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How to forgive without forgetting

by
20 June 2012

by Naomi Starkey

That evening, Lucy Partington vanished. Her fate remained a mystery until March 1994, when her remains were unearthed, along with those of other young women, in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street, Glou­cester, the home of Fred and Rose­mary West. She had been bound, gagged, raped, tortured, and eventu­ally killed — or allowed to die slowly, possibly over weeks or months.

For her parents, her brothers, and her older sister, Marian, the agony of not knowing where Lucy had gone was replaced by the appalling agony of knowing that she had, in Marian Partington’s words, fallen into “medieval hell”.

Her struggle to grasp the horror of her sister’s suffering and death, and her arrival, after years of soul-searching, at a place where she could talk meaningfully in terms of for­giveness and healing is documented in her recently published book If You Sit Very Still.

Part of the catastrophe of murder, she says, is the way it takes not only the life of an individual, but also destroys a whole network of wider relationships, as family members and friends find themselves processing en­ormous grief in very different, some­times mutually inexplicable, ways.

In her own family, her mother’s reaction was a “stiff upper lip” ap­proach: “My youngest brother, who was still in the sixth form when Lucy disappeared, would come home and find her crying and looking at photo albums. But she found it all very hard to talk about, because her way was one of silent, stoical suffering.”

Partington was in her mid-20s at the time of Lucy’s disappearance, and initially found it hard to admit to herself the depth of her own loss. “It took me a while to realise that I had a right to grieve, because I sensed that there was a hierarchy of grief — that a mother losing a daughter must be worse than losing a sister.”

HER way of grieving involved the use of words — first in an essay about her sister (Salvaging the Sacred, published in the Guardian in 1996, re-published by Quaker Books in 2004), and then in her new book.

She wanted not only to express and begin to process her own pain, but to affirm the beauty of Lucy’s life in the face of atrocity. “Using the power of words, especially poetry, was something we both shared, and so writing about my experiences helped me feel I was reclaiming her real self from the horror of her death — and also reclaiming myself.”

She admits that, at times, her approach seemed threatening to others, especially family members. “My mother once said to me: ‘We wish you’d just shut up about it,’ but it’s been the only way I could go.”

Having worked as a homeopath for 25 years, Partington says she has seen how physical pain is associated with unexpressed loss. “It’s somehow there in every cell of your body, and you need to have a way of grieving — something which has been lost in our society, especially with the decline in religious belief. There’s a tendency to emphasise the need to ‘move on’, not to show that you are deeply affected by your loss, but this has very unhealthy consequences. It diminishes the depth of being alive, of being human.”

She feels that it is important to qualify the idea of “letting go” in grieving, so that it becomes “letting go with love”. It means, she says, “allowing the pain of remembering the beauty of that person’s life, and acknowledging the depth of the loss”.

The particular anguish of bereave­ment by murder is that the loss was no accident. “You are faced with the reality that this person you love wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t for the actions of other human beings. The unresolved pain of such bereavement can eat you up if you can’t express it; so you become more and more isolated and hopeless.”

SHE has been struck by the parallel between Lucy’s disap­pear­ance, five weeks after she was received into the RC Church, and the discovery of her remains, which came five weeks after Parting­ton herself became a member of the Quakers.

The Quaker community has given her wonderful support, she says, while her search for wholeness and healing led her to spend a significant amount of time on Buddhist silent retreats. “My faith is about trying to be true to what needs my attention — trying to learn more about what it means to be forgiving and com­passionate.”

It was after one such retreat, in 1995, that she made a vow to forgive Fred and Rosemary West. “I got excited by the realisation that, what­ever it means, this is the only way out. None of the other routes are ever going to work, like denial, be­cause of the huge cost of that. People make war instead of forgiving, but that’s just dumping their anger on others. And then there is suicide . . . But forgiveness is the only way of hope and renewal.”

Immediately after this decision, however, she was shocked to find herself flooded with murderous rage. “It was so real, and so terrifying, be­cause I realised that I, too, could kill someone. I found that I had this huge potential for evil and rage within, and it made me reflect on my own life, bringing it all closer to home.”

Admitting what she calls her own “rotting pile of mistakes”, she saw how shame and guilt can corrupt anyone, and cripple his or her capacity to live well. “We all edit out stuff from our lives, but where do we put the bits we don’t like about ourselves?” she says. “What we don’t resolve gets passed on to the next generation, and healing is sometimes very painful, because it involves having to get to know who we really are.”

PARTINGTON is quick to point out that she has never said that she has forgiven the Wests, although she has tried to see them as human beings — even meeting other members of their family, and realising that the couple may have been acting out the consequences of abuse they had endured themselves.

“I don’t like the word ‘forgiveness’, because there’s an expectation that this is something that one should try and do if one is a good person. I’ve attempted to connect with the Wests’ humanity, not simply to say ‘I’ve forgiven them.’ I don’t think it’s some­thing that you can just do, but you can align yourself with it through prayer.”

