Philomena was innocent and pregnant.
Her family gave up on her, sending her to a nunnery. She survived a breach
birth of her son without medication. She survived the more painful moment of
watching her small son being sold by the nuns to a couple who purchased him in
an unplanned adoption.
For fifty years Philomena
searches for her son. The movie bearing
her name tells the story of her journey. It is a journey of exploration, for
her son, yes, but also for forgiveness. Forgiveness of her sin; of those who
abused her; forgiveness of herself. I
don’t want to tell you more, because I want you to find and watch this movie.
But there is one speech from the
movie I want to give you to ponder this day. It is spoken by another character to
Philomena, near the end of her exploration, as she returns to the nunnery:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot (Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations, 1980, p. 808)
To truly forgive as God
forgives us requires us to go on a journey. We need to explore the people and the
places which are the burden that weighs us down. So heavy a burden are anger
and hate, yet a burden we somehow prefer to carry every day for all of our
lives. Yet when we put it in our minds
to take the first step of the journey of forgiveness, then we have finally
begun to experience joy. Joy, as C.S. Lewis says, is not happiness. The surprising
joy that is found in forgiveness removes the heaviest of burdens from our
shoulders and allows us, at the end of our journey of exploration, to know the people
and places that hurt us “for the first time.” Start your journey.
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