Lifeletter #78
Here’s Redemption
Meeting with a Killer
Did you ever watch something that left you walking around on a tilt? As if some fundamental idea about reality got pulled out from under you?
A psychic earthquake happened to me when my dear friend Jessica Ryder sent me a link to a documentary video:
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/rji/mwak.html
It’s called, ‘Meeting with a Killer,’from the Institute of Restorative Justice & Restorative Dialogue. Their byline is, ‘An approach that puts energy into the future, not into what is past.’
This video documents a mediated meeting between the mother and daughter of a woman who was raped and murdered, and one of the two men who committed the crime, when he was 15 years old and on drugs. He has been in prison for over 25 years.
The meeting took a whole year to prepare for – all three of them went through a very extensive process in order to show up for this meeting. It was initiated by the mother and the daughter of the woman who was murdered.
When they finally met, they sat together in prison and spoke with each other for almost a whole day. The killer listened to the mother and daughter as they described to him the nature and depth of their suffering. And he described to them the precise details of his crime.
All of them, plus the mediator, were passing through extremely intense emotional states. But they stayed there, talking with each other, doing what they had been preparing to do for so long.
Near the end of the day, something starts to happen. It felt to me like some kind of incredible grace opened up in the field between them. The bitter hard walls of hatred and separation just melted away. It is quite amazing to watch.
As the mother and daughter are saying goodbye to the killer, they start hugging him. It looks like they weren’t really planning to – it was something very spontaneous. The mother grabs him and holds him right to her heart, with such pure love. And then the daughter hugs him, looking as if she can’t believe what she is doing.
The force of divine love in the room is palpable. Or whatever you want to call it. Whatever it is that allows you to love and embrace the man who raped and murdered your mother or your daughter. What would you call that?
I was not the same after watching this video. Because of what these two women did, my life has been deeply altered. They just got tired of living with anger and bitterness and hatred. They couldn’t do it any longer. They knew their life wasn’t worth living like that. They knew something else was possible.
They were not saints, or long-time meditators, or some kind of special exalted being. They were ordinary people, who did something because it was right in front of them to do and they simply could not avoid it.
After watching that video, I couldn’t let myself off the hook anymore. I knew for sure that we all have that kind of love inside us. We’re just sitting on it, pretending that it’s not there, because to acknowledge it would turn our life upside down.
They went back and interviewed the three of them a while later. The killer said, “Do you think for one moment I can go on living like I was before that happened to me? That forgiveness, that love? I have to find a way to pass that along now. That’s what my whole life is about. Nothing else matters.”
The mother is now working in the prisons herself, with the Institute for Restorative Justice and Dialogue.
But it was what the daughter said that got to me the most: “After going through that,” she said, “I know I can go through anything. I didn’t know that I could do something like that. And now, I don’t miss my mother like I used to. It just feels like she’s with me, like she’s right here.”
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
— David Whyte
with love
Shayla
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