What Forgiveness Is and Is Not, and How to Practice It
Informed advice from Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes and Patricia Meier. A prison story from journalist Lee Hedgepeth.
Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, my personal archive of favorite web links on the subject of peace, cooperation, and the middle ground. Today’s post features three Substack authors: two write with expertise and clarity on the subject of forgiveness and releasing oneself of emotional burdens; the third is an investigative journalist with a story of forgiveness from Alabama’s death row.
PeaceLinks readers are exceptionally savvy and heart-aware people, so these posts will affirm some things this crowd already knows. Even so, I’m certain that you will find something gracious, revelatory, or surprising from each of today’s authors.
Psychologist and theologian
of is writing a series on forgiveness in five parts. Dr. Chanequa is the author of multiple books, the most recent one from HarperCollins called Sacred Self-Care: Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves. The link below leads to the outstanding first installment in her forgiveness series, explaining why five myths about forgiveness interfere with the ability of an injured person to heal. I hope you will read her series and find somewhere to share it:
When I searched Substack to see who else had interesting things to say about forgiveness, I had the pleasure of discovering
of . Patty is a hypnotherapist, reiki master/teacher, and author of Forever Five: Adventures of the Ladybug Hunter, a memoir of what comes after the unfathomable loss of a child. Earlier this year, she posted from her research on the Native Hawaiian practice of forgiveness, or making-right with loved ones and oneself. If you like language-play, you’ll appreciate this fresh angle on a familiar subject:
Judgement of others creates unclimbable walls between us and them — Patricia Meier
More recently,
wrote about aging as a process of shedding judgment. This post fits beautifully with last week’s PeaceLinks theme.It sometimes happens with PeaceLinks that I’ve drafted an entire Friday post by Monday or Tuesday, only to come across something new to me and on-point on Thursday. This is one of those weeks.
Yesterday, the indefatigable PeaceLinks alumna
posted a Substack Note that would otherwise have eluded me. She Restacked a post from her fellow investigative journalist in Alabama . The central figure of this short essay is a man who is currently scheduled to be executed for murder in Alabama. The story is not about legal clemency; it’s about forgiveness. We don’t learn the details of how he reconciled with people he harmed, but we hear that he and others took the leap.
I hope you enjoy today’s authors and share whatever moves you in their work by clicking into their posts and hitting the Share button there.
Peace, friends.
Thank you for including me and introducing me to the work of other writers!
Forgiveness - sometime the only life-affirming option available. So tragically, the death penalty leaves no room for grace.