As the year nears its end, reflecting on its highs and lows, and the lessons these brought, exposed a pervasive issue that prevents reconciliation wherever I look. But to be able to make better sense of the world around us it’s often most helpful to look within. The following is such an attempt.
A proper translation of the German word Annäherung into English proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Reading Kurt Vonnegut swayed me to choose reconciliation. As many others before me, I started with arguably his best known work: “Slaughterhouse Five”. Through it I first encountered the “serenity prayer”, one that some past or current participants of Alcoholics Anonymous may be familiar with. It goes like this:
Irrespective of God’s role in the matter of things, the words stuck with me. In a tumultuous year like the one we’ve been having, perhaps the second line has proven to be the most difficult for many of us, in particular as it provides a necessary condition for both the third and fourth. But this year, another moment made me better understand a particularly powerful application.
In August, I attended the opening of an exhibition for a friend of a friend’s photography work. Part of the exhibition was an hour-long documentary about the photographer’s relationship to his estranged father, who spent most of his son’s childhood in jail for murder. I don’t wish to go into more detail about the film, except for one scene which deeply moved me. It exposed something about the relationship to my own father; a fundamental truth that many of us accept but do not understand – as clear a distinction as that which exists between those who may sympathize with others and those who risk being buried under the oppressive burden of empathy.
My filmmaker friend traveled with the photographer to a small village in Turkey, the birthplace of the latter’s father. In the film, interviews were shown with his paternal grandmother, who exposed a deeper, troubling truth about her son: the suffering the entire family experienced at the hand of his father. Your first gut reaction might be to jump immediately to the thought: “But that does not excuse his own later behavior! Neither his failure as a father nor as a human being.” And I agree. In particular, the crimes this man committed later in life are his own. But to his son it had exposed a deeper, truly flawed human being.
Many of us hide behind concepts, abstractions of people in our lives. Categorizations that may lead us astray in our opinion of these people, prove detrimental to the ability to find the serenity we might so yearn for. For years much of my relationship to my father was in a sense shaped by some “mold” I hoped to fit him into; one that is endowed with its own “typical” characteristics a father should exhibit. Many of us do this to rationalize our own feelings of others. As many regions are engulfed in war, this process of abstraction carries with it dangerous implications for the “other”. In both cases we effectively “dehumanize” those who – when we properly perceive them – seem to all be victims of that utmost insurmountable state of affliction: to be human. For many of us we will only be able to find the serenity we crave when we understand that much of what we cannot change about others is this fundamental truth.
Illustration: Lucia Maluga