This sense of alignment has con­tinued through the Buddhist retreats she has attended, as well as on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Com­postela. She has found forgiveness to be a continuing process, something that calls for mindfulness each day.

“What does ‘forgive’ mean? It means becoming more vulnerable, and more open to being changed, becoming less deluded about who I think I am. The process of healing is at the heart of forgiveness — going from a small, self-centred place to feeling part of a greater whole, a place of connection with others.”

The Quaker belief that “there is that of God in everyone” gives her hope, and challenges the temptation to write off some people as monsters, beyond redemption. “Connection and empathy with those who have harmed us can feel unnatural and impossible, but moving towards that frees us from being victims. It’s as if we are able to move to a new land — it will never be the same as the land we have been forced out of, but it has the potential for renewal and hope.”

THERE is a particularly power­ful moment in the book, when she describes sending a carefully penned letter to Rosemary West, including the words: “Please know that I do not feel any hostility towards you, just a sadness. . . May you be less burdened with fear.” She posted it four years after writing it, and subsequently received a brief reply from the prison, asking that she desist from all future correspond­ence, as West “does not wish to receive any further letters from you”.

After questioning her motives for the letter — even wondering whether it might have been a subtle form of revenge — Partington real­ised that it had brought her a sense of release. “I had done what I could. I posted the letter because, if she had died, I would always have regretted not sending it. It felt like planting a seed.”

Her experiences are included in a collection of stories gathered by the Forgiveness Project, an international organisation which promotes con­flict resolution and restorative jus­tice. “The emphasis”, she says, “is not on people saying ‘I have forgiven so-and-so,’ but ‘I am wanting to move in the direction of healing.’ That involves developing empathy with those we find incomprehens­ible.”

Her story also features in the book Healing Agony by Stephen Cherry (Continuum, £14.99), a study of the theology of forgiveness.

SHE has found that, with the publi­cation of her book, the journey of reconciliation and healing has continued. One of her brothers attended the book launch at St Ethelburga’s, the centre for recon­ciliation and peace in London.

Having struggled to express his own sorrow, he was deeply touched to see how Lucy still meant so much to those who had known her, and who had gathered at the launch to celebrate her memory, still grieving over losing her. The next generation of nephews and nieces, very young at the time when Lucy’s body was discovered, have been reading the book, and have been struck by its message.

Connection is a significant theme in the workshops run by the For­giveness Project, with which Parting­ton is involved, and also in the prison work she does, which brings her into contact with those who carry huge amounts of unresolved guilt because of the crimes they have committed.

Connection is also what she now sees as central to the eucharist. “I sense it especially in the words ‘the body of Christ’, which make me weep, and in sharing the Peace, which I find deeply moving.”

She enjoys visiting Glasshampton Monastery, near Worcester, three times a year, and finds Dr Rowan Williams an inspiration. “He’s a man living his faith: whatever God is, he’s certainly in contact with him.” At the same time, she chose to join the Quakers, because she did not want to commit herself to a faith commun­ity that would oblige her to assent to doctrines with which she disagreed. “I didn’t want to have to say or do things that didn’t have meaning for me. I find bits of the creeds really difficult, although I have wondered about baptism, not having been baptised as a baby.”

Her feeling is that she has received grace for the hard journey she has had to make. “I’ve been given what I have needed, but the quest is ongoing. Actually, the whole of this journey is about grace, about want­ing to try and bring something pos­itive out of what happened, some­thing that we can all learn from.

“In terms of faith, it felt as if what happened to Lucy was a terrible cruci­fixion, but, in my life, it has led to a resurrection.”

If You Sit Very Still by Marian Partington is published by Vala at £15.99 (CT Bookshop £14.40); 978-1-908363-02-2.

Healing Agony: Re-imagining for­give­ness by Stephen Cherry is published by Continuum at £14.99 (CT Bookshop £13.50); 978-1-441119-38-4.

The Forgiveness Project

The Forgiveness Project

THE Forgiveness Project is a charity based in the UK which uses storytelling to explore how ideas of forgiveness, reconcilia­tion, and conflict resolution can be used to have a positive effect on people’s lives, through the personal test­imonies of both victims and per­pet­rators of crime and violence. Its aim is to provide tools that foster conflict resolution, and promote behavioural changes. It works with ex-offenders and victims of crime as a way of modelling a restorative process.

The Forgiveness Project:

• collects and shares real stories of forgiveness and reconciliation to help individuals transform the pain and conflict in their own lives;

• runs a restorative justice programme in prisons that helps to build community resilience by working with victims to rehabilitate offenders;

• creates resources for schools to educate young people about peaceful solutions to conflict;

• provides tools for resolving hurt and conflicts by holding events and running training programmes.

www.theforgivenessproject.com

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