Sam Wells AYR Interview

“On Healing in Community and the Phases of Forgiveness” was a promo video by Sam Wells for the 2011 After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University. Interview by Logan M. Isaac, videography by Pilar Timpane.

 Transcript

We're all saints with the past and sinners with the future. The church is an equality game. We're all in this together. All have sinned and fallen short of glory of God, and, the church needs to belong in places where we give permission to someone to break down in tears and say, I killed 12 people face-to-face. I saw their eyes. I saw them pleading me, and I still pulled the trigger. And then to recognize that that's, that's an awful thing.

But having said those terrible words, you can then look around the room and find some other people have got some terrible things to say too. Not to trump what you've said, not to take away the reality of what you've said, but simply to recognize that we're in this together.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Healing is always both an individual and a communal thing. If you look at the people that Jesus heals most obviously the man who comes in through the roof with the four friends in Mark chapter two. The story ends with the man being restored to community, and that's a significant dimension of what healing is.

And so in that sense, any repentance, any confession of sin is somehow always a shared confession, not just a lonely confession. And you go around the room and you think, well, this is getting increasingly difficult to separate, to isolate this ex-service person as being the heinous crime committer, and you're looking around the room and saying, well, I think we're in this together.

So the journey in my view goes from truth telling to repentance and then can begin to move towards forgiveness. And then towards reconciliation and then finally perhaps towards healing. In terms of how do you know it's working? Well, I, I guess I have one phrase that's important to me and one, one pastoral experience that I found over and over again.

The phrase that's important to me is if it can't be happy, make it beautiful. It's a phrase that I've, had for myself for most of my adult life, and I think, the kinds of things we're talking about are never gonna be happy. There's no way to make a joke out of them. There's no way to make them good.

But there are ways in which to make them beautiful. And for example the point at which the Vietnamese mother and the American former soldier can, if you like, appear together in front of an audience and tell a story together of what they've been through separately and possibly together can be a very beautiful thing.

You know, that's a kind of, it can't be happy, but it can still become beautiful when people can tell a story together. And related to that, I think the second thing that I found pastorally over and over again is when somebody said to me, “I'll never for a moment be able to say, I'm glad that happened.” But what I will say is that whatever they're involved with now could never have happened unless that terrible thing had happened.

And those, those are stories of forgiveness. I mean, those are stories of healing. That's, you know, that's the gospel, that's Church, that's redemption.