While I was on the faculty at Trinity College Theological School, I had the privilege of being invited to serve on the Human Ethics Committee of the Royal Melbourne Hospital. As we know, the Royal Melbourne Hospital is the teaching hospital of Melbourne University. It is directly attached to the Faculty of Medicine.
Like all teaching staff of any university, medical faculty members are expected to continue to research and develop new knowledge in the field of medicine. The medical faculty's research obviously concerns human beings.
When we fall sick, we go to doctors, specialists, and surgeons to treat us, and in almost every instance, we share a lot of personal information with them and confide in them with a lot of confidence. All our doctor visits go fine; often, they do not ask for our permission before asking us personal questions. We only sometimes think twice before we share personal information with doctors because we assume that what we tell them will assist them in diagnosing our illness and treating us best.
However, if the doctors were to visit us to gather information so they could study our illness, the story would be different. They cannot do that without the prior approval of the Hospital's Ethics Committee or the University they come from.
The purpose of the Human Ethics Committee at the Royal Melbourne Hospital was precisely this. We, the Committee, had to interrogate all study proposals of doctors and medical faculty members and give approval before they could start interviewing or talking to any patient.
There were Ethics Committee meetings at the hospital each week, and five researchers would come and present their projects to us. The Committee was made up of 10 members. Of the ten members, only 3 had anything to do with medicine. The other seven members were lawyers, social workers, community workers, laymen, laywomen, academics, and theologian-priests. I was the theologian-priest member.
The Committee's purpose was to ensure that doctors respected human ethics during their research. We would even go to the finest details, such as questioning where and how the people would be interviewed and where they would keep the notes.
Just because a professor of medicine had a long list of letters after their names, they couldn't go and do tests on people and ask people or patients questions to enable their studies.
I remember two interesting applications. One was from a Professor of Neurology who wanted uncontrolled access to the records of recovering alcoholics living in halfway houses. His arrogance was getting in the way of human ethics, and his application was turned down. He was asked to re-submit.
The second application, which was submitted for approval towards the end of my tenure on the Committee, came from a specialist children's psychiatrist. This doctor had applied to access the medical records of 40 young girls between the ages of 14-16 who had abortions between 2000 and 2002. A sample of 40 was proposed for the research to stand as an authentic study. The psychiatrist had wanted to contact the girls to follow up on how they were mentally coping with the abortion in their post-teen years in adulthood. Various aspects of the specialist psychiatrist's application were interrogated over seven meetings before it received the approval of the Ethics Committee.
The application received a lot of attention from me because the purpose of the psychiatrist's application was to find out how the religious beliefs of the girls, especially their understanding of forgiveness, had played a part in them finding or not finding healing from their trauma. The forgiveness of God for them for having aborted a life, and their forgiveness to the unborn child that was aborted due to whatever the circumstances were.
After my term on the Committee ended at the end of 2006, as a researcher myself at the Theological School, I contacted the psychiatrist and joined a team of five researchers. In joining the project, I, too, had to work within the stringent ethical guidelines I had contributed to the process before the application was approved.
The year I spent with these researchers and the young women they interviewed was a life-changing experience for me.
In a meeting with the young women who had aborted lives, I learned that even though five or six years had passed since the abortions, they were struggling with profoundly disturbing questions. These questions varied from questioning themselves: whether the fetus they had aborted was a living human being or not?; whether life began at conception or at some point thereafter?; whether the lives of late-term abortions knew the mother and her circumstances that led to the abortion?; and whether both the baby and God had forgiven them for what had happened five or six years ago.
Some girls were torturing themselves to understand whether the life they had aborted was a precious soul that God had sent to this world and whether they had destroyed that soul.
Some others had never recovered from the ordeal of the abortion itself and their lives had never been anything different from the day that they had the abortion. They said they felt their life ended the day the abortion took place and have lived since without a purpose, without feelings and a soul.
We ended up interviewing 36 young women. In the process of interviewing and seeing the girls over a period of one year, we discovered that 79% per cent of them were being treated for depression and mental conditions. 56% per cent of them lived with suicidal thoughts, and 39% of them had attempted to commit suicide. Typical secular counselling and psychotherapy for the girls had not helped them entirely. Only 4% of the girls out of 36 had managed to live with normalcy.
We found that the trauma that the girls had experienced had shaken them so much that part of their souls had been lost in the experience. Treatments, drugs, psychotherapy, and counselling only helped with what was left of their souls and didn't work.
And there we came to introduce the importance of forgiveness – forgiveness for the wrongs they were suffering from and receiving forgiveness for the lives that were terminated.
For many, it was a long process, so the project lasted a year. A two-stage process facilitated self-forgiveness and forgiveness from the lives terminated.
One-third of the girls took part in psychodrama. Psychodrama is a creative way for an individual or group to explore and solve personal problems. In a clinical setting, it offers the opportunity for a person (and the group) taking multiple roles -- mother, unborn baby, God, doctor, etc, in this scenario – to act and out the experience for which healing is desired.
In a psychodrama, participants are invited to become therapeutic agents to populate the scene of one client. When acted out the scenario under the supervision of a skilled clinician, both the designated client and the other participants gain enormous benefits in terms of their recovery.
Two-thirds of the girls were taken through the process of confession and reconciliation. A few asked for anointing, and many others asked for both. Once the lost parts of their souls were restored, medication, counselling and psychodrama did the magic.
After a year of hard work, our study project was a great success. We were able to gather enough data to show that forgiveness exercised and experienced by the young women brought about healing in 89% per cent of the 36 girls who took part in the project.
The data the chief researcher, the specialist child psychiatrist, wanted were gathered, and a brilliant scientific article about the relationship between Psychiatry, Forgiveness, and Trauma Healing was authored.
Taking part in this project was my first lived-out and first-hand experience of the power of forgiveness. Before this experience, I had talked and preached about forgiveness. I had also experienced forgiving and being forgiven.
But taking part in this project with young women who had been forgiven and healed from their abortion experiences and witnessing the transformation they had experienced from being forgiven by the unborn babies and God was life-changing.
This experience allowed me to understand the gamut of what forgiveness is.
With this experience, I can understand well the importance Jesus placed on forgiving and being forgiven.
From the tone of Peter's question, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?" one could easily guess that the issue of forgiving was an issue at the time of Jesus as it is for us today.
To draw our attention to the importance of forgiving, I wonder whether you realise that Jesus uses hyperbole in telling the parable. He tells the story of a servant of a king who owed the monarch 10,000 talents. One talent is about 6,000 denarii, give or take, with each denarius worth a day's wage for a labourer. (Denarius is a Roman silver coin used during Jesus' time and was worth ten donkeys)
The first servant owes about 60 million denarii, which is, in today's terms, about 37,000,000 (thirty-seven million) Australian Dollars. No person could repay it, even if they were to sell themselves and their family into servitude for several lifetimes. The King graciously forgives this unforgivable debt in an outrageous act of generosity and mercy.
The second servant owes 100 denarii. It is a decent amount of money but minuscule compared to the debt that the King forgave – just 62 Australian Dollars. When the forgiven servant refuses to extend compassion to his mate, it is no wonder the King becomes angry. He had written off 37,000,000 Australian Dollars, a level of forgiveness that exceeds imagination. Yet, that servant is unwilling to offer even the most minor mercy to his mate, who owed him only 45 Australian Dollars.
Perhaps the guy was paralysed by his greed. So, the King, fuelled by the anger of his unforgiving and merciless servant, handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt, 37,000,000 Dollars.
You could see the contrast here. It's Jesus' way of saying God forgives us despite our massive debts. In return, we are asked to forgive the minuscule debts others have against us.
He also tells others that our actions, whether in thought, word, or deed, can injure another. It doesn't have to be an abortion or any other life-changing experience that can harm us and others. Still, depending on each person's temperament, even the smallest action could harm the soul of the other. Depending on the gravity of our actions, they can even make someone lose parts of one's soul or lose it altogether. We need to ask and seek forgiveness for these actions.
In the same way, the smallest action someone takes against us could harm our soul. Depending on the gravity of their actions, they can cause us to lose parts of our soul or it altogether. Knowing how much debt Jesus has forgiven us in God, we are asked to extend a minuscule forgiveness towards those who've caused us hurt and harm.
Forgiveness heals others, and forgiveness restores us to life. It helps us move on with life and find life again. Forgiveness helps us recover spiritually and physically. It heals our souls.
Jesus said to forgive not seven times but seven times seventy. In the Bible, like the number 40, the number 70 has great significance. It symbolises the evolution of human beings and the universe to its perfection.
I want to close by sharing with you a poem written by a 21-year-old woman whom I interviewed and journeyed along in 2006. The pseudo-name I gave her in the project was Joanna. I deliberately chose this name from the Bible (Luke 8:1- 3) because Joanna means "God is gracious."
The baby she'd had carried for fourteen weeks and aborted, as a 15-year-old child herself, was a girl. I'd suggested to Joanna that we name the baby "Talitha", another biblical name (Mark 5:41). Talitha means "Little Girl".
You may know that after 14 weeks of pregnancy, you cannot end a pregnancy with drugs – it involves surgical intervention, and it is not a pleasant experience. It is one of those experiences that can make one lose one's soul. And that is what happened to Joanna.
For six years, she had suffered the trauma of not being forgiven for having aborted Talitha.
After a year of journeying with Joanna, she was convinced that she had reached a point where she was ready to be forgiven by Talitha. The following is the poem Joanna wrote to Talitha, asking for her forgiveness for having cut short her life.
My Darling Angel Talitha, being sorry can be tough when overwhelmed by grief,
But now I must let the grief caused by killing you heal,
And to say sorry with all my heart and soul for letting your life go.
My heart is weeping tears of blood for the pain that I'd caused you,
And it's crying out my apologies to your mind,
Pleading for your forgiveness for my unfortunate decision to cut your life short; I've never meant, in a million years, to be so cruel.
My God has forgiven me, and all that's left for me is to ask you to forgive,
a cry that comes from deep inside my soul,
It's all I have to ask your soul that is no more,
but only memories of your life that were carried in my heart and womb.
Please forgive me, Talitha, as it comes from the heart,
Take time and try to forgive me for my failure to deliver,
If you can, please return back to me again
And I will love you forever until eternity, not to end forever.
Forgiveness heals, forgiveness restores, and forgiveness brings lost souls home. Amen
