Since September last year I have been doing Landmark Education’s ‘Curriculum for Living,’ a set of three courses about how to live.

You would think that having just had my 48th birthday a week ago I would have known how to live.  But not at all.  Until last September I was struggling every day of my life with feelings of rage against my mother, feelings I had had in some form for more than 30 years.  It seems that when I was a teenager I made some decision about who my mother was for me, and who I was for her, and this decision — disguised and unexamined — has been driving my life ever since.

The impact of this decision on my life has been massive.  To punish my mother, and I now see, to punish myself for hurting her, I made my life a misery. I turned away from happiness time after time, put myself in hopeless situations, sabotaged every potential success that came my way, starved myself, got jobs, lost jobs, had relationships with men I didn’t love, friends I didn’t like, and I made sure she knew every twist and turn along the way.  At every moment, the rage would be there ready to boil up.  Even getting home from work and seeing by the answering machine light she’d left a message would be enough to start it, and I’d refuse to listen to the message for days and would put off ringing back even longer.

Then about five years ago, the word ‘forgiveness’ started to pop into my head.  I knew enough to know this word was about Mum, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.  I started to go to church to see if I could find some answers, but I didn’t find them there.  I then spent years daydreaming about this task of forgiveness.  I used to think, ‘I wonder when the day is going to come when I can forgive her,’  or ‘what’s it going to be like on the day I forgive her’, or ‘I wonder what it’s going to be that finally makes me forgive her?’

And then I did the Landmark Forum in September last year.  And on the second day of the Forum, sometime during the afternoon, the penny finally dropped.  I don’t know what was said, or who was speaking at the time, but I suddenly saw what my task of forgiveness was.  My task of forgiveness was to ask my mother for her forgiveness, not for me to forgive her.  And so, on the next break, I practically ran outside and sitting on the steps of the flats opposite, I rang my Mum and told her what I’d been doing.  How I’d designed my life as a reproach to her, to hurt her, how I had made sure she knew every misery, how I had turned away from happiness.  I told her how sorry I was.  I told her how important she was to me, even though I’d spent my life pretending she wasn’t.  And for the first time ever, I told her I loved her.  I asked her if she would forgive me, and she said yes and she said, ‘you’ve given me the most wonderful gift.’  And in that one 10 minute phone call, more than 30 years of rage and torment disappeared.

Since that day my relationship with Mum, and my life, has been transformed.  Now I regularly call her several times a week, and more often than not, as soon as I put down the phone I have to ring her straight back because I’ve forgotten to ask her something or share something with her.  And I’ve stopped punishing myself.  This is what has been revealed to me about forgiveness.  That it is profound and that there’s an intimate relationship between punishment and forgiveness.

Since doing the Landmark Forum, and subsequent Landmark courses, I’ve had many more breakthroughs, none quite as big as that first one, the one that made all the others possible, but every bit as necessary.

In fact, just in the last week I realised I needed to clean up my relationship with my ex-partner too. I heard him talking on the radio last week on a program about swine flu because he’s an expert on influenza, and straightaway when I heard him, I knew I had another task of forgiveness. Yet up until that day, I had thought everything between us was well in the past because we’d parted more than ten years ago and hadn’t even spoken for more than five years.  So I got his telephone number again and I called him and told him things I never thought I would be able to share with anyone, things about my love for him and where it hadn’t been whole and how I’d not been authentic for him.  I told him how sorry I was and I asked him to forgive me, and he said ‘I forgive you unreservedly’.

Landmark is not only about forgiveness.  In fact, it’s hardly discussed at all.  But as it turned out for me, ‘how to live’ had everything to do with learning about forgiveness.

*****

I happened to visit Melbourne’s Jewish Museum last Sunday to see an exhibition called ‘Superheroes and Schlemiels’ about the Jewish creators of such cartoons as Superman.  Not only do I love comics but I also love Yiddish words like schlemiel and schmuck.  How could you not love a language which has so many words meaning ‘loser?’

When I got there, however, I didn’t even make it to the comics exhibition; I was too caught up in reading the displays about Jewish traditions and religion.  One of the displays discussed the ‘high holy days’ of the Jewish calendar, including Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I read how on Yom Kippur every observing Jew goes to all those people he or she has wronged in the past year and asks their forgiveness.

Perhaps if I’d been a Jew I wouldn’t have had to wait so long to discover for myself the beauty and necessity of forgiveness.  But I’m very grateful to have discovered it at last.