, otherwise…I’m sorry, as much of a thinker as I am and a writer as I am, these processes cannot be done solely in our heads.
Marlena: Yeah, yeah. And if they’re done in the head, we need both sides of our brain, which is I think why music is so powerful also in this process, that it’s not just our left brain that’s working, yeah.
Phil: Oh, fantastic. Music and also drama. Going to plays and find out how others have been hurt and what they did with that hurt, how did they atone? How did they get through it? Or how did they self-destruct? We’ve been doing this for millennia. And at the same time, we can’t forget that there has to be some lightness to it too. I remember Mother Teresa once saying, “People are illogical and they’re self-centered. You know what? Forgive them anyway.”
Marlena: So, you talk about the importance of willingness and honesty in acts of atonement, that they really do need to be performed willingly and honestly for it to lead to healing. And then, a few pages later, you describe an Atlanta judge sentencing four white racist arsonists to rebuild the Black church that they had burned down. And this leads to my question, under what conditions may an ordered act of restitution lead to healing?
Phil: I think this is a terrific question. Thank you for citing that. Two things about that. The most important is context. In some societies, let’s say, in an indigenous tribe, where they’ll say the White man’s law on the Navajo reservation just isn’t working. So they have their own courts, their own ways of dealing with justice. So, that Atlanta story would sit very well, let’s say in a Navajo court or in New Zealand with the Māori people, because they would say, “Well, of course, you give someone the opportunity to make up for something that they did that was either stupid or profoundly hurtful to someone.”
In our culture, it’s a little trickier because we really have been based since the founding of this nation on revenge. And it’s why we have more prisons and more death sentences than any culture possibly in human history. So, we have to be careful about the business of this slow, steady emergence of what’s called restorative justice. I think this was ingenious, the Atlanta judge…the world isn’t going to be a better place by sending these guys to prison for 20 years. They haven’t learned anything. They probably have 100 friends who’d want to do something similar somewhere nearby. But the attention that that gains, these guys are physically doing something. It’s not just, “I’m sorry, forgive me,” or “Can I just do six months and then can you let me go?” The vision of it, it’s kind of the dramatization, now that I think about it. They are dramatizing the act of atonement. Now how deep that sits in, I don’t think we know yet.
Marlena: Azim Khamisa, after the murder of his 20-year-old son Tariq in 1995 says, and I quote, “I see victims at both ends of the gun.” Will you speak to what he meant by that?
Phil: Yes. Azim Khamisa, I had him on the forgiveness, the healing program for the “Golden Spirit” show. And then later, did a few days of interviews with him at his home down in La Jolla in Southern California because I wanted to explore the atonement side of what had happened briefly in the proverbial nutshell. He was a banker, who had done very well. He split up with his wife. His son left to go and live with his mother for a while, and then, wanted to come back and live with dad. So, Azim said, “Please, come down and live with me again, but you have to go to work immediately.” And the first job the poor kid named Tariq, T-A-R-I-Q, that he took was simply delivering pizzas.
Marlena: Yeah. And that’s one of them.
Phil: His first night on the job, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he was brutally murdered in a kind of forced murder by the gang, kind of initiation ceremony. Now, what then happens is totally startling. Azim said that even in his community, people were suggesting, “We’ll all band together and we’ll go get our revenge. We know where these guys live.” But Azim held out. It’s like Nelson Mandela holding out on all those urges for revenge in South Africa after apartheid fell in, he became president. There was so much pressure on him beginning a bloodbath, and he refused to capitulate to that.
Similarly, Azim Khamisa said, “no” and he reached out, not to the father who was absent, but to the grandfather of the 13-year-old boy who had murdered his son. And what he said was, “together, you and I,” Ples was his name. “Ples, together, you and I are going to help set up a foundation to help stop, to help kids stop killing other kids.” And by the time I’d interviewed him, their figure was that they had talked to either immediately in gymnasiums or in the media, around 8 million high school kids, to show them the price that is paid for exactly immediate revenge.
Marlena: That is such an inspiring story.
Phil: So, the boy now, he has been in prison for a while, and he’s up for a pardon. Azim, whose son was murdered by this poor kid, he has been at…one governor after the other saying…This boy, he’s now a Buddhist, he reads, he has completely self-educated himself. And now, here comes the second pillar, if you will.
Azim has told the pardon board that if you release him on day one, he will have a job with my foundation. I want him to come in and appear with me all around the world on stage to talk about the possibility of healing and forgiveness.
Marlena: Yeah, that’s so inspiring. So, I’m going to ask a question. And we’re almost out of time, so I’ll ask you to just briefly respond. But at the end of the book, James O’Dea leaves us with a hope-filled question. He asks, “Can we re-envision atonement as shaped less by regrets about the past than envisioning a more enlightened future?” How do you think about this hopeful dream in light of what you quote your friend Gary Rhine as saying… At the beginning of the book, you quote him as saying, “People don’t change when they see the light, they change when they feel the heat.” How do you put those two together?
Phil: A couple of things. Excuse me. First, in terms of my dear belated friend, Rhino, as we loved to call him, what he was saying was that under certain circumstances, and again, it’s from the personal to the collective, people rarely change or do good things just on their own initiative. In the history of drama, from Greek drama all the way to Eugene O’Neill, also tells us that people don’t change until they have to, until life gets so difficult. It’s grow or die. We can see this in addiction programs, we see this at the United Nation.
The stakes have to be high but in terms…So, the other side of the coin, to use Mr. Gandhi’s phrase or image, again, is this. I think what James O’Dea who is one of the most inspirational and optimistic of our social commentators was [inaudible 00:54:21] to I think, is at the core again, of this wonderful word, atonement. Here’s one example. When I walk around my neighborhood here in North Beach the old Italian neighborhood in San Francisco, I see old Italians, I see the old Chinese waiting at stop signs, and it’s a crazy time to be in San Francisco. It’s what the actress Carrie Fisher used to say immediate gratification just ain’t fast enough. Life is so fast in San Francisco. So, what I do, and I know a number of other people are doing here, every day, we leave our apartment or our house, we go out, and we try to make the world a little bit of a better place.
You leave a dollar in the pot of a young kid who was singing songs, a busker, as we used to call them. You help someone across the street. I see a lost tourist every time I leave my house, and out of sheer kindness, in a way, trying to make the world a little more at one. You see, I’m trying to play with the language but also the gesture. I deliberately, I swear, people know I’m fairly infamous for this. Every day, I’ll look for a lost tourist.
Marlena: Yep. And that really does speak to O’Dea’s comment about atonement, which comes out of envisioning a more enlightened future. I love it. It’s a great example, actually.
Phil: That’s it. Where can you help someone cross the street? Where can you help someone, let’s say, today drive across the city so they can actually vote? Rather than waiting for the overarching, highly ambitious and often dangerous collective moves, what are you doing in everyday life?
Marlena: That’s lovely.
Phil: That’s one way I think we can all deal with this. Otherwise, we’re halved. Our souls are halved. Walking down the street, I’m not part of that community if I don’t try to help somebody every day.
Marlena: Phil, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, what would that be?
Marlena: I remember when I was interviewing Joseph Campbell, the great scholar mythology for the film we did about him in the 1980s, which is still playing on public television, “The Hero’s Journey,” it’s still playing all around the world. And we’re talking about this notion, both in also James Joyce’s literature, in Yeats’s poetry, in Hindu Buddhist mythology, Emerson, it’s in the transcendentalist. This elusive notion that’s at the heart of our word for the day, Marlena, atonement. What does that mean in everyday life?
And Joe, I remember at one point, as in Joe Campbell says, “The great mystery is if we are separate from each other, and we are meant to be brutes and there are whole streams of psychology and philosophy that says, “Well, everybody’s out for themselves,” right? No one is really…there is no such thing as altruism. However, why is it that in a moment of war, a hand grenade is thrown into a trench, and a soldier will look at his best friends, her mates in that trench, and throw herself on the grenade?” People do this or the equivalent, running in front of a bus to save a kid who is in a stroller that was released by the horrified parent on the curb. People will risk themselves, and Joe’s question is why? And I can still hear the beautiful cadence in his voice when he gave me the answer on camera, it’s because we know at the end of the day, we are one.
Marlena: One.
Phil: If you don’t throw yourself on that grenade, if you don’t save their child in the middle of the street, if you don’t give some money to the elder who doesn’t have money for food at the end of the month, if you don’t do that, we will never feel this sense that we are deeply and profoundly one.
Marlena: This has been real and thought-provoking, and we’re out of time. Phil, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me.
Phil: I appreciate it. I appreciate you giving a deep read to the book and asking deeply thought out questions. That helps make a true conversation.
Marlena: I’ve been speaking with Phil Cousineau, editor of the book, “Beyond Forgiveness,” only one of his many creative contributions. You’ll find details on the show notes about how to reach him and purchase his books as well as my new book, “Love is Complicated.” And thank you our listeners for joining us today. If you know anyone who’d be interested in the podcast, please do share it with them. And if you liked it, take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcasting network. Instructions on the show notes make rating and reviewing easy.
And remember, we are together on this journey.