Emily Graves spoke with freedom fighter and healer Fr. Michael Lapsley

Emily: A turning point for you was when you received a letter bomb. Can you tell us a about this?

Father Michael Lapsley: After 27 years, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the apartheid regime said, finally we'll talk, we'll sit at the table. It was three months after that that I received in the post two religious magazines at my home in Harare, Zimbabwe, posted from South Africa. When I opened the magazines they exploded because it was in fact a letter bomb. In that explosion I lost both my hands, I lost an eye and my ear drums were shattered and I had many other injuries, but somehow I felt that even in that experience, as horrendous as it was, I had a sense that somehow God was with me. God hadn't said don't open it - I opened it - but there I felt a presence of God was with me.

Emily: So how did this stretch your belief in God at the time?

Father Michael Lapsley: I think in a way I was taken back to a faith learnt at earliest childhood, because some people said to me - I think very foolishly - oh this was God's will and I said what do you mean by that, I said, I wasn't sent a letter bomb by God, I was sent it by human beings. It was my faith and the prayers and love and support of people across the world that enabled me to make my bombing redemptive. What I mean by redemptive is to bring good out of evil and life out of death. I realised that if I was filled with hatred, bitterness, self pity and desire for revenge, that I would be a victim forever. They would have failed to kill the body, but they would have killed the soul. I began to travel a journey from being a victim, which I was, to being a survivor, which I was, but to take a next step to become a victor; a victor in the sense of taking back agency, taking back the ability to shape and create the world, but just as people had accompanied me on my journey of healing, so I began to realise that I had a calling, if you like, to accompany others on their journey of healing and help create what we call safe and sacred spaces, where people could begin to deal with how wider contexts of their nation's history had affected them psychologically, emotionally and spiritually and that led eventually in 1998 to the formation of the Institute For Healing Of Memories.

Emily: We will talk a little bit more about that shortly but something I'd just like to touch on is what exactly were your injuries - because it was a real lifestyle change for you wasn't it?

Father Michael Lapsley: I lost both hands, I lost an eye and my ear drums were shattered and of course I was burnt. The most devastating impact, if you like, was losing both hands, because that affects every single aspect of your life. For the first four months I was as helpless as a newborn baby. I couldn't do anything for myself. In a way I had to, if you like, climb my way back to being able to live. A little bit of the time I thought it would be better to be dead, but the prayer, love and support helped me realise that for me the struggle now was the struggle to get well, the struggle to return, the struggle to live my life as fully, as joyfully, as completely as possible and that would indeed be my victory.

Emily: The events of the letter bomb didn't stop you from continuing with the work that you did before. How did you choose to react to the letter bomb?

Father Michael Lapsley: Anything that is life-threatening will be life-changing and in some ways my own journey echoes the journey of the people of South Africa. We had a struggle to end apartheid, but when we'd achieved that, we had the struggle to heal ourselves and to build a new society. That was true for us as a nation, but equally it was true for me. There's a passage in Scripture, in Ecclesiastes, 'There's a time for war, there's a time for peace; there's a time for breaking down, there's a time for building up'. The time had come for peace and the time had come for healing and so not long after I returned to South Africa I became a chaplain to a trauma centre for victims of violence and torture. In that period South Africa was deciding that it would have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a mechanism by which we could face the past as a country. We realised that yes, we could reconcile, but we could only reconcile on the basis of truth: we had to bring into light what was done in darkness. That commission in the end had 23,000 people coming to it, but we are a nation of 46 million people. I realised that we needed to create opportunities for South Africans of all backgrounds and all sides of the conflict to begin to tell their story; to begin to deal with what they had in them as a consequence of the nation's journey.

Emily: So tell us about the healing memories workshops you have been doing.

Father Michael Lapsley: The model of workshop that we developed is a process that takes over two and a half days. We have 25 people at a time. We try and create very quickly a sense of community in those workshops. We often ask people what is it that's pushed their buttons in the last few weeks that has taken them back in time to early events. At the beginning of the workshop, we want people to begin to go back into their past and, if you like, focus on what is their unfinished business, because lots of things have happened in their lives and we are at peace with them, but there are other things that we either buried or they continue to haunt us. Then we give people some questions to focus on overnight like, what is the most painful and the most beautiful experience of your life? How has what happened to your parents and grandparents affected you? What is participation in a faith community or a set of religious beliefs? How has that been for you? Then in the second day of the workshop we give people a pen, paper and crayons and a large piece of paper and say, now we would like you to draw your life story. The drawing of the life story in a way is like the creation of a mirror. People say, well what have been the turning points of my life? What has shaped me? What has miss-shaped me? What is the stuff that's still messing me up from the past? Then we take people through a process of storytelling where people speak of their life journeys in a small group of seven or eight people and have an opportunity to listen, but also an opportunity to get in touch with their feelings, because the poison lies not on what we think about the past, but what we feel about the past. The people have had horrible experiences; they have very good reasons to hate, to be bitter, to want revenge, but those feelings, although justifiable, in the end destroy us if we keep them inside of us, so we have to find a safe way of letting them out. There's a healing that comes when I tell my story in a collective but safe space, because I discovered that other people share similar feelings with me and so I often then begin to feel less alone and encouraged in my own life journey and begin to be able to let go that which is destructive in the past.

Most of the heart of this workshop is the story telling, but then on the last day of the workshop we give people clay and we say, now why don't you create a symbol of peace and hope of how you would like to see the world. We're encouraging people as they heal to become participants in society, not somebody to be healed for healing's sake. In terms of the Christian paradigm, we think about building God's Kingdom; in a secular way we say, well it's about how do we create a society based on freedom and justice and kindness and gentleness for all?

The workshop culminates in the creation of a liturgy, a kind of ceremony. One of the things we do in that ceremony, often we get people to write down what it is they would like to leave behind in the workshop; whatever burden they've carried. They write that on a piece of paper and burn it. In the drawing and the storytelling, in the clay and the burning we do experiential, simple physical things, but what we're getting at is the spiritual, because not everybody is religious but we all have spirituality. We all ask questions about meaning and so no matter what people's faith tradition, they can participate in some sort of workshop. We say to them, come to our workshop and we promise you one step towards healing, but if people have never, ever told their story to another human being it can indeed be a giant step, a step where people begin to leave victimhood behind.

Emily: A common question that's asked is why didn't God stop this various event happening to me or other events through history? What has your reply been to a question like this?

Father Michael Lapsley: I think that human beings have struggled with that question throughout history. In the Old Testament, the book of Job, Job wrestles with that question and I think it comes back to what kind of God we worship and the reality of the freedom that God has given us, so that we have the power to mess our own lives or mess the lives of others; they have that power or that freedom if you like as well. My experience is that God is the one who shares with us in our pain, but does not conjure reality to prevent us from having our freedom to do good or to do evil. I think one wants to honour people in that kind of wrestling, but at the same time encourage people to look at the fact that we cannot change what happened; we cannot change what other people do to us, but we do have a choice in how we respond and we can respond in a way that causes us either to grow or to diminish, but that's a process and that's a journey and I think the wrestling and the questioning is one key element of that journey.